Hey everyone, it's time for another cycling update since my last cycling post was a month ago, this way I can keep track of my progress as well as help keep the cycling community alive with other posts than automated strave2hive posts, which work awesome by the way. 🙂

Cycling is getting pretty addictive, with bigger rounds it takes up more of my time and with it I get more and more needs for better gear.

In my last post I shared I bought new shoes, gloves and a winter jacket but because everything is still new to me, I didn't knew it's better to have clickless pedals to go with your special cycling shoes, in my mind I could do just fine with using my old Nike Air Max sneakers in the summer and switch to my Rogelli Artics in the winter, but when my rides got longer and I was able to put more power on my pedals, I noticed my feet started to hurt after two hours...

When I bought my bike in May of this year, the guy in my local bike shop told me 'ah.. in a while you will probably want other pedals and maybe other upgrades as well'. And I was thinking 'why in the world would I want other pedals!?'

We learn as we go! 😄

Progress Update

I'm still pretty consistent, riding every Sunday and Thursday - I like it ordered like that! 😅
In the last month I did a total of 438 km, numbers I didn't think I would be able to reach but it's pretty easy to go longer distances as long as you have good bib shorts.

My top distance so far is 63km, the last two weeks the wind is really picking up, where I would usually have wind speeds from 7 to 15 km/h it's now often 15 - 25 km/h and today it was 41 😏 hence I only went a small round of 32 km.

New gear, again!

When I found out I kinda needed summer shoes as well, I had breakdown service for work the next week which means when I have to drive out to help our customers I would have some extra funds.
So, Saturday morning it started with an early call from a customer about an hour away so I was thinking by myself 'maybe one more call today and I will be able to not only buy the shoes I want but also the SPD pedals'.

The phrase 'be careful what you wish for' was very true, the phone kept going and I drove a total of 900km on Saturday and Sunday, with 17 work hours in total 😅 well now I could very well buy what I wanted without touching the family budget. 😁

I just bought the Rogelli Bibshorts when I made my last post and I like it so much, it wasn't cheap with €59 but it's worth it every cent, for any new cyclist out there, don't buy something cheap - your ass will thank you by not hurting too much after a couple of hours!

For my summer shoes, I chose the Shimano XC1's since I'm only a beginner and all I wanted was a stiff sole so my feet wouldn't hurt anymore, I bought Shimano SPD pedals with my shoes and after I learned how to adjust the cleats under my shoes and some testing and adjusting some more I can say this is a really nice upgrade.

The fact that my feet were kinda fixed to my pedals was a scary thought at first but after some dry practice while standing still, leaning against a wall I quickly learned how to click in and out without problems and soon, I didn't had to look down to be able to click in, I'm glad I bought the standard single release Shimano cleats for my winter shoes instead of the 'beginner multi release' silver cleats.

Getting lost, over and over.

I'm planning my routes with the use of Google Maps to roughly see how far my ride will be and then I would write some pointers on a piece of paper, the problem with this is I would often get lost anyway because I had never been to a certain area before and in real life it sometimes looks very different than on the map, and on one certain place I made the same mistake twice (in hindsight) going to wrong way because apparently, the road to the right I needed to take instead of following the road straight ahead, isn't as notable in real life resulting in a completely different route back home than I had planned, on top of that, it happened twice already I lost the piece of paper... 😅

Cycling Computer

So then I decided a cycling computer with navigation would be a nice upgrade too, who knew that cycling was such an expensive sport!?
Well you can just be fine with a bike and some basic gear but I'm a sucker for cool stuff and stats so once I learned more about a cycling computer, I really, really wanted one but OMG they are not cheap!

So I first did some research in the cheaper brands like Bryton and IGPSport but they're not perfect, plus the Bryton was around €160 which isn't cheap to start with, to then find out it's not what I want after all...

So, this morning, I ordered a Garmin Edge Explore 2!

It even was on a small discount at Decathlon now so that's nice.

Support your Local Bike Shop!

That's what I'm reading everywhere, and it's true, we should support our local stores so I bought my bike there and my Bib Shorts and Winter Jacket at a local sports store, most of the other gear I bought at Mantel though - they have two superstores half an hour from where I live and a great website with a great self developed size chart for shoes, I bought both of my shoes online and both were a perfect fit.

Small purchases are still better to do at my local bike shop I was thinking yesterday, and now my rides are getting longer, I figured it's a good idea to not only bring a puncture repair kit but also a new inner tube to not risk I had to walk 30 km home with shoes that aren't made for walking, Mantel's price for Continental inner tubes are €4.95 but I had to pay €9.90 for a Schwalbe inner tube at my local bike shop, that's double the price 😕

So, next time, I'll plan my purchases and just visit the Mantel super store! 😅

Connecting Strava to your Decathlon account.

I guess Decathlon is in Europe only since it's a French company I think, it's a great store for many kinds of sports and they even have their own brands that develop good quality items for reasonable prices.

For every €1 you spend, you're getting 10 points and with 2500 points you will receive a €5 gift card.

This morning when ordering the Garmin Explore 2, I found out when I connect my Strava account to my Decathlon account, I will get 100 points every week when I'm doing more than 1 hour of exercise each week so that's easy, my rides always take more than 1 hour anyway, it's a free €10 a year I can earn this way 🙂

Also, if you like to follow me and vice versa - my account name is ne9en.

Sharing some pretty pictures made on my trips.

It's easy to ignore the places we see every day because we're so used to it, but when I see pictures from people living in other parts of the world, I think they're very pretty so probably it's the same the other way around, also we're blessed with the near to perfect roads here to bike on in our country, I read about a guy on Reddit yesterday who was getting so many flats because of the bad road conditions he was thinking about stopping at all 😞

Soon! Off Road!

So, until now I've been cycling as a road biker on a mountain bike, in a country without mountains so that sounds pretty silly I know, when I started I liked to have all options open to be able to use the road, gravel paths and trails in forests as well, there is a fairly new MTB route close to where I live, it's a paid route but only €17 a year so that's fine.

I first wanted to be able to cycle a good amount of distance and not be... dead in the end before I would go off road, the two MTB tracks are 18km in total and it probably is (much) tougher per kilometer than on a smooth road, the trail is about 10km from where I live so now I'm able to do this and the new permit starts in October, I can soon check this out, finally!

Well, this turned out to be a much larger post than I intended, I hope you liked it if you made it this far down, thanks for stopping by!