What to Wear Cycling in Varying Weather, a Conversation with Coach Ertl This article began one December when I started trading emails with Coach David Ertl. Coach Ertl lives and rides in Iowa. I grew up in neighboring Missouri and can attest to the terrible weather (and the 100-degree-plus extremes — in normal years!) possible in […]
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What to Wear in Various Weather

Dictionary of Cycling Lingo
A List of Common Terminology to Decipher the Sometimes Arcane Patois of Road Cycling Ever wonder what cyclists are talking about when they start throwing around weird slang? We’ve created a bicycling dictionary for you, with definitions of the most common phrases and words related to cycling. Did we miss a word? Leave a comment […]
The Important Role of Carbohydrates
By Coach John Hughes RBR Reader Chris e-mailed me, “I have questions following up on last week’s column on Anti-Aging: How to Improve Your Diet and Performance This Winter. You wrote, ‘Eating the optimal mix of carbs, protein and fat off the bike will improve your performance on the bike. On the bike eating correctly […]
What basic skills are needed to ride a bike on the road?
QUESTION: I’ve heard people talk about how easy it is to ride a bike, but what are the basic skills you need to ride on the road? —Dave S. RBR’S STAN PURDUM REPLIES: After stage 5 of the Paris-Nice bicycle race recently, a roaming camera operator captured a scene of professional racer Romain Bardet riding […]
Anti-Aging: 7 Mental Skills to Make You Faster
By Coach John Hughes “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.” — Yogi Berra, 18 time Major League Baseball All-Star. The same thing applies to cycling, especially to going faster. The days grow longer (and hopefully drier and warmer). Let’s ride! Let’s rebuild our cycling fitness.
New Word, Old Worries and Both About Sugar
By Kevin Kolodziejski I daresay you’ll never converse with one. Even if you truly have a screw loose and take a two-week, ice-cycle vacation across the Arctic and subarctic regions. While then you just might meet an Inuit, one of the 65,000 or so people who inhabit those regions — and whom the politically correct […]

The Latest on Irregular Heartbeats in Lifelong Exercisers
By Gabe Mirkin, M.D. Many studies show that a lifetime of vigorous exercise makes the heart stronger and healthier and does not harm it. However, as I reported earlier, a few studies that got a lot of media attention suggested that chronic intense exercise can damage the heart to cause irregular heartbeats. Now a study of […]