Interesting stuff is happening around Strava. They’ve introduced new developer API terms that seem to break most connected third party services that focus around providing training advice and coaching to end users.

Strava claims that the changes have been made to strengthen end-user privacy and prevent peoples' data from ending up in countless places used to train AI models. This, I can absolutely get behind. I don’t care for AI one bit and I don’t want my data scraped for it, especially not biometric data.

The way the new developer API usage terms and conditions are phrased, though, indicates that Strava is trying to bamboozle customers into thinking that’s the main reason. Effectively what they appear to be doing is killing the ecosystem.

Ray Maker of DC Rainmaker has a good summary of things on his site that’s worth a read and includes the most recent update on the situation by Strava on 19 Nov.

There are two things that give me a very bad feeling about the situation:

1. Strava announced that any discussion on their community forum around this topic would not be tolerated. If there was anything they could’ve done to ensure people would understand that this change is user-hostile, it was this.
2. In most of the language in the announcement and the developer API terms of service, Strava talks about “Stava data” and how that data is their property. What they refer to is my data. That’s my training data given to Strava and not even through their app but through my Hammerhead cycling computer, my Concept2 rowing machine and other sources. I understand that they are hosting the information and providing me with a service that I pay for but that doesn’t give them permission to do with the data as they please.

In the end, Strava is a business like any other and if they do not want to provide a platform that other companies build their business model on, I get that but then please just say that and see people move on to the next one that offers better conditions.
I appreciated having a platform where I could aggregate my fitness data outside of the Apple ecosystem (I use the Apple fitness and health apps intensely) and even connect to other services I use but I’m just as happy using a different service for this.

As a precautionary measure, I’ve exported an archive of my Strava data and if you use Strava and don’t like the changes they’re making, maybe you should, too.

My partner and I are headed on another bikepacking trip soon and once again we’re reminded that the bike industry has issues catering to women and smaller persons. My partner is 158 cm tall (5' 2") and of a slender build.

Two years ago it was a mess trying to find a gravel bike that fit her and that didn’t have a completely compromised geometry and handling. Out of all the bikes in the market, only roughly 6 models were even worth considering¹ and even on those the componentry was sometimes ill-conceived with bars that are too wide, brifters too large, really long cranks (think 170 mm), two instances where the seat post was too long to allow for any kind of proper seat height, and just strange saddles.

This time around she was trying to find a hip bag with

• decent usable volume,
• proper waterproofing,
• an outside attachment point for a bottle or a rain jacket,
• and optionally: the ability to attach it to the handlebars of the bicycle.

We’ve scoured the web to find something and in the end ordered a Chrome Doubletrack Bike Bar Bag (5 l, already discontinued) and a Restrap Utility Hip Pack (6 l). Both bags are well-made (the Restrap definitely taking the cake, though), check all the boxes of features she was looking for … and both do not fit her at all.

On the Chrome bag the strap is way too long, making it impossible to cinch it down around her hip (the waist is completely out of question). If she wanted to use that one, she’d have to modify the strap and shorten it by about 20 cm.

The Restrap can be cinched down to fit her hips at least but the way the straps attach to the body leave the top half of it always dangling and rocking, creating discomfort and instability. Oh and the padding of the hip belt is very oddly cut so it digs into her hips.

The search continues and my hunch is that she’ll have to work with the people from Wizard Works in the UK or someone else for something custom and expensive.

I purchased the frame set in mid-April, after realising that I had an itch to try something closer to a road bike. Something stiffer, faster, and built for skinnier tyres than my Veloheld Icon.X titanium gravel bike that I had purchased only in October 2022.

It was a bit of a search to find a titanium bike that had moderate clearance, proper rack and fender mounts, wasn’t built with some oddly shaped, brand specific fork, and something that I found pleasing to the eye but the Yukon Disc audax bike fit the bill, at least on paper.

The frame set arrived quickly enough but I had to have the fork swapped because the dropouts were badly finished to the point where I wouldn’t have trusted them on anything but smooth road surfaces.
Moving almost all of the components from the Veloheld to the Van Nicholas was simple but time-consuming and I do now get why bike mechanics dislike internal cable routing.

At this point I’ve done 750+ km on the bike and I’m very happy with it. The frame set is stiff enough to lend itself to fast road rides, it accelerates quickly, and the steering is towards the more direct side between the Veloheld Icon.X and the full-on 2004 Litespeed Tuscany road bike that I’ve sold a couple of years back. The geometry is bit more upright and comfortable for longer rides (especially combined with some carbon Ritchey handlebars).

Right now I have a pair of WTB Exposure 30 tyres on it, which plump up to 32 mm on the DT Swiss GRC1600 wheels (hookless with 24.5 mm inner width) and these tyres are really versatile. Great for fast, dry road rides and with a little less pressure they work well enough on mild gravel, too.

So far going for an „all road“ bike seems to have been exactly what I was looking for. I don’t plan on tackling the kinds of rides with it that I have my XC mountain bike for but I’m also not limited to planning routes in Komoot locked in to the „road bike“ category; „bike“ works perfectly fine and I know it won’t throw anything at me that I can’t handle on this bike with slick tyres.

The frame and fork can take up to a 35 mm wide rubber and I’ve already done a couple of proper gravel rides using DT Swiss CR1600 wheels shod with Schwalbe X-One 33 mm tubeless tyres. Now that was a bunch of fun and it’s the setup I plan on using for this year’s Gravel Rallye Rhine Valley.

For many cyclists n+1 is a reality and I don’t want to claim to be an exception – my stupid brain is already thinking of what fun thing to do with the Veloheld frame set … maybe a flat bar gravel bike? I can honestly say that I’m enjoying this bike more than I would’ve thought possible and something really groundbreaking would have to come along to get me to even think of replacing it.

Late in summer of 2021 I stumbled across a 1996 Trek MultiTrack in almost mint condition on a classifieds site. The seller was running a small business on the side, finding really nice, old bikes in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, cleaning them, repairing what needs repairing and reselling them at a decent mark-up.

The frame is aluminium made for Trek by Easton and welded in the USA. The fork is a CroMo fork with full-width reinforced rack eyelets. Both painted in a beautiful metallic bordeaux red. All original parts were from Trek’s in-house accessory brand (before Bontrager) and the groupset was full Shimano STX RC (including the wheels).

I immediately fell in love with this bike and after I picked it up from the seller at Lake Constance, it was fitted with a pair of SKS Bluemels Long fenders and a period-appropriate rear rack.

After riding it happily for a few months, I made some changes to my stable of bikes and with some inspiration from The Radavist and Bikepacking.com—typical cyclist, I know—I got it into my head that I could turn this into a retro mod that would be appropriate not only for really quick runs to the supermarket but also for day rides when I don’t need one of my more performance-oriented bikes. I checked what I had laying around in terms of componentry, made a list of stuff I’d need and got searching.
I have to admit that it did feel like sacrilege swapping all of those perfectly good old components but I’m very happy with the result (and I’m not giving them away, so if I ever decide to sell the bike again, I’ll likely install them again).

List of changes:

• 680 mm wide (25.4 mm clamp diametre) Reserve handlebars (new, stripped the logos)
• Higher stem (bought used)
• Spurcycle bell, black (new – none of my bikes feels complete without one)
• SRAM GX Eagle group + NX Eagle HG cassette (bought used)
• Rotor Aldhu cranks + Rotor oval 34t chainring (bought used and got it surprisingly cheap)
• Magura HS33 hydro rim brakes (new)
• Specialized Pizza Rack (bought used)
• DT Swiss rims (32 spokes, 19 mm internal width) with Shimano XT hubs front and rear (bought used, almost mint condition and got them for a really good price)
• Specialized Pathfinder Pro 700×38c (used) on Tubolito tubes (also used)

The bike rides really well and with the very low gearing, lugging the doggy trailer up one of many hills in the area is quite doable. The rims are excellent and braking performance with the HS33 is incredible.

With WWDC coming, I was about to write another post clamouring, pleading, even begging for a macOS tablet or iPadOS becoming less of a limiting factor for the applications it runs. I like macOS and iPadOS mostly and the app ecosystem for Apple’s operating systems is hard to beat. Yet not a day goes by that I don’t wish I could perform certain tasks on my iPad Pro that I can do on my MacBook Pro, or interact with content on my MacBook Pro’s screen by touching it, or just grabbing the disply to read something in portrait mode.

Instead of writing that article again, I finally broke down and ordered a ThinkPad X12 Detachable.

I hesitated taking the plunge because

• the hardware is well over a year old already,
• the Microsoft Surface Pro 8 exists and is better in many ways (higher-resolution display, better colour reproduction, two Thunderbolt 4 ports) and
• devices of this class with Intel’s new Alder Lake architecture are right around the corner.

That’s always the issue, though, right? Something new and better is always around the corner. In the end, I decided to go for it because

• I found a demonstration unit in supposedly “as good as new” condition for a decent price with a lot of warranty still in place,
• I’ve always had a soft spot for the ThinkPad design language,
• the display is going to be good enough for my use (as good as the iPad Pro display in terms of colour reproduction),
• it has LTE built-in,
• and I’m definitely going to enjoy the keyboard.

It’s going to be interesting finding Windows alternatives to my favourite and most-used applications from both macOS and iPadOS.

Seit dem 1. Januar 2022 gelten in Deutschland neue gesetzliche Vorschriften hinsichtlich der Sachmängelhaftung bei Privatverkäufen. Da ich aktuell viele gebrauchte Dinge im Netz verkaufe und mir nie sicher war, welche Formulierung einen Haftungsausschluss darstellt und wie ich klar machen kann, dass Rücknahme und Umtausch ausgeschlossen sind, habe ich mich auf die Suche gemacht und wurde relativ schnell in diesem Artikel von Stiftung Warentest fündig: Privatverkauf im Internet — Haftung ausschließen als Verkäufer

Die Quintessenz ist, dass bei mehrfachen Verkäufen von Gebrauchtware nur die folgende Formulierung einen wirksamen Haftungsausschluss darstellt:

Ich schließe jegliche Sach­mängelhaftung aus. Die Haftung auf Schaden­ersatz wegen Verletzungen von Gesundheit, Körper oder Leben und grob fahr­lässiger und/oder vorsätzlicher Verletzungen meiner Pflichten als Verkäufer bleibt uneinge­schränkt.

Wichtig hierbei ist eine genaue Beschreibung des Artikels und eventueller Makel und Mängel, sonst haftet der Verkäufer weiterhin.

Interessant ist auch—und das wusste ich nicht—dass bei Privatverkäufen grundsätzlich kein Recht auf Rücknahme, Minderungen, und Umtausch besteht. Ich denke ich werde dies aber weiterhin dazu schreiben.

Wired: Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture

Using the example of how the gender-neutral word “hen” changed perception and culture in Sweden, the authors of the article go through various issue that exist with making gender-neutral language the default.

As I read the article, I realised how much the use of the singular they/them is ingrained in my vocabulary at this point, thanks to amazing friends and colleagues who helped me educate myself on this topic.
It also made me wonder how I handle this in German, my native language.

I speak English every day and for a living. It makes using gender-neutral pronouns and more inclusive language easy; with the exception of androcentric words, gender typically doesn’t seep into the nouns themselves, unlike in German.

Thinking about this a bit, I tend to avoid pronouns in writing and speaking whenever possible but it can lead to less elegant and sometimes downright unwieldy sentences.

It led me down a rabbit hole filled with lots of variations of the same question on popular question/answer platforms “Wie kann they/them im Deutschen erwendet werden?” (How can they/them be used in German?) and eventually to a section in a German Wikipedia article on the topic, which was pretty good as an overview: Nicht-binäre Geschlechtsindentität - Das singuläre Pronomen “they”

The recommendations from various institutions and entities listed there are pretty good starting points but something about the use of neopronouns in German doesn’t yet manage to penetrate my skull. In the latest season of Star Trek: Discovery, there’s an amazing non-binary character and in the English audio, they/them is used. In German the translators went with “dey/dem” and it felt jarring to my ears. Illi Anna Heger published a broader discussion of this topic, highlighting various examples of German translations of they/them in German synchronisations and subtitles. Really worth a read.

I’m intensely curious which pronouns are going to become established norm for gender-neutral language in German and Im glad to see that even large organisations are starting to attempt using more inclusive language in their daily business. It would definitely be nice for an institution like the Duden (think: Merriam Webster in Germany) to throw their weight behind one of the neopronouns.

Utterly great comedian Tiff Stevenson last week had had Andy Zaltzman on her podcast, where she interviews various comedians and artists about the tiny revolutions in their lives. The conversation these two had is brilliant and features a lot of history of The Bugle, which has been my favourite podcast for almost 13 years.

I honestly find it hard to express how much joy The Bugle has brought me. I first found it by accident in late 2008 when I was in a bit of a stand up comedy show discovery phase while studying in Beijing. It popped up in the recommendations in Apple Podcasts and after the first listen, I was hooked.

When John Oliver left because, as Andy tells it, it just wasn’t possible to do Last Week Tonight and a weekly transatlantic podcast, I was gutted and very sad but obviously kept listening. The reimagined show, where Andy is joined by two correspondents every week, has been, in my opinion, the best thing that could’ve happened. I’d still love to see John Oliver return every now and then but the roster of people Andy is bringing on from around the world, all of them with their own perspectives, is hard to beat.

I was introduced to so many extremely funny comics: first and foremost Alice Fraser, as well as (and in no particular order) Tiff Stevenson, Nish Kumar, Aditi Mittal, Josh Gondleman, Anuvab Pal, Charlie George, James Nokise, Felicity Ward, Alison Spittle, and many, many more.

There are alerady two spin-offs, both hosted by Alice Fraser:
The Gargle, in which Alice and guests tackle anything that isn’t political news, and The Last Post, The Bugle from a parallel universe.

If you like satire, sillyness, and can handle puns, check out The Bugle and its sister shows. I’ll see you again in about 9 months, once you reemerge from the binge cave. 😁

Over the past few days I’ve been looking at potential alternatives to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for my RAW processing and photo editing needs. It’s not that there’s a lot wrong with Lightroom, really. I’ve been using the applications, particularly those on iOS with satisfaction. With the renewal of my annual subscription coming up, I wanted to see what else is out there, at this point.

A few friends and acquaintances helped me with some recommendations and I took time to test them:

• Capture One Fujifilm surprised me with a decent UI and a significantly better rendering of Fujifilm RAF files than Lightroom. I’d read about that but didn’t think the difference would be this stark. Adobe should really do their homework there. Sadly, the macOS app was slow, slower than Lightroom. While that was disappointing, the complete lack of an iOS application disqualified it for me.
• Next up, I gave Affinity Photo a try and this app really shone for a number of reasons, including a very responsive user interface. The RAW renderer wasn’t as good for Fujifilm files as Lightroom’s, though. But the more important reason why I didn’t go deeper into it was the fact that this application is simply too much for my needs. It’s much closer to Photoshop than to Lightroom or Aperture (R.I.P Aperture 😢) and that’s overkill for me.
• The last one in the pack, Pixelmator Photo, has no macOS application. I can forgive that but it doesn’t read Fujifilm RAF files at all, which would mean I’d have to convert everything into DNG first. That’s a non-starter. It’s also an app that feels very similar to Affinity Photo. Since I have a licence for it anyway (as I do for every app the Pixelmator team have produced), it stays on my iPad for situations where Lightroom is too limited for a specific task.

It was good to see what the market currently offers and what I found was a) solid choices for different sets of needs and b) the realisation that Lightroom still fits my requirements best by

• having good, responsive iOS applications,
• an okay macOS offering,
• solid synchronisation of data and editing progress,
• decent if not perfect rendering of Fujifilm RAF files,
• and 1 TB of storage space, which works out as a very usable puzzle piece in my photo backup strategy.

If I had one wish for the Lightroom apps, it would be for Adobe to bring back geotagging. I miss this dearly from the classic Lightroom app.

TL;DR

• My saddle was too low because the method I used to determine saddle height didn’t work for me.
• I tried to overcompensate for what I perceived as excessive reach by moving the saddle forward. Moving it back instead and improving my posture worked a treat.

Backstory

In mid-December 2020 another half-hearted lockdown loomed in my region and there was a possibility that exercise outside might actually be prohibited. That made the decision to finally pull the trigger on a smart bike trainer easy and I was lucky enough to snag a mid-range model before they went out of stock in Germany.

I’ve been enjoying the smart trainer a lot and it’s helped me improve my many aspects of my cardiovascular fitness. Something I’ll write about at some point.
The other benefit the bike trainer brought with it, was the ability to slowly but steadily improve my bike fit on both my road bike and my gravel bike. It’s honestly had as much of, if not more of an impact on my riding as the marked improvement in fitness.

There are a lot of good resources for picking the right size of frame and dialling in the right position of the touch points on a bike, to achieve an optimal riding position. The three that have helped me the most since December are,

1. “Bike Fit Tuesdays” on Francis Cade’s youtube channel,
2. “Bike Fitting Series (with Neill Stanbury)” on Cam Nicholls’s youtube channel,
3. And the article “How to Determine the Correct Saddle Height” on the site of the cycling retailer Mantel, oddly enough.

The big issue with attempting to try all of the advice thrown around is that it’s hard to do on the bike when out riding or not being able to pedal while sitting on the bike. That’s where the trainer came in really handy and I’d encourage anyone to either buy or rent one, if you want to improve comfort and efficiency on your bicycle¹.

Side note:
Getting a professional bike fit has been something I considered to be something useful only for racers but I’ve come to change my mind and would now recommend getting one to anybody who either plans on buying a new bicycle or has issues with comfort on their current one.

So here’s what I learned

The resources I linked to above have loads of great information and greatly improved my understanding of how certain changes to a bike influence my riding position. The findings listed here came as a bit of a surprise to me, or were generally counterintuitive based on the information that is out there.

Moving my saddle back

James of Bicycle Richmond often mentions in the Bike Fit Tuesdays videos that many people buy bikes with excessive reach and then try to compensate for that by moving the saddle forward or hunching over the handlebars, which leads to all sorts of pains, mostly a lot of pressure on the hands and wrists.

Well for me it was a bit of a mixed bag. The bicycle frames I have are the right size, from what I can tell. I’ve already equipped my road bike and gravel bike with comparatively shorts stems (~ 7 cm) and the handlebars I use also have short reach figures. Still, I felt the need to use seat posts with no setback and moved the saddles forward, often as far as they went. I did so because of things I read about a good angle between torso and upper arms and a general impression of being too stretched out on my steeds.

The result has always been the aforementioned impression of riding on a stretcher even while I felt hunched over the handlebars and putting a lot of weight onto my hands and wrists. This in turn caused numbness in my hands, sometimes after only 20–30 min of riding. On the bike trainer, when I wasn’t shifting my position as often as I did riding outside, this effect was even more pronounced.

In one of the bike fitting videos I learned about hip position over the bottom bracket and how being too far forward could result in pains and less power output. I gave it a try, gradually moving the saddle back² and carefully tilting it forward a bit. This resulted in me rotating my upper body downward and my hip forward.
I was honestly stunned by how suddenly my core muscles had an easier time supporting my upper body, less weight resting on the hands, and the bike feeling less long even though I technically increased the distance between the nose of my saddle and the handlebars.

Something was still a little off:

My saddle was too low

This realisation was the single biggest revelation to my riding comfort and equally importantly; my cycling efficiency.

One of the most commonly used methods to estimate/determine saddle height is the “heel method”, where you sit squarely on the saddle and place your heel on the pedal, with the leg fully extended. If you cannot extend the leg fully, move the saddle up. If you find that you’re rolling of the side of the saddle trying to extend the leg, move the saddle down until you sit securely on the saddle again.

I’ve been setting my saddle height using this method for years and it Turns Out™ that it doesn’t work for me.

Looking at a video my partner recorded, I noticed that in the lowest pedal position the underside of my foot was pretty much level with the ground and that the angle of my upper leg to my lower leg was larger than typically recommended.

After some reading, I discovered two methods for calculating saddle height (see the article linked above) and they gave me totally different numbers than the heel method and a new starting point for experimentation.

I gradually increased the height of my saddle and ended up with 3 cm more³. Honestly, that’s a lot. The effects of this modification were and are profound:

1. I still feel perfectly planted on the saddle, perfectly secure sitting on the bike.
2. In the lowest pedal position my heel now sits higher than my toes and my leg is extended further. This has led directly to my calf muscles being activated and me being able to put more power down.
3. It made rotating my hip forward and my whole upper body downward even easier and even more comfortable.

Bonus: use a narrower saddle on a trainer

This one was a small but nice surprise.

At the beginning of my time with the smart trainer, I had specifically put a slightly wider saddle on my road bike thinking that the increased surface area would help spread the load I put on it, riding in a more static position than while out and about. After having already gone through the two steps above, I still felt some discomfort after a long time in the saddle on the trainer.

Looking for information, I stumbled across a video on the youtube cycling channel GCN where someone asked for advice with saddle sores/butt pain on a bike trainer. Their guidance was to use a narrower saddle than what one would typically use but obviously something that still supports the sit bones fully, to encourage more movement and better circulation while on a static trainer.

This bit of advice turned out to be bang-on for me and brought the desired improvement.

In conclusion

Using a bike trainer allowed me to cautiously experiment and eventually massively improve my bike fit. I was lucky in the sense that my bicycles have the right size and my basic assumptions about reach and stem length were correct. Honestly, I should’ve gotten a trainer (or better: a proper bike fit) a long time ago.

Cycling on my bikes now, I’m much more relaxed, able to put much more power down at the same perceived exertion, and long rides are more enjoyable because my bikes feel more comfortable.
On the gravel bike in tricky terrain there has been another positive side effect: due to the fact that I’m putting less weight onto the handlebars and being in a generally more balanced forward/aft position on the bike, I’m able to steer more nimbly. That gives me more confidence on technical climbs and descents and makes for a wildly improved and fun overall riding experience.