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The Motivation: If not now, then when? Life is too short to stay inactive.
The Challenge: If you are not willing to suffer, then you shouldn't be racing
The Dream: Staying fit and feeling younger day by day!




Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts

12 May 2015

Road bike tire review: Bontrager R3 700x25 clincher (but, is it really 25mm wide?!)

I recently purchased a Bontrager R3 700x25 tire, moving up in width from Bontrager R3 700x23. The main reason was that I was looking for more comfort, for my 100kg weight. The 23mm width felt too sensitive to shocks and road vibrations, so much, that I was feeling as if I was slowing down instead of going faster. The 25mm width seemed logical to compensate this problem.

I have been using the R3 700x23 for about 18 months, with only 1 puncture (rear tire) and that was due to my fault hitting hard inside a road hole. Compared to R2, the R3, feels 'softer', faster, more responsive. I wanted a 25mm wide tire though, to give me some extra comfort.

I normally inflate the front R3 with 105-108psi and the rear R3 with 112-115. Sometimes, I might take 2-3 psi away from both tires to boost comfort, but I can observe a noticable reduction in top speed and acceleration.

On my new R3 700x25 setup, I did this test: Front wheel remained at 700x23, rear R3 wheel now gone from 700x23 to 700x25. Upon inflating both tires at the same pressure (115psi) for testing purposes: To measure tire width in order to double check manufacturers specifications. I noticed something weird, which I didn't see before in any tire: To my surprise my findings were the following:
Front tire width: 23.6mm (instead of 23mm)
Rear tire width: 24.3mm (instead of 25mm)


BIKE SETUP FOR MEASUREMENT:

20 December 2012

Sports Watch Review: Polar RS300X Heart Rate Monitor

(an update was added to this post 12th Oct. 2014 - scroll at the bottom of this article)

 
Despite my full time job as a computer engineer, I am a keen sport's person and I am involved into rowing, cycling, triathlon, windsurfing for years. I realised that to get a basic feedback of your body conditioning DURING training requires a nice sports watch. There are currently hundreds of models on the market and it's a complete headache trying to pick up the one that best fits your needs.


I don't want to tire you with an exhaustive review about this watch (Polar RS300X), but I will try to outline its most important technical features. I assume that you are a serious sports person otherwise you don't need all the features of this watch. These combined features made me pick up this quality watch out of other branded sports watches or Polar models around an affordable price range (90-100 euro inc.VAT). Some of the features that I quote below are NOT mentioned (or better perhaps: are not clearly indicated) on the Polar official manual, despite being there for the user to enjoy! (you can download and read Polar RS300X user manual )  I have been using this watch during training/racing since 2009 and I never had any technical problems or issues with this model.

I've chosen Polar RS300X between other models after extensive market research, for the following reasons:


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