Week in Review–August 13th, 2011

The Week in Review is a collection of both all the goodness I’ve written during the past week around the internet, as well as a small pile of links I found interesting – generally endurance sports related. I’ve often wondered what to do with all of the coolness that people write, and while I share a lot of it on Twitter and Google Plus, this is a better forum for sending it on to y’all. Most times these different streams don’t overlap, so be on the lookout at all these places for good stuff!

So with that, let’s get into the action!

Slowtwitch.com Weekly Sports Gadget Mailbag this week:
This week I cover the following topics over at Slowtwitch as part of the mailbag series. You can read it here.

1) Whether to buy wired PowerTap at $699 or wireless PT at $799
2) PowerTap and Cadence Information
3) Which non-GPS watch for trail running?

You can read all my past weekly mailbags at Slowtwitch here. Or the pre-Slowtwitch days here.

DCRainmaker.com posts this past week:
A wide variety of posts this week covering quite a range of stuff. Here’s what made the main stage:

Sunday:  Week in Review–August 7th, 2011
Monday: A weekend back home training in the heat and rain
Tuesday: Separating product timeline fact from fantasy- The After Party Edition
Wednesday: Behind the scenes on my aquatic product review posts
Thursday: Were the NYC Triathlon swim deaths preventable- A look at our sport
Friday: Tip of the Day (to nutrition vendors)- Do not make your packaging impossible to open

Men’s Health/Gatorade/Urbanathlon Blog posts this past week:
In addition to all my writings here, I also cover a bunch of topics over on the Men’s Health Urbanathlon blog. Here’s the goods from the past week:

Tuesday: A Typical Week of My Training
Thursday: How to increase your grip strength at home

Note that I post over there roughly every Tuesday and Thursday, and Sarah posts on Monday and Wednesday. It’s a tag-team event.

Stuff that I found interesting around the interwebs:
Here’s a small smattering of all the random things that I stumbled on while doing my civic duty to find the end of the Internet:

1) Deep interview with Team Garmin Rider Ryder Hesjedal: A great article that really goes into what it takes to be at the top in the sport of pro cycling.

2) A simple decoder ring for the Hy-Vee 5150 Championship race entry list: The pro triathlete world is entirely different than the one you and I compete in. It’s got different competition rules (for ITU races), different emphases on the sport segments, and different ways you can qualify depending on the series. This quick post decodes the magic of one of the most financially rewarding series in the sport.

3) O-Synce Plans to release new ANT+ GPS bike computer: A brief look at this bike computer from the German firm also behind some pedal based power meters. Look for some more detail from me here in the next month or so on their products.

4) Lessons Learned from the London ITU Olympic Dress Rehearsal: A good recap article of all sorts of things related to the ITU event held last weekend and what it means going into next year.

5) National Harbor Swim (DC): Really cool to see now a few events being held in National Harbor. Glad to see the National Harbor management there is open to this. I would love to be able to get to the point where folks had organized (or even unorganized) weekly morning swims there, like many other places in the country. That’d be awesome!

6) A cool way to visualize run maps: Albeit similar in concept to how Nike+ does heat maps for your past runs, this individual takes a different twist on it using his own collection of tools. Cool stuff.

7) Critical thoughts on the pro cycling biological passport: If you saw this post by Cervelo founder Gerard Vroomen, then you’ll want to read the UCI response here. In short, it appears for once it’s point awarded to UCI (at least based on the simple factual statements provided).

Random Items of Note:

Nothing of note this weekend!  For all those competing, enjoy your races and good luck!

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