While we are always proud to send our customers off to far away places like Kona, we recently decided to start taking our customers with us! Not to the Iron Man Championships but to remote locations on open roads.

Get a Grip Cycles is proud to announce the first year of spring to fall self contained bicycle tours. Trade concrete and grid lock for sleeping under the stars and rural highways. Leave the car keys and PDAs at home while we pedal out of the city for overnight, weekend and week long tours.

New to bicycle touring? Don’t know what to pack? Not sure if your bike is tour ready? No need to worry, GAG will be hosting free bicycle tour seminars covering everything from product information to touring safety. All levels of cyclists are welcome!

So dust off the tent you bought in college, get your sleeping bag out of storage and join us as we navigate and explore on the most efficient mode of human transportation. Keep checking for information on dates and destinations. Please send us an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it if you’d like to be added to our mailing list.

Ricks Tour Experience

All too often when one observes a sport at a competitive level the same thing is seen: ultra fit athletes in their physical prime taking their finely tuned bodies to record breaking achievements. We here at Get A Grip have been fortunate enough to play a part in the success of some of these athletes, but what about the other 95% of us who cannot or do not eat, sleep, and breathe racing? We are not left out in the cold. One does not have to be 5’6” and 145 pounds of pure muscle to enjoy or excel at bicycling.

At 6 feet tall and “a bit” more than 200 pounds than I’d like to admit I hardly fit the mold of a stereotypical cyclist. Yet I own many different bikes and ride most of them twelve months out of the year. I’m an enthusiast whose passion for cycling negates the fact that I’ll never ride professionally. However I still benefit from advances in fitting and equipment technology as much as those who race ironman triathlons.

Bicycle racing is about setting goals. How can I improve my tactics? How can I get faster, more ‘aero’? Bicycle riding may not have the same end result but that doesn’t mean the average person cannot increase their enjoyment of riding by using similar methods. Let me explain further. If you’ve ever watched a criterium race you see riders going fast around a closed course like bats out of hell. But there is a good deal of strategy involved. Things like jockeying for position and conserving energy for just the right moment are no different than observing your position in traffic while commuting or making sure that you’re not out of steam at the end of a ten mile ride. I challenge anyone who rides the Lakefront Bicycle Trail to tell me that these skills aren’t relevant.

Bicycle fit is another piece of the puzzle. Elite athletes try to maximize power output while maintaining the most aerodynamically efficient position possible. Get A Grip has built a reputation as one of the premier fitting studios in the country, if not the world, when it comes to helping people go faster for longer periods of time. But the science of fit is not limited to professionals. If your neck hurts when you ride, if your knees ache, if your shoulders and arms feel like lead you can benefit from being professionally fit.

Comfort is a cornerstone of bicycle fit because if you are not comfortable you cannot go faster. Now go back and read that sentence again. If you’re not comfortable you cannot go faster. We see it all the time when working with our clients. But how does this benefit the casual rider? Well if you’re more comfortable you are more likely to ride in the first place. Not only will you ride more frequently, but you will be capable of riding farther. This is because you are not in pain, but also because you are more efficient and have more energy to go farther. It has nothing to do with split times, average speeds, or breaking records. It has everything to do with you enjoying riding your bike as much as you either have in the past or want to in the future.

Equipment is very important as well. Among the bikes I own is a custom steel road bike. It has a carbon fiber fork, Campagnolo components, and a standard type 32 spoke wheel with 700 x 23c tires. I mention this because every year bicycle manufacturers dangle the latest and greates product in front of us like a carrot on a stick, and I'm usually at the front of the line glossy eyed with cash in hand. And while my size keeps me from riding certain products, it does not prohibit me from having a traditional road bike.

At the end of the day it boils down to this: I like to ride my bikes. I’m not an elite athlete, but that doesn’t mitigate the level of enjoyment I get from riding. A good ride for me can be as little as three miles or as long as 300 (check the site for an update on the first GAG tour which I had a blast doing). Don’t be intimidated by what you can’t do; enjoy what you can do.

Keep on ridin’

Rick
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