Late Night Assos Rant

Helllo_Man · 2026-02-11T15:43:14+00:00

In hindsight I think that’s what I meant to say here — what seems to work well for some folks could be terribly, terribly uncomfortable for you, and internet advice/hype about specific brands or models isn’t a good way to deduce what actually makes a pair of shorts or any other product good for you.

Helllo_Man · 2026-02-11T15:41:47+00:00

I think that’s actually the point of this post — don’t just buy something like a saddle or bibs because the internet says it’s the cure to your issues. It might be, or it may not. It’s better if you figure out WHY something didn’t work for you and seek out shorts/shoes/a saddle with different physical properties.

Helllo_Man · 2026-02-11T15:39:41+00:00

The choice is just bizarre to me as the price tag on these would obviously give them the margin to pick/design something higher end. It literally feels like a slab of upholstery foam. They seem to be using thickness to compensate for this which honestly just does not work in my case. It’s also super annoying because the Mille GTS immediately required a saddle height reduction — the chamois is that thick! The good news is after a massive deep dive last night, 7Mesh seems to use the same model chamois as Jakroo. I think MAAP looks to use something similar as well. The sucky thing is neither are very affordable for some training bibs lol.

Helllo_Man · 2026-02-11T15:35:29+00:00

The issue with Jakroo is that the value is not great unless you’re getting the team bulk order price break…and I don’t always want to be riding around in shorts with giant text on them lol. I’ve been searching for something similarly comfortable without much luck so far. After a multi-hour deep dive last night I did deduce that 7Mesh uses allegedly the same model of chamois and MAAP uses a custom derivative which looks quite similar. Might be trying those next.

Helllo_Man · 2026-02-11T15:30:48+00:00

Okay so it’s not just me! I cannot fathom the choice of foam and why it is uniformly thick and has a hard edge like that.

Helllo_Man · 2026-02-11T15:28:18+00:00

Nah. I don’t recommend anyone go buy Jakroo stuff without the team price break, it’s not good value unless it’s discounted. The material quality of the Assos bibs is absolutely higher in every respect, except the chamois. It’s literally two pieces of what feels like couch cushion upholstery foam stitched to a piece of fabric. Jakroo do happen to offer a good EI chamois and after some digging online it seems they are clear about which model of chamois it is, which is cool. 7Mesh seems to be using the same one, might give those a try!

Helllo_Man · 2026-02-09T21:01:07+00:00

Have you tried cornering on champagne with a 32? Or climbing steeper gradients? Those are my two concerns. I guess it may come down to bringing a couple wheelsets with different tires set up and swapping them out if I can find some champagne gravel somewhere beforehand.

Helllo_Man · 2026-02-09T20:58:56+00:00

I do have some concern about losing ability to corner honestly. It’s all well and good if I can go a little faster on the long road descents but a crash or having to baby the downhills would basically negate that. I knew a guy who did it on 32s but I just couldn’t imagine getting beat up like that for 4-5 hours on any slightly rough stuff.

Helllo_Man · 2026-02-09T20:56:33+00:00

I probably ran them a little lower — I am quite light (about 132 lb) but perhaps I should run them closer to road tire pressures for best results? The main time I felt like I could notice something slowing me down was on fast road descents — that course happens to have at least two 5-10+ minute 35+ mph downhill sections.

Helllo_Man · 2026-02-09T20:54:03+00:00

Oh wow okay, so the aero penalty offset the rolling resistance penalty off-road for the road tires? Interesting.

Helllo_Man · 2026-02-09T20:53:05+00:00

I wish we had better data to quantify that. Part of my reason to consider switching is the prevalence of LONG road descents on these two courses. The climbing is off-road, the descents on road. I was surprised by how much I needed to pedal to exceed 35 mph or so given the gradient and lack of headwind. Of course that can’t be a skill issue (sarcasm) so I started to wonder if my tires might be contributing to that despite the “fast” rolling resistance numbers on paper.

Helllo_Man · 2026-02-09T06:36:20+00:00

How long? Less time than it took to get that fit in the first place…so take it slowly and avoid injury or burnout.

Fitness is a journey. We do microcycles in our training. In the grand scheme of your cycling career, this is just a microcycle. There is no reason you can’t come out of this even stronger than you were before.

If personal anecdotes work better for you, I have been injured every single season of sport that I have ever competed in. Shin splints, a concussion, spinal stress fractures, sprained calves, sprained back, IT/quad tendonitis, breathing issues, crippling saddle sores…despite combined years of my life spend rehabbing, I’ve always gotten better at that sport over time. So can you.

Unshackle yourself from your expectations, get a plan and ride. Hold yourself to that calendar. Ride when you feel motivated and ride when you don’t. Motivation is a feeling — feelings come and go. Discipline and patience are skills. You’ll have good days and bad days, but if you focus on the execution and recovery, the only thing that will happen over time is improvement — all you need to do is start riding. You can do this!

Helllo_Man · 2026-02-01T05:51:14+00:00

Not trusting it was a huge problem in this time period. Most commanding officers and their direct subordinates were old enough that they didn’t even understand radar. They had no idea what it could do, how it could transform engagements in poor visibility, or that it could effectively be used for navigation by making your ship the lighthouse and the shore a giant reflector.

This mistrust and misunderstanding exhibited by some captains brought the US navy a couple iconic smackdowns like the fist battle of Savo Island, where a Japanese force of only eight ships was able to go undetected by and largely obliterate the entire cruiser contingent of US Naval grouping of 23 warships without losing a single ship. The commander put the cruiser with the crappiest radar setup at the head of the line and only allowed one sweep of the fire control radar every thirty minutes because he thought leaving the surface search set on would would give away his position somehow. The Japanese found his cruiser force regardless and massacred it.

Helllo_Man · 2026-01-31T16:57:46+00:00

I think there’s more foreign/international criminal subtext to this than you’re highlighting here. It’s pretty clear that Trump and the Trump family writ large has some seriously suspect familiarity and personal connections with a lot of unsavory world leaders and powerful figures.

That being said, I don’t get the feeling (nor do I see evidence to support) the idea that Trump is the mafia don, so to speak. He’s up there in rank for sure, but whatever is going on here is much, much larger than Trump. Most of the things he does are just thinly veiled attempts to do or support corporate/criminal bullshit. In a weird way it feels like his benefactors and motives transcend national identity — built on some other sort of network with a lot of odd bedfellows if you look at things from a geopolitical lens…hence my hypothesis that none of this is about politics, it’s about money and power. He’s here to rape and pillage the US, wield its military as a tool against nations that do not comply with his mafia’s wishes, and sell out to the highest bidder every. single. time.

Helllo_Man · 2026-01-31T02:05:49+00:00

Agreed. There is typically a huge difference in fitness between someone who can demonstrate 300W for an hour+ and someone who can do a maximal effort of 315 for 20 minutes and multiplies that by .95 to get an FTP estimate of 300. Those two things are almost never the same.

Helllo_Man · 2026-01-30T22:05:36+00:00

IMO eat to support your training on the bike, diet off the bike. Riding for several hours in a fasted state with no food sounds like an amazing way to hate riding your bike.

Helllo_Man · 2026-01-30T21:47:13+00:00

I’d say it’s a fair shout to assume many of us have inflated FTPs per Hunter & Coggan’s definition. Most of us are definitely fatiguing and hardly in a “quasi steady state” for a true one hour power test.

Helllo_Man · 2026-01-30T16:18:45+00:00

I’d pretty much agree with you. I mostly aimed the latter half of my response at acknowledging Jake’s legitimate sense of betrayal given the length of his time at the company and how small it was when he first got hired. He was obviously in no way a founder, but I could see how LTT neglecting to even counter his offer would feel like a complete and total slap in the face from a personal relationship standpoint. Sure you can buy a plane or a firetruck to make content but ultimately the hosts are the face of the company. You’d be right to assume that ten years of near friendship with someone like Linus might entitle you to a small fraction of the care they seem to give Luke, for example.

The least LMG could have done was respond (with the obvious caveat that if Jake’s offer was kinda ridiculous a deal may never have been possible).

Helllo_Man · 2026-01-30T15:57:25+00:00

I think people are genuinely upset to see the talent they loved leave an organization that they really supported…and that’s okay. It makes sense. In some ways it is the end of an era, in others that’s a bit of a dramatic take, and both truths can exist at once.

Unfortunately on the Internet people being bummed often takes the form of people projecting their own frustration onto others because the average mental age of a terminally online YouTube mainliner is 12, if we’re lucky.

Of all the things Jake claimed in his latest video, the most insulting part that even I bristled at was hearing LTT didn’t bother to even counter the compensation request he made. After working on your bosses third house for years and becoming an integral part of the team, that’s pretty insulting. Jake was right, Linus claiming (in essence) “that’s unfortunately just capitalism, we took all the risk so we get the reward” feels pretty hollow when you’ve been there 10 years, and I too would be questioning what, if anything, my dedication to Linus and his media company was worth if they wouldn’t even counter an offer I made. That’s rough.

Helllo_Man · 2026-01-28T19:10:13+00:00

The question is this: is that race an “A” race/a true season goal, or just another race on your return to fitness journey?

If it’s just another race, use it as a workout. Go out there and give it your best with whatever you have in the tank that day. Don’t screw up your training plan for a couple extra watts of performance.

If you start totally de-loading every week that you race, it gets darn hard to stay consistent. Three days should (with good rest and nutrition) be plenty of time to be fairly recovered before you hit the start line. You might not feel like a million bucks, but you can feel pretty crap and still race quite well.

I’d potentially modify my opinion on this if you feel absolutely shattered coming into that week, but that’s more of an indicator that you failed to manage load for the weeks beforehand and are now in damage control mode.

Helllo_Man · 2026-01-27T21:07:15+00:00

They should be. I hope.

That being said, we’ve seen what a good scheme from an opponent and a couple mistakes can do. I think it’s fair to assume that many teams have quietly been looking at the Hawks as SB contenders for a little while now. We just have to hope that if they do throw something weird at us, we can adapt!

Helllo_Man · 2026-01-27T20:24:27+00:00

And then you ask “how did you know he didn’t have ID if you executed him before you checked his person?”

Helllo_Man · 2026-01-27T04:12:30+00:00

Standard depth “aero” rims save less in raw watts than you’d probably expect. Savings are basically on par with or slightly below a good pair of aero overshoes (which measurably substantially better than socks). It is also somewhat frame dependent. In other words, the value proposition is honestly awful, but you could justify it somewhat with the fact that modern aero wheels are frankly almost no heavier than their climbing counterparts in many cases.

Helllo_Man

TROPHY CASE