Lennard Zinn in Venice

Each morning during the ExpoBici bike show in Padua, I’ve been riding toward Venice along the Riviera del Brenta, as I have 1.5 hours each day to squeeze in a ride between when breakfast opens (and it becomes light) and when my shuttle leaves for the bike show.

Wealthy Venetians back in the day apparently hated traveling by land. To escape the congested island in the lagoon, and because starting in 1345 residents of the SerenissimaRepubblica di Venezia were not allowed to own land on the island, they built enormous villas inland toward Padua along the Brenta Riviera, a navigable canal off the Brenta river (which flows relatively freely to Padua from Trento and Bassano del Grappa) with locks every 10km or so to control the level. The Riviera del Brenta was considered an extension of Venice’s Grand Canal and went all of the way to Padua (35km), and it included many side canals and loops to get all over the place without leaving the boats. Crews would row the luxurious barges across to the mainland from the island of Venice, and then horses would drag the barges up and down the Riviera del Brenta. In the mid 1700s, Casanova and his friends traveled this way from party to party at the huge villas lining the canal.

Check out my daily route (http://bit.ly/nZoEM9). Each day I see more hidden villas with vast, elegant grounds. A lot of them seem abandoned; it would be fun to fix one up and live in it, switching off kayaking to Venice and riding to Venice from there, but the wait for Casanova would be in vain unless he’s on Elvis’s program.

Tall Gigabike riders taming Vancouver’s hairy North Shore trails

I just had dinner last night in Vancouver with two tall (6’7” and 6’9”) Zinn customers, Layne Nadeau and Byron Tokarchuk, and heard inspiring tales of the riding that is now possible for them since they got their XXXL Zinn Gigabikes. The Vancouver North Shore trails are notorious for their steepness, slipperiness, dropoffs, stunts, and general technical challenge. Trails that are labeled blue (i.e., intermediate) on the North Shore would be labeled as double black diamond anywhere else. There are maybe two loops in the area that could be called “cross country” trails; everything else is an incredible network of freeride trails, many of them build high off the ground on skinny wooden Ewok-village-type structures with teeter-totters (even curving ones) in them.

Byron had broken many 26-inch-wheel bikes trying to ride these trails in the past, and he ended up broken sometimes himself. He said, “With my high center of gravity, the short wheelbase, little wheels, and overall size of the bikes, I would have my butt pushed back so far and low that my navel was on the rear tire, brakes fully on, and I’d still go over the bars on steep drops that smaller riders could roll no problem. And there were moves that I just couldn’t make, like a steep drop with a must-make right turn followed by a quick left down a log. But when I got my Gigabike, I could do those things and finally understood what a benefit the bigger wheels, longer wheelbase, longer top tube, longer cranks, and generally better balance of the bike makes.”

Layne said, “After I got my Gigabike, my wife asked me why I was not coming home bloody from mountain bike rides anymore! I used to be so scared on those trails and would go out fully padded up, because you can break an arm here on a zero mph crash; I felt totally naked out here in Lycra with all of this granite below me. I have a lot more scars from riding the North Shore on 26ers than I do from playing semi-professional rugby for years! But now that I got my Gigabike, I can ride this stuff and not hurt myself!”

Layne’s success on the mountain bike inspired him to get into off-dirt riding as well. He’s now got a Zinn magnesium road bike, and on Saturday I’ll ride the Gran Fondo Canada from Vancouver to Whistler with him.

Thanks for reading.

Lennard Zinn