Gear

Buying gear for a new cyclist is a minefield. Bike shops love to upsell, Amazon reviews are half fake, and everyone with a road bike has an opinion on what a beginner “needs” on day one. I’ve been riding long enough to know what actually gets used and what ends up sitting in a drawer

You are two minutes into a run, the watch says 178, and you are fairly confident you are not dying. So you spend the next half hour quietly negotiating with a number on your wrist. I wanted to stop guessing, so I ran a track session wearing a Forerunner 265 on one arm and an

For years the screenless tracker category was basically one product with a subscription attached. That changed fast. Google launched the Fitbit Air in May 2026 at CA$129.99, and Garmin announced the CIRQA Smart Band on 21 July 2026 at CA$279.99, both of them subscription-optional. Whoop now has two direct competitors aimed squarely at the same

You buy a new saddle. Then a different saddle. Then better bibs, then chamois cream. Nothing quite kills the ache in your lower back or the hands that go numb after an hour. That was me for a while. I kept treating the symptoms and never looked at the thing causing them, which was how

Buying gear for a swimmer is harder than it looks if you don’t swim yourself. Goggles fog, caps rip, and half the accessories on Amazon look more like torture devices than training tools. The good news is that swimmers actually use a short, predictable list of gear, and most of it is cheap. If you’re

I bought the Favero Assioma Pro RL to put on my triathlon bike for a couple of specific reasons. My road bike is already running Look Keo pedals, and switching to a different cleat standard would have meant keeping two sets of shoes. A crank-based power meter wasn’t the right fit either, because with pedal-based

Choosing a GPS watch for triathlon used to mean defaulting to Garmin and spending whatever it cost. That’s no longer true. COROS and Suunto have both released genuinely capable mid-range watches that handle swim-bike-run transitions, dual-band GPS, and real training data. The hard part now is knowing which one is actually worth buying for how

The swim is the discipline most triathletes improve the least between races. A coach on deck helps, but most self-coached athletes never get that kind of feedback. Smart swim goggles put real-time data in your line of sight while you swim: pace, stroke rate, heart rate, and in open water, a compass that keeps you

Carbon plate running shoes have taken over race start lines. You see them on elite runners, age groupers, and, increasingly, people at their first 5K. The technology is real: the stiff plate and bouncy foam work together to return energy and keep your turnover high. The question is whether any of that translates into something

Most cyclists upgrade in the wrong order. They chase lighter components, swap handlebars, or spend hours agonising over saddle choices, when a few targeted changes would have made a much bigger difference for a fraction of the cost. These are the five road bike upgrades that are genuinely worth your money, ordered from the cheapest