What's Cool In Road Cycling

Author

Leslie Reissner

Growing up in the two-wheel desert that was Canada decades ago, Leslie Reissner discovered the joys of cycling when he and a friend rode from London to Munich one summer after high school. Since then, he has done some long distance riding in Europe, including the Camino de Santiago (which apparently entitles him to reduced time in Purgatory), dragged himself over major climbs in the Alps, Pyrenees, Dolomites, Vosges and Appalachians, and even done some racing. In spite of owning 11 bicycles and a cool sports car, Leslie still stays indoors for six months of the year due to the lousy weather and terrible roads in Ottawa but at least he has time to listen to classical music and read a lot of cycling books.

PEZ Bookshelf: Riding in the Zone Rouge

Leslie Reissner
Much of bike racing lore seems to centre around how much participants have to suffer before reaching the finish line, assuming they even make it that far. For sheer awfulness 1919's “Tour of the Battlefields,” one of bike racing's worst…

PEZ Bookshelf: Higher Calling

Leslie Reissner
Ah, mountains! Perhaps they share only with the sea something that universally arouses us to flights of poetry and fancy. “Higher Calling” is a book by Max Leonard that endeavours to explain this attraction to “up.” Beautifully written and…

PEZ Bookshelf: The Plant-Based Cyclist

Leslie Reissner
The release of “The Game Changers,” a documentary about athletes switching to non-meat diets, in 2019, aroused considerable interest and some controversy. On the other hand, GCN's “The Plant-Based Cyclist,” a book that also came out in…

PEZ at the Movies: The Long Way Around

Leslie Reissner
A sea-change in entertainment has given us a brave new world of cycling-related videos that through their subject matter or length or lack of star power would never have appeared in traditional media. Wahoo Fitness has a series featuring…

PEZ Bookshelf: The Big Climb

Leslie Reissner
Bookshelf: As we all know, Europe is the Promised Land of Cycling and as a professional athlete if you want to make it big you need to make it there. 2019 saw a Colombian, Egan Bernal, victorious, and a fascinating book, “The Big Climb,”…

PEZ Bookshelf: The Road Book 2020

Leslie Reissner
The Cambridge Dictionary defines an almanac as “a book published every year that includes information for that year such as important days, times of the sun rising and going down, or changes in the moon.” “The Road Book 2020” may not…