We are living in an era where indoor cycling has collided with the greatest pandemic since Spanish Influenza. PezCyclingNews has invited readers to tell us about their bikes in Readers' Rigs, so now is the ideal time to reflect on indoor training and your very own Pain Caves. Here is a first contribution from Leslie Reissner, our Literary Editor.

2019 Het Nieuwsblad and Kuurne: Ed Hood is missing his Flemish weekend at the first of the Spring Classics in Belgium; we look back at his trip to Het Nieuwsblad and Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne in 2019. No frites and cobbles for Ed in 2021.

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 multi-faceted, it elegantly ranges from the personal to the historical to the geographic and even to the macabre.

Chris Froome is not sure about disk brakes, he never had them at Sky/Ineos Grenadiers, but with his new team and bike he has no choice. Ed Hood has been talking to our Soviet friend, Nikolai Razouvaev, who has his thoughts on the disk situation. Some of you won't like it.

In 2000, former US national-level racer Lennard Zinn came out with “Zinn & the Art of Road Bike Maintenance”, grease thumbprint-stained copies of this excellent book can be found in many of our workshops. But time marches on and the latest comprehensive guide to road bike maintenance is the third additional to GCN's library.

The International Cycling Union announced new measures to improve rider safety. The UCI will be stricter if riders 'take dangerous positions on the bike'. The UCI refer to the 'super tuck' and 'puppy paws' positions. Riders will first receive a warning, but after April 1st may be suspended. Here is what the riders think.

The UCI has announced that they'll be looking at dangerous behaviour in a peloton, including adopting dangerous positions on the bike; descending on the top tube. Ed Hood takes us on a retrospective a look at descending, handlebars and the evolution of aerodynamics in modern cycling.

It was May 1981 when Phil O'Connor took his first race picture; Manxman, Steve Joughin winning a stage of the Tour of Britain, 'Milk Race' as it hurtled into Bournemouth - some months later he managed to get it published in a cycling magazine.

On Monday we learned of the passing of Poland's top bike rider, Ryszard Szurkowski. The man from Lower Silesia came to prominence before the fall of the Iron-Curtain, but in those days the Russians and East Germans made life hard for everyone. Ed Hood remembers Poland's best.