Tag: colin i blogged

Thoughts I had on the trainer

I posted some of these on Twitter already on Thursday. But then my site was being dumb and I wasn’t able to post them on this here blog BUT HERE THEY AREEEEE.

1. Take the live power data from road races (like upcoming classics), send it to the CLOUD (?????), then send it to your computrainer (via the CLOUD), and make your computrainer demand that you put out 650 watts for two minutes or something until you quit bike riding forever.

2. Enter into your Garmin (or maybe on Strava or Trainingpeaks or whatever) food kilojoule units, so you can see your ride in terms of “bags of BBQ potato chips”. Not that you should feel guilty about eating an entire bag of chips, but maybe this will make you feel better (need to talk to therapist about this one)?

3. A klaxon that goes off any time Tim Mitchell shifts down three gears, warning everyone to get ready to party or get out of the fucking way.

4. Shut up colin

Watching cross worlds

I was thinking to myself today, “I wonder how much Universal Sports/NBC/Comcast/Xfinity paid for the rights to UCI CX? And I wonder how much the UCI would make if they charged everyone in the US $5 per race to watch it?”

I think I actually thought this out loud, while reading Twitter. Or something.

Because if you’re a fan of cyclocross in the US, you have probably discovered the wonder of installing Hola in Chrome, pretending to be another country where Jack Donaghy didn’t win the rights to broadcast CX worlds, and going to the UCI YouTube channel, and watching the race in normal definition (WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE we had pixelated crap feeds on steephill.tv AND WE LIKED IT) on your laptop or TV.

The situation in the US is so ugly that Tim Johnson is tweeting out VPN solutions.

ANYWAY, I was thinking all of this (and, as usual, Cosmo has a great post/rant about this), and thought I had a GREAT IDEA in the “charging $5/race”, until I realized that in all of the countries I pretend to be via Hola, the race is broadcast for free on YouTube.

Except in the US, where the UCI found a network willing to give them some money to “broadcast it” to it’s “subscribers” (and yes, I tried cycling.tv, but it was terrible, and they kept billing me after I cancelled my subscription).

So anyway. Someone in the UCI Media Rights Sales Department (gotta be a thing, right?) managed to discover a way to get some cash money from Xfinity International Sports, and we’ll never be able to watch UCI CX in a non-janky fashion again.

But thank you, Hola.