You have to pity anyone who doesn’t understand the joy of spending a Saturday afternoon in front of the telly watching the last 100k of one of the Classics or the extra spring in your step you have in July knowing that for 3 weeks you will have the Tour de France to bring light to your life.

Anyway here are the races you simply cannot miss this year under any circumstances. You can watch most of them on Eurosport if you are prepared to part with 4 quid (5 euros) a month (if you don’t have it on you normal television). The UPT races are Pro Tour and the HIS races ‘Historic’.

Wheelworx Bike and Tri Store in Dublin have moved premises to a new store (on the Fonthill Retail Park in Liffey Valley) 12 times (!) the size of the old one in Clondalkin. That must make it just about the largest and best equiped tri and cycling store in Ireland. We have been supplying the Wheelworx shop and pro racing team with kit for years now and they have been good enough to feature one of our tri suits on their new store front!

Rob Cummins at Wheelworx is a top man who is totally passionate about his sport and you can be confident that the highly professional advice that came with staffing his shop with people who really live cycling and triathlon will be continued at the new premises. Tri and cycling kit is getting pretty confusing these days and it is just such a good idea to buy from someone who will give you honest and meaningful advice and who will give you the kind of after sales service that can be missing when you buy from non-specialist outlets.

We would just like to wish the new store and the Wheelworx race team a great 2010!

Jaakko is a triathlete from Finland attempting to break into the disturbing world of elite triathlon. We are very proud to sponsor his custom cycling and triathlon kit for racing and training and this is a podcast with him about what it is like training for Ironman and also just how bad he feels with 25kms to go on the run.

Find out more about Jaakko at his blog. Best of luck this season Jaakko!

We have a Carvalho Custom facebook page, but it is a little neglected! So we have decided to do a special offer for those ordering from us. We will give you a free cycling jersey in our new Bio-Cerâmica fabric and all you have to do is:
1. Place an order with us for some kit
2. Become a facebook fan
3. Post on our wall to say that you have ordered from us
4. Change your status to say your club has just ordered from us and include a link to our facebook page
5. Tell us that you have done the above and tell us what size jersey you require.

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Don’t try and tell me that this is not a great looking jersey! You will be the envy of everyone you ride with and it is worth €35/£30.

We have a few cyclists and triathletes round the world who we help out with custom kit in return for helping us to try out new fabrics and garments in race conditions. One of them is leading Dutch triathlete, Mirjam Weerd . It looks like she is going to have a fantastic 2010 season, so keep an eye open for her.

Well here is Mirjam going out to work this morning in full custom kit! One of the items she is trying out for us is our Drystorm winter cycling jacket, which we have recently improved to make it more stretchy for a comfortable fit, increasing the breathability by over 30% and adding a water repelant treatment to encourage water to bead of. It is a very warm jacket, as it has a microfibre insulation layer, as well as the breathable/waterproof/windproof membrane.

For the record Mirjam said the jacket kept her warm as toast! Best of luck to her this season.

We try very hard to keep all our fabrics bang up to date, but frankly with the rate of development of new fabrics it is very hard work. Not a week goes by without us receiving a new fabric to test and the pro riders we use to test them are always trying out something new for us.

A lot of the new fabrics are in fact pretty similar to the old ones, but sometimes something quite special comes along. So we have a new cycling jersey fabric, which is from the new family of bio-ceramic textiles. These are supposedly the big secret behind the clothing using by the GB Olympic cycling team, which had to be burnt after they were used so that nobody could copy them.

Bio-ceramics are natural materials consisting of a combination of mineral and ceramic oxides. This mixture is fused together at a very high temperature and the result of this is a bio-ceramic material which is capable of emitting infra-red light. The big deal about this for sport is that infra-red light is great for promoting blood flow (which is why it is used to treat injuries) and increased blood flow is just what an athlete needs, because it means more oxygen being delivered and faster recovery rates for muscles.

Our new fabric, Bio-Cerâmica is fantastically soft to the touch, is resistant to threads pulling and is stretchy for a great fit. It is not going to transform you from a back of the bunch grunter to Bradley Wiggins, but every little bit helps!

We have some etape places available – if you are interested, please contact Charlie. First come first served.