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This is not an obituary. John Cobb’s Bicycle Sports is still in business.

Yes, your favorite companies' product managers were all over in Taipei working on next year's bikes. They're working hard, no-doubt, but are they designing and spec'ing good bikes?

With Interbike right around the corner I thought I'd write a bit about how the bike business works—not everything about it, but the nuts and bolts of how a bike gets from the "paper napkin sketch" to your local bike shop's showroom floor.

One would be hard-pressed to come up with an industry, activity or economy in which one single trademark is more powerful or over-arching than in triathlon, and the trade name is Ironman.

Races are hard to produce. The bigger the race, the bigger the headache; the greater the expense; the more hand-wringing the stress; the more sleep-depriving the risk.

Yet again (as happens about every 18-months) someone asks about the beginnings of the bike technology that has make our sport unique. I thought I'd answer the question here, and with some photo representation.

On the same day the men's Olympic triathlon was contested a group of fifteen or so cyclists started up San Diego's Palomar Mountain.

Give Scott Tinley the task of beating up on a gaggle of pro triathletes on the race course and he's more than capable. Ask him to organize those same professionals into a union that will represent their best interests and you might as well ask him to raise the dead.

The amount of 19-norandrosterone present in Smith's urine, reportedly calculated by UCLA's drug lab at an estimated 11 nanograms per milliliter, is above, according to most involved in the drug testing milieu, any amount which might naturally occur in one's system.

15 people in the world can say that they have taken part in the very first Ironman triathlon in Hawaii, but only 12 can say that they finished the event. Slowtwitcher and Power Crank inventor Frank Day is one of these 12 finishers and he talked to Slowtwitch about that long day.

The final entry of Monty's retrospective blog, recounting the first-ever Hawaiian Ironman contested on the Kona course.

Monty's 1981 Kona retrospective continues with the lead up to the starting gun.

Mark "Monty" Montgomery competed in Kona's first Ironman, in 1981. His story parallels that of many of triathlon's pioneers. Here is Part I of his "blog" (26 years after the fact) recounting Kona's debut Ironman.

Interbike sneaks up on us every year. This year we snuck up on it.

You can race fast, and you can live long, but are achieving both goals a reasonable expectation?