Mountain

SLIDESHOW: Trials riding has its own following, and nowhere is that more evident than at the UCI Mountain Bike & Trials World Championships (see, it's even in the official title of the event) in Mont Saint Anne.

VIDEO: With a little help from his friends — a few of whom you may well recognize — Adam Craig takes us on a pre-ride of the  MTB World Championships cross-country course in Mont Saint Anne.

Cannondale's cross-country racing bikes and forks spoiled Singletrack.com ridden-it-all tech guru Lennard Zinn. That's pretty hard to do. Find out how Cannondale did it…

Nino Schurter not only beat Julien Absalon at the line in the 2010 World Cup cross-country opener, he topped the Frenchman one more time by winning the World Cup overall title, which Absalon had won the last four years. And what about last year's MTB worlds?

VIDEO: The 20th edition of the UCI Mountain Bike and Trials World Championships at Mont Sainte Anne, Canada, started Wednesday with the team relay. Switzerland wins gold; U.S. finishes in ninth.

An over-stretched chain will usually wear your cassette and chainrings to the point of incompatibility with a new chain, causing the need for an entirely new drivetrain. Singletrack.com's Zach White takes a look at a new precision chain guage that makes keeping track of your chain easy.

VIDEO: Windham World Cup wrap-up in moving pixels...

SLIDESHOW: The 2010 UCI Mountain Bike World Cup is officially in the books as racing wrapped up on Windham Mountain in New York's Catskills on Sunday with the men's and women's downhill contests.

SLIDESHOW: Catch the elite men and women's cross-country action at the Windham World Cup final.

VIDEO: Flat tires stifled the momentum of almost every North American hopeful at the first World Cup in the United States in five years. Mishaps didn't slow Windham World Cup winner Jaroslav Kulhavy, however.

VIDEO: Two-time Olympian Julien Absalon had some bad luck at the Windham World Cup race, which meant he was out of contention for the overall series title for 2010.

VIDEO: Canada's Catherine Pendrel wins Windham World Cup and the overall 2010 World Cup overall. Marie-Helene Premont finishes second with her eye on hometown victory at next week's Worlds at Mont Saint Anne.

VIDEO: Canada's Catharine Pendrel leads the overall World Cup points battle, but Eva Lechner of Italy and American Willow Koerber are right on her wheel. How will Pendrel come out in the battle for the title?

VIDEO: Adam Craig's season was late to start due to knee rehab. How does the Maine native view the Windham, New York World Cup course and having the "Euros" invade the U.S.? Watch on...

Of the six season titles up for grabs, only one — four-cross — has been mathematically won. Prendrel, Lechner and Koerber all aiming for women's XC overall honors.

Full-carbon 29ers just keep getting lighter and are appearing more often atop the podium domestically, and, finally, internationally as well. Want proof? World XC champ Nino Schurter and his Scott Swisspower teammate Florian Vogel are checking out two-niners.

Singletrack.com recently caught up with four North American contenders for the podiums at the World Cup final at Windham, New York and at the mountain bike world championships at Mont Ste Anne — Georgia Gould, Katie Compton, Geoff Kabush and Todd Wells.

Riders like Julien Absalon, Nino Schurter, Willow Koerber, Catharine Pendrel, Greg Minnaar, Gee Atherton, Steve Peat, Sabrina Jonnier, Anneke Beerten and Jared Graves will be vying for rainbow jerseys in their various disciplines at Mont Saint Anne Sept. 1-5.

Tuesday's third stage of the Breck Epic somewhere above Breckenridge, Colorado saw a brutal day in the saddle where riders climbed over the Continental Divide twice in 44 miles, gaining over 9,400 feet. And did we mention it was cold...?

Although electrical storms moved through well before the start of the Fool's Gold Rush race in Georgia on Sunday, heavy and steady rains remained causing a viscous mud bath at race 7 in the National Ultra Endurance Series.

Mountain bike stalwart Tinker Juarez, 49, takes second at his first Mt. Washington Auto Road Bicycle Hillclimb.

SLIDESHOW: Is Rotor's 3D XC2 crankset Lord of the Rings? Singletrack.com's Caley Fretz does some wrenching and riding. Check out what he found out…

When considering bike components, lower price can mean inferior performance. Singletrack.com's one-man wrecking crew Zach White says that's not necessarily the case with SRAM's new Avid Elixir 3 hydraulic disc brakes.

Lennard Zinn, Singletrack.com's master technician, answers readers' questions. This week, the need to bleed (brakes); seat angles; and Dyna-Sys XT.

Goal of meeting is to ensure the future of sustainable trails and riding in the Lake Tahoe Basin, which sits in California and Northern Nevada and is home to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride and the Tahoe Rim Trail. What can you do keep rippin' riding in the Basin open?

Want to be the lucky dawg who wins one of Sony's new W Series Walkman MP3 players? Fill out the Singletrack.com reader survey.

VIDEO: The Singletrack.com crew was out and about all over the Leadville area Saturday covering the LT100. Here's a few highlights from a day filled with them.

VIDEO: An exhausted bunch of racers dissect the 2010 Leadville Trail 100 in a post-race press conference. Watch Levi, JHK, Wells, Wiens and Jeremiah recount the race.

RadioShack's Levi Leipheimer won Saturday's Leadville Trail 100 mountain bike race in Colorado in record time. VeloNews.com's sister site, Singletrack.com, provided full coverage including live text, galleries, results, race report and a look at the bikes used by the top riders.

Singletrack.com's resident tech guru Lennard Zinn caught up with Levi, Ned and Jeremiah to check out their Leadville bikes.

• 1. Levi LEIPHEIMER, Santa Rosa Ca, M3 in 6:16:37.2
• 2. Jeremy HORGAN-KOBELSKI, Boulder Co, M3 in 6:25:21.4
• 3. Todd WELLS, Durango Co, M3 in 6:30:31.1
• 4. David WIENS, Gunnison Co, M4 in 6:33:54.1
• 5. Jeremiah BISHOP, Harrisonburg Va, M3 in 6:33:54.4

Levi, JHK, Dave, Wells, Rebecca, Tinker and more: Check out the photos shot by Dave McElwaine and Rob O'Dea at the 2010 Leadville Trail 100 on Saturday.

Levi Leipheimer and second-place finisher Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski both break Lance Armstrong's course record at the 2010 Leadville Trail 100.

VIDEO: Endurance queen and 2009 Leadville 100 winner Rebecca Rusch is aiming to beat the women's LT100 record set by Gretchen Reeves in 2007. What will it take to set a course record?

VIDEO: Matt Shriver, coach of the perennially powerful Fort Lewis College cycling team in Durango, Colorado, set the punishing pace in 2009 that allowed Lance Armstrong to shatter the Leadville Trail 100 record. Will he pin it this year?

VIDEO: Mike Sinyard, founder of Specialized, raced the Leadville Trail 100 last year. He liked it so much his company is sponsoring this year's event. What bike is he riding Saturday?

VIDEO: Cross-country specialist Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski has won the 50-mile long mountain bike marathon national championships two years running and won the only 100-miler he's contested. What's his plan to stay in contention at the Leadville Trail 100 on Saturday?

If the Leadville Trail 100 was your second 100-mile mountain bike race ever, how would you set up your bike? This is how Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski is doing it.

SLIDESHOW: What's Dave Wiens Running at Leadville this year? Check it out in the Singletrack.com tech gallery.

VIDEO: Six-time Leadville Trail 100 winner Dave Wiens has gone up against the likes of Armstrong and Landis — and won. "I'm still here. I can go pretty good for a 45 year old."

As national cross-country champs, Georgia Gould and Todd Wells are two of 53 athletes nominated to represent the United States at the Mountain Bike World Championships in Mont Ste Anne, Quebec, September 1-5.

The Leadville Trail 100 will see its deepest field ever duke it out, including Dave Wien Levi Leipheimer, Todd Wells, Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski and a host of other names start the Colorado epic.

Defending champion Lance Armstrong will not start the Leadville Trail 100 this year. Armstrong decided Monday to pull out of the high-altitude mountain bike race because of a hip injury sustained in a crash in the Tour de France.

Max Plaxton and Kelli Emmett clinch overall wins in the TR3, a three-day race held during the seven-day TransRockies Challenge.

Hot damn! One rippin' ride on 2011 Shimano XTR has Singletrack.com's tech editor Zack Vestal highly impressed with the venerable group's re-tooling.

Slideshow: After a decade or so of "being dark," GT is making a push to relaunch its brand, with hopes of using GT's race-rich heritage as a platform to do so.

Slideshow: Austria's Alban Lakata wins men's Mountain Bike Marathon World Championships in a race that saw five riders finishing within 10 seconds of each other. Esther Suss of Switzerland topped the women's field with Americans Krista Park and Sonya Looney in the top-30 in Germany.

Leadville Trail 100 founder Ken Chlouber on Thursday announced he had sold his collection of ultra-endurance running and cycling events to Life Time Fitness.

The Wilderness 101 in Pennsylvania was the fifth stop on the eight-race Kenda National Ultra Endurance Series schedule.

The NUE Series will make its first-and-only 2010 stop on the West Coast when it rolls into Bend, Oregon for the High Cascades 100 this weekend. Check out the video recon of the course.

The Colorado high school league is the first to be established outside of California by the National Interscholastic Cycling Association and will feature a four-race series starting in September.

Slideshow: Consider adding Dejay Birtch to your list of the "lucky cyclist." Birtch manages and races for the Niner-Ergon mountain bike team, riding and traveling for most of the summer with an Air 9 Carbon.

From cross-country and dual slalom and big air, it's been a full weekend at Colorado's Winter Park Resort's Trestle Bike Park.

For the third time in less than a year, Nino Schurter and Julien Absalon battled it out to the finish at a World Cup cross-country race, and again Schurter came out victorious. One race remains — Windham Mountain New York.

Although Catharine Pendrel (Luna Pro Team) lost the victory on the last lap Saturday in Val di Sole, Italy, the Canadian is back in the World Cup overall leader's jersey as the series heads to the final round Aug. 28 in Windham, New York.

Slideshow: There's a 29er option in every single family of Specialized bikes, including Stumpjumper HT hardtails, Epic XC race bikes, the new Camber trail bikes and even Stumpjumper FSR trail bikes.

Slideshow: Specialized Factory Team rider Todd Wells won his two recent Stars-and-Stripes jerseys aboard the all-new 2011 S-Works Epic 29er, a carbon fiber full-suspension race bike.

There is a backstory to everything, and pioneering clothing company DeFeet is no exception. Singletrack.com's Lennard Zinn gets to the base of the company's success.

Offering five inches of hydraulic drop that is infinitely adjustable throughout its range, the Rock Shox Reverb offers by far the most saddle position selection of any drop-post we've ridden.

Find out the pros and cons of Specialized's Command Post, Crank Brothers' Joplin 4 and Rock Shox Reverb.

Specialized uses a mechanical locking system sprung with air, which gives a very crisp, definitive position adjustment to its Command Post.

The latest Joplin 4 has a touch less side-to-side shimmy compared to last year's model, which is mostly due to adding another guide block, thus doubling stability points internally.

Willow Koerber takes a third at the Champéry World Cup, but now sits in second place in the series overall, just 15 points behind Italy's Eva Lechner.

Greg Minnaar, from South Africa, and Great Britan's Gee Atherton have dominated all four speed events so far this season, each with two wins.

With the 2011 product rollout happening across the bike industry, Breezer will debut its Cloud 9, the first carbon fiber bike from the pioneering mountain bike designer Joe Breeze.

See how Giro's new Roc Loc 5 fit system works.

Luna's Catharine Pendrel goes into Champéry, Switzerland wearing the World Cup cross-country series leader jersey as well as Canada's national champion jersey.

For six-time LT100 winner Dave Wiens, the road to Leadville is a well-trodden route, one he's written on and off about over the last few years in a training diary. Leading up to the August race Dave is once again chronicling his training, which we'll have here on Singletrack.com.

The much-anticipated repeat battle between five-time Breckenridge 100 champion Josh Tostado and Jeff Schalk, leader of the 2010 NUE Series, fell victim to mechanicals as Schalk's double flat on loop one took him out of contention for a first-place finish.

Slideshow:Todd Wells wins XC and short-track titles over the weekend; Katie Compton shows her elite form with short-track victory.

Slideshow:Todd Wells and Georgia Gould each win their respective fields by more than two minutes .

Before the pros hit the race course at the Mountain Bike National Championships on Saturday, U23 and Junior riders battled for their Stars-and-Stripes jerseys.

Hundreds of ultra-endurance athletes will roll out Saturday for the start of the Breckenridge 100 Mountain Bike Challenge, which is race number four of the growing Kenda (NUE) National Ultra Endurance Series.

Adam Craig was running Shimano's latest take on its top-tier group at the Downieville Classic last weekend. Check out what AC thinks of the 2011 XTR.

According to reports in the Belgian press, Roel Paulissen, reigning marathon mountain bike world champion and 10-time Belgian Champion, failed a doping control last month.

VIDEO: This weekend kicks off the U.S. Mountain Bike National Championships in Colorado. But for three top women contenders for the Stars-and-Stripes cross-country jersey — Georgia Gould, Heather Irmiger and Mary McConneloug — there's a lot more racing to be had after nationals.