Okay, so it’s worth saying that I walked about 7km today, only about 15 minutes of it outside. Interbike is a really, really big convention.

This year, the theme is also ‘unite,’ and the panel I started my morning with was coffee with the 20Collective, a group looking at bringing the industry together to improve. The Canadian bike industry is very different in a lot of ways from the American industry, but a lot of the themes that keep coming up still resonate. Getting more people more excited about bikes still needs to be part of our basic mission.

I also went to a panel about trade-ins, to see if there were any ideas about how we could make our process better. What came out of that is that we’re doing pretty great, but the Bicycle Blue Book is still a great tool for you. We’re also always open to feedback from you guys: we’re your bike shop, not the bike shop for a bunch of dudes in Las Vegas.

The rest of the panels I went to were again for stuff that affects us more as stuff to think about than stuff to immediately present to you guys – except for the Shimano road hydraulic disc brake panel. That was mostly fiddly tech stuff, like how much cooler the Freeza rotors are and how rotor tech keeps improving, providing better braking overall. There were graphs. It was cool. It was the last panel of a very long day, so those are about the only thoughts I can cobble together.

I also spent a bunch of time hanging out with Charlie Kelly, the founder of Fat Tire Flyer, author of the book of the same name, and one of the founders of mountain biking as a sport. I’d last seen him when I was about a year old, so it was really awesome to be able to meet him at the Mountain Bike Hall Of Fame booth. Mountain biking is such a West Coast thing from the ground up that it really makes me happy that we have such great local sites, like Hartland and Mount Washington, not to mention Whistler if you want to go a little farther afield.

I’d meant to post more photos from Interbike today, too, but it appears that all I have are screenshots of my schedule, a screenshot of our tune up sheet to send to the owner of another bike shop because he was so impressed at our transparency, and a selfie of me looking super unimpressed about all the wind while I was waiting for the shuttle to come back to the hotel. So instead here’s a super cool carbon bike from yesterday.