Giant Cima mitts

I haven't written a kit review for ages, mostly because I buy the majority of my bits and bobs secondhand. However, I was in the market for a pair of mitts for commuting, now the weather has turned warmer, and ended up plumping for these Giant Cima short-fingered gloves. So what are they like?

I chose these because I want decent padding, but don't want gel pads. In my experience, they compress and become less effective over time. Your mileage may vary, but they're not for me; I prefer an old-school pad. I've also been spoiled in recent years, using excellent DHB Aeron mitts for all my serious rides. So I expect a lot from a glove.

Mostly, these Giant mitts deliver. They feel very well made, stitching is tidy, and the materials, especially the sweat-wipe thumb, have a quality feel. The all-important padding is firm but comfortable and, for me at least, in exactly the right places. Even the price - £14.99 plus P&P at the time of writing - feels alright for a branded product. And although they do an all-black variant, I went against type and bought the black and white colourway shown, complete with reflective branding across the knuckles. Can't hurt to be better seen, right? So why only four stars?

It's the sizing. I have always worn a Large in cycling gloves and, after consulting the Giant size chart, saw no reason to change that. These, though, are ironically not giant. In fact, they may be the tightest Large mitts I have ever tried. They are just wearable enough for me not to return them, but they are very hard to get off, being so tight. In fact, I had to roll them off this morning, so that they ended up inside-out. This wasn't helped by a complete absence of any pull-tabs to help remove the gloves, which seems like quite a basic oversight these days.

TLDR: these are good quality, nice looking gloves at a fair price, but size up! Consult the chart, then order one size up from whatever that says. And if you have ham-hands, maybe look elsewhere... ★★★★☆

BUY: Cima mitts, currently £14.99 from Giant

Full disclosure: I bought these with my own money. If anyone wants to give me kit in exchange for an honest review, I'm open to that, but unless I explicitly say otherwise everything I review on here will be sourced and paid for by yours truly.

It's a numbers game

I've mentioned my Google Sheets tool that consumes all my Strava data via an API, and let's me slice and dice everything the way I want. There's nothing new there. But drilling down into some figures last night, I noticed some anomalies. It was a lot of elevation in 2019, more than I could remember doing. So I started investigating... and found multiple rides that year that were duplicated. There was even a pattern - rides recorded on my Wahoo Elemnt Bolt, synchronised to Strava and then edited to change the name. So these rides were effectively stored twice, once with the default name, once with the edited name. I've been through Strava and deleted all the duplicates, and whatever the problem was it didn't seem to happen after 2019, at least not for me, so my stats are in a better place now even if I haven't cycled quite as far as I thought.

This reckoning has sliced 1 off my Eddington number though, annoyingly. In turn, this has required me to revise my Eddington-related cycling goal for this year. It was:

• Increase lifetime Eddington from 46 miles to 48 (requiring three days of 48+ miles)

And it's now:

• Increase lifetime Eddington from 45 miles to 47 (requiring two days of 47+ miles)

Bugger.

If nothing else, that feels more achievable. Silver linings, eh?

A mixed bag

I'm a couple of days late with this, but here's the quarterly update of progress against annual cycling goals which, in case you've forgotten (or care), are:

1. Complete 1,750 miles distance
2. Complete 54,500 feet of elevation
3. Record an annual Eddington of 17 miles (requiring 17 days of 17+ miles)
4. Increase lifetime Eddington from 46 miles to 48 (requiring three days of 48+ miles)

Sit-rep after Q1:

So, I'm mostly doing okayish, but need to have some long days in the saddle. No surprise there.

See you in three months for another update. Try to contain your excitement.

Another year of failure

Remember those cycling goals for 2025? And if you do, do you care how I did? If so, prepare to be disappointed.

To recap, my goals for the year were:

1. Complete 1,800 miles distance
2. Complete 55,000 feet of elevation
3. Record an annual Eddington of 17 miles (requiring 17 days of 17+ miles)
4. Increase lifetime Eddington from 43 miles to 46 (requiring six days of 46+ miles)

Here's a sit-rep at year end:

So, I failed on distance, for reasons I discussed briefly at the last update, only managing 85.7% of target. I did better on elevation, but still only managed 94% of what I'd hoped for. I only managed 12 days of 17 miles or more toward my annual Eddington target, but at least managed an annual E of 16.

As for my lifetime Eddington goal... well, that's a longer story. It's achieved but only because I realised a mistake in my calculations for it. My Google Sheets spreadsheet tool that hooks into the Strava API and does all my stats assesses all timestamps in co-ordinated universal time (UTC) but Strava timstamps are local (GMT/BST for me). So during British Summer Time, any rides that I started between mindight and 1am were being assigned to the wrong day for the purposes of Eddington calculations. I've now fixed the spreadsheet but this had a bigger effect than you might think, which shows how often in my Strava cycling life I've cycled home from a night out in the witching hour. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that although I only managed two days in 2025 where I rode 46+ miles, my lifetime Eddington is actually now 46 miles, my original target for year end. Hooray. Well done me.

What about targets for 2026? Well, I'm relucatant to row back too much on distance and elevation - I feel these are realistic goals, notwithstanding the issues I had to deal with in the summer of '25 (which, inevitably, will recur, if not in '26 then at some point). I've set Eddington goals too, though the beauty of that particular metric is that it becomes progressively harder to advance, so they're modest goals. In summary then, here are my goals for 2026:

1. Complete 1,750 miles distance
2. Complete 54,500 feet of elevation
3. Record an annual Eddington of 17 miles (requiring 17 days of 17+ miles)
4. Increase lifetime Eddington from 46 miles to 48 (requiring three days of 48+ miles)

Wish me luck, if you like.

I've got an excuse this time

Remember those cycling goals for 2025? Well, for reasons I won't go into here, they've taken a bit of a back seat this quarter, as I was barely able to get out on the bike at all during July and August. So although I've had a decent September (my third most miles in a month since I did LEJOG in 2021), it looks like being too little, too late.

To recap, my goals for the year are:

1. Complete 1,800 miles distance
2. Complete 55,000 feet of elevation
3. Record an annual Eddington of 17 miles (requiring 17 days of 17+ miles)
4. Increase lifetime Eddington from 43 miles to 46 (requiring six days of 46+ miles)

Here's an sit-rep after the third quarter:

Still behind on all counts... and unlikely to catch up, especially on the Eddington-related targets, as I don't have any sportives planned for the rest of the year. On the plus side, I have managed to increase my lifetime Eddington from 43 to 44. Whoop-de-doo, tarantula town.

Not even close to on-target

Sigh. Remember those cycling goals for 2025?

1. Complete 1,800 miles distance
2. Complete 55,000 feet of elevation
3. Record an annual Eddington of 17 miles (requiring 17 days of 17+ miles)
4. Increase lifetime Eddington from 43 miles to 46 (requiring six days of 46+ miles)

Here's an update after the second quarter:

So... behind on all counts... and I'd be even further behind if I hadn't just done a small sportive. I have one other of a similar length lined up for later in the year, but that's it. I'm not going to meet any of these targets, am I?

Weight...wait...

The Tank™'s diet continues, with another saddle change. I picked up a secondhand Selle Italia Kevlar Gel Flow saddle on Ebay for the princely sum of £40.41. It's quite an old one but is in fair condition and, crucially for my purposes, tips the scales at just 180g. That's pretty light for any saddle, but especially for an MTB-specific one.

Whatever, that's a further 160g shaved off the bike as a whole, bringing the whole thing down to 13.05kg. Not bad considered it started at 14.5...

There is still more to do, but am starting to get to the point where big differences will be hard to make. Still, every little helps, right?

Helpfully/unhelpfully

As you'll know from recent posts, I'm trying to shave some flab off The Tank™. The next obvious candidate for an easy weight loss is the seatpost, currently the OEM alloy post from the mid-90s. With a good carbon post, I could probably save at least 150g, if not more. And this is where it turns into an ISIHAC parlour-game.

Helpfully the current seatpost still bears an original sticker, proclaiming it to be 26.4mm in diameter.

Unhelpfully part of the sticker is missing, and I interpreted what was left as 25.4mm.

Helpfully this used to be quite a common size for Cannondale bikes, so they, ENVE, Zipp, FSA and a very few others make a carbon post this size.

Unhelpfully they are ruinously expensive.

Helpfully there are some on Ebay.

Unhelpfully these are still quite expensive, or don't have the right offset, or are overseas and ruled out by extortionate postage charges.

Helpfully, I found what looked a like possible candidate in the shape of an old Easton EC70.

Unhelpfully they didn't list the diameter in the description, only the length and offset.

Helpfully they did include this picture, which suggested the post was 25mm or a whisker over:

I should not have relied on this...

Unhelpfully I relied on this, and took a punt.

Helpfully the post arrived quickly, beautifully packaged and in great used condition.

Unhelpfully there was no way in a million years it would fit The Tank™ - my middle-Lidl digital vernier caliper suggested it was actually more like 27.2 mm across. And that the partially stickered OEM post is actually 26.4mm. Bugger.

In a fit of pique, I rummaged around in a toolbox, found a hacksaw and lopped about two inches off the old alloy post. The Kitchen Scales of Inaccuracy™ suggest this realised a weight saving of 27g, for free. And I now have a 27.2mm carbon seatpost to sell on Ebay. The moral of the story? Don't be fooled by photographs, and get yourself a caliper. And/or a hacksaw.

Behind on all counts

Remember those cycling goals for 2025?

1. Complete 1,800 miles distance
2. Complete 55,000 feet of elevation
3. Record an annual Eddington of 17 miles (requiring 17 days of 17+ miles)
4. Increase lifetime Eddington from 43 miles to 46 (requiring six days of 46+ miles)

Here's an update after the first quarter:

So... behind on all counts... and still no sportives lined up for this year yet. I've got some work to do.

Oh, and regarding the annual Eddington target of 17. Really annoying when this happens: bad route planning on my part.

The Tank™ is on a diet

As mentioned last time, I'm trying to breathe a bit of life into The Tank™, a 30yr-old steel mountain bike that has been through the mill but is seemingly indestructible.

Part of that resuscitation involves putting the whole thing on a diet, and I was quite pleased to have shaved nearly half a kilogram off last time. But why stop there? As it happens, the old girl needed new tyres, the old pair having clocked very nearly 4,000 puncture-free miles.

So my starting point was a 26 x 1.9" Schwalbe Land Cruiser on the front and a 26 x 2.0" Land Cruiser Plus on the rear. Don't ask why they were different widths - that's what happens when a bike shop only has certain tyres in stock. Anyway, they came off and a last-gen pair of new Land Cruisers went on, but narrower: 26 x 1.75". And I was amazed at the weight saving. My admittedly increasingly inaccurate luggage scale reckoned the old front tyre was 700g but its replacement was 350g. And an even bigger reduction came from changing the rear.

The upshot of all this is that The Tank™ now tips the scales at something like 13.25kg, more than a kilo lighter than it was this time last month. And because the tyres were last-gen, i.e. last year's model, they were only £11 each. So my secondary aim of rejuvenating the old girl on the cheap holds up too.

Wondering what I can do next? The seatpost is an obvious candidate but being an old-school MTB it's a funny size: 25.4mm. Don't find too many carbon posts that size. I might have to result to more rudimentary changes, as in pulling the post out and seeing if there's scope for cutting it down a bit. Now, where's my hacksaw...?