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.