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MATT SURCH
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When the warm summer winds fade, many cyclists hang up their bicycles or ride indoors until the following spring.
Knowing how to dress and having the right gear to reach for will make all the difference in these conditions. A cold-weather ride can be a blast instead of miserable, even with variable conditions and temperatures dropping below freezing.
A cold weather ride can be a blast instead of miserable even with variable conditions and below freezing temperatures.
DRESS FOR SUCCESS
On this episode, Castelli’s Canadian social media manager, Fred Tremblay, talks to Matt Surch, a well-known figure in the Canadian Ottawa and Ontario cycling communities, discussing how to keep the wheels turning when the temperature drops below freezing or when snow begins to fall.
Matt is not afraid of taking on new cycling adventures or challenges, whether it’s mountain biking, downhill racing, road racing, cyclocross, or even grassroots gravel events—his stories are packed with experiences and tips to keep you warm and energized while cycling in cold weather.
Hope you’ll enjoy the episode!
If you're looking for related content, we also have a blog post about Matt's secrets for staying warm and comfortable during winter rides.
IMPORTANT LINKS
Matt Surch (Instagram)
Host: Fred Tremblay
Guest: Matt Surch
SEND US YOUR QUESTIONS
If you want your questions to be answered on air, be sure to submit your questions by sending us a message on social media or by email to podcast@castelli-cycling.com
________
Knowing how to dress and having the right gear to reach for will make all the difference in these conditions. A cold-weather ride can be a blast instead of miserable, even with variable conditions and temperatures dropping below freezing.
A cold weather ride can be a blast instead of miserable even with variable conditions and below freezing temperatures.
DRESS FOR SUCCESS
On this episode, Castelli’s Canadian social media manager, Fred Tremblay, talks to Matt Surch, a well-known figure in the Canadian Ottawa and Ontario cycling communities, discussing how to keep the wheels turning when the temperature drops below freezing or when snow begins to fall.
Matt is not afraid of taking on new cycling adventures or challenges, whether it’s mountain biking, downhill racing, road racing, cyclocross, or even grassroots gravel events—his stories are packed with experiences and tips to keep you warm and energized while cycling in cold weather.
Hope you’ll enjoy the episode!
If you're looking for related content, we also have a blog post about Matt's secrets for staying warm and comfortable during winter rides.
IMPORTANT LINKS
Matt Surch (Instagram)
Host: Fred Tremblay
Guest: Matt Surch
SEND US YOUR QUESTIONS
If you want your questions to be answered on air, be sure to submit your questions by sending us a message on social media or by email to podcast@castelli-cycling.com
________
Follow us on social:
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TRANSCRIPT
SOREN JENSEN
Hello everyone, I'm Søren Jensen and this is the Castelli podcast, the show that takes you behind the scenes of the iconic brand that has revolutionized how pro riders dress and pushed the boundaries of cycling clothing performance. On today's episode, we are diving into the topic that is crucial for all of us, how to dress for riding through the cold winter month. I'm joined by Castelli's Canadian social media guru, Fred Tremblay, who will talk to Matt Surch, a well-known figure within the Canadian, Ottawa and Ontario cycling communities. As thousands of Canadians cycle in the summer and use bikes to commute to and from work, most of them put their bikes away either when the temperature drops below freezing or when snow begins to fall, which could happen anytime now. However, there are a growing number of people who keep the wheel spinning through the winter and enjoy being outside. As Matt points out, we can't change winter, but we can change our perspective of it. Or as the old saying goes, there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing. For those who doesn't know Matt, he is a guy who is not afraid of taking on new cycling adventures or challenges, whether it's mountain biking, downhill racing, road racing, cyclocross, or even grass roots, gravel events. His stories are packed with experiences and tips to keep you warm and energized while cycling in cold weather. So we hope you will enjoy this episode and please make sure to rate us and follow the show wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to Fred and Matt.
FRED TREMBLAY
First of all, thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and your story, Matt?
MATT SURCH
Sure, Fred. Thanks. Thanks for having me on the pod. Just high level, I'm 44. I'm from Ottawa in Ontario, which is just in the border of Quebec. I won't dig into the parallels with cycling things but there are some that are kind of fun. But on the bike sort of front I started riding mountain bikes more than 30 years ago and got into racing 30 years ago which was cross-country old school and and then into downhill in the late 90s, so that was a few years of full-on downhill racing in this part of North America. Went back to school kind of early 20s and lived in Montreal for five years and spent time sort of riding street mountain bike, skate parks, dirt jumps, that kind of stuff, because I didn't have a lot of time and then started my family actually when I was 26 and got into riding bikes with my daughter when she was one year old in the trailer and then into road racing which started with Spring Classics what's now called gravel. I raced my first Spring Classic race on a fixed gear bike with some other friends on fixed gear that was OG fixed gear stuff and then transition into local road racing things we used to have a big local road race that was amazing in Gatineau Park and built from there into stage racing kind of was developing a shop based club and racing team and that kind of stuff and I eventually transitioned then into cyclocross full-on and criterium racing and all during that time we were riding what became known as gravel, we just called it dirt road riding, and I was involved in organizing sort of grassroots gravel events in our region. And fat bikes came in more than 10 years ago I guess and then really have been blowing up in our region over the last three or four years and so now winter time I get to spend on fat bikes full-on and we'll get into the contrast against another format of riding a little later. So a lot of bikes over a lot of years.
FRED TREMBLAY
Yeah that's really cool. I actually know you from doing one of your uh I used to do a ride of the dam that you used to be part of back in the day so I know you from that time. So from knowing you on social media it's pretty evident that you're all year round, you ride through all kinds of conditions. How do you adapt to riding in the arch condition of our Canadian fall-winter weather here?
MATT SURCH
Yeah, I guess the adaptation has just been an iterative process going back a long view. I started riding in winter at 13 years old and that was because there was a guy who played hockey at my outdoor rink who came to the rink with his bike and his stick attached to his frame and I thought that's dope. I'm like that is what? I'm like that is cool. He's riding in the winter. That's dope. And so I figured well I can bust out my bike and ride. Let's see what it's like. And it was gnarly, right? Like there's snow and ice everywhere, but it was cool. And so it was a compliment to playing hockey. And that was my life and my passion at that phase of my life. And riding was just a completely, you know, free kind of thing to do, free form, compared to hockey. Hockey training, practice, games, pressure. Bike was just bike, just fun. So over the years of dressing for the bike, you know, like skiing, like snowboarding, I had the chance to learn, you know, what's working and not working as I'm riding that bike two hours, three hours as a teenager on the weekend for fun, you know, exploring around the city and realizing, okay, there's some things that don't work so well. So it was certainly a long, a long period of learning, transitioning into riding, commuting year round. That happened in my teens to school, to work at the bike shop and all around town. And it wasn't until later, especially it was kind of cyclocross was what really drove me to start thinking about my kit as vital to training in really bad weather because in mountain biking prior you would just dress for two three hours four hours whatever high intensity you could kind of manage but in cyclocross if you're going to go train after work in cold rain you have to feel comfortable, high intensity, low intensity to make it sustainable. So through the process of doing that kind of testing, trialing with cyclocross training and carrying over some of the mindset into winter, it became a little more experimental, a little bit more about tracking results of what I was doing so that I could adapt in a more targeted way instead of having a recollection of two months ago what did I wear two months ago so consistency became more the norm for me riding in the bad weather increasingly cold longer riding and so the consistency allowed me to be doing little tweaks and trying adaptations and I actually started taking notes so that I would have the ability to do small tweaks and build off of what was working and put aside what was not working. So I think it became that kind of experimental sort of mindset that allowed me to adapt sufficiently to a broad range of winter, which is pretty gnarly in our region. It goes well below minus 20 Celsius.
FRED TREMBLAY
And as far as like, what could you tell me about like, what are your favorite product for Castelli for winter riding right now? And what kind of advice can you give people about what they should wear with our brand?
MATT SURCH
Okay, so favorite products for me are maybe not going to be the same as what would be favorite for other people, because winter is such a big category, right? So here in my region, which is very much like your region in Quebec, we have a winter that becomes kind of easy to dress for at a certain point because it's not wet anymore. So it's dry cold, you know, if it's precipitating it's going to be snow, it's not going to be rain. Rain is really really hard to deal with so I empathize with people who live places where it's cold rain and fall and spring. So for us winter dry cold The name of the game is managing moisture right against wind protection so wind protection and generating heat and Storing moisture and clearing moisture. That's the whole equation. We have to try to manage Right. So the whole what I like tends to differ based on the kind of riding I'm doing. So I kind of bracket commuting in a city you can do often with kind of normal clothing and like really big boots, it depends how far you're gonna go. But if you're gonna ride longer than an hour it starts to get complicated because you generate heat that needs to go somewhere and that heat is also pushing out moisture right from all of your skin. So if I'm riding a high intensity one hour, two plus hours, five hours, I have to dress for a really crazy and difficult regulation problem. So if it's fat biking, it's hard but it's not the hardest because fat biking is generally a fairly high intensity that's fairly consistently high intensity on rolling terrain so I have to have a good moisture clearing from my jacket but I don't have to have an extreme wind protection because the speed doesn't go that high. So for that I like things like the Perfetto. The Perfetto jacket is easily my favorite for fat bike because it clears moisture incredibly well. It's shocking how well it can clear moisture, but it's also blocking all the wind I needed to block. In contrast, the Unlimited Puffy Jacket is an insulated jacket that is quite amazing for its warmth retention factor, but it gets overwhelmed by moisture clearing when it's really cold. So that's an item that I know the team has been working on other sort of fabric combinations for that high intensity kind of output. If I contrast fat bike which is high intensity without generally high speed against what we call snert riding so that's like a snow covered dirt road when you combine it you call we call it snert it's a funny term. Yeah it's new to me it's a new term to me I like it. So, snow riding can be very very fast it can be at 60 plus kilometers an hour on descents that's a real tough one for Kit and when I do that kind of riding I will lean to Alpha RoS 2 jacket that's prior this year that's been the warmest jacket Castelli has made and it uses a dual construction right where you have an inner insulation layer but you can open up an external shell right and you have two zippers so you have the internal you can open or close it so you can ventilate so that jacket is incredibly good for the nastiest gnarliest winter weather that I ever want to ride in and that's good down to for sure minus 20. It becomes more an issue if you're going to do Alpha RoS day, can your hands stay warm enough? Can your feet stay warm enough? Because those become very challenging without having to do some very special moves. So those are jackets you know like Perfetto and Perfetto is amazing for people riding in terrain where there's going to be more climbing and descending also, but maybe they don't need as extreme insulation. But you can also layer under the Perfetto, right? You have to size, maybe size up so you can do a little bit more layering, right?
FRED TREMBLAY
And if we talk about layering, what kind of layering would you do, depending on the weather, but like how much layering and what are your products that you like to layer with?
MATT SURCH
Mm-hmm, so once upon a time myself and others I rode with we would have many layers because we had to. Today though, it's a lot simpler I find because the solutions that we have with Castelli are so effective that I don't have to result to an elaborate layering approach. Instead I have to choose generally the right base layer and then I wear the external and it's done. So for example with the Perfetto I can wear a ProMesh base layer that is a t-shirt base layer. It's very thin. I can wear that in the fall down to depending on intensity easily 10 degrees Celsius, no problem, and be very comfortable. Or I can add a full sleeve base layer under that same jacket, right, and I can bump down to a colder bracket, easily go down to minus 10, minus 10 Celsius with a Perfetto and a Flanders Warm base layer. No problem. So that's a higher intensity output like fat biking that combination works really really well and just a hot tip here I put a camelback like a backpack small bladder system I put that under a Perfetto jacket inside against me so my water doesn't freeze and for that I use a Perfetto that's one size up than what I would wear in summertime. So that gives me more space to do it and works incredibly well. So for the Alpha you can do, it depends because it's insulated right, you can go anywhere from a short sleeve base layer to a medium weight full sleeve base layer, like again like a Flanders Warm is on the more extreme end of the spectrum. There's a Prosecco base layer that I've used a lot that's a little bit lighter, doesn't have the high neck, right. It really just depends on how humid it is outside, what's your effort going to be, but the nice thing about a jacket like Alpha RoS or the new would be Alpha Doppio, is it has a tunability because of that dual layer, so if you go a little bit over with your base layer, it's okay, you can vent without having to deal with with full air penetration right so generally I'm pairing one base layer with the external and that Alpha or the dope you know those designs they're effectively giving you the equivalent of wearing two base layers but with the tunability that you wouldn't have had with a shell and two actual base layers where you're actually you know actually locked in.
FRED TREMBLAY
You mentioned hands and feet getting cold. Do you have any tricks for that matter outside of like product?
MATT SURCH
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so the general principle is if your core is not sufficiently protected and insulated, where again moisture management is a big deal, right? Because if you're retaining moisture against your skin, when your intensity comes down, you chill. So it's name the game is venting out your moisture. So if your core is good and regulating well, right, you stand a fighting chance to have warm hands and warm feet. Because you're pushing warm blood down a cold arm, by the time it gets to a hand it's pretty chilled. You have to make sure that you have sufficient protection and insulation all along those extremities, your legs and your arms, to give your hands and your feet a chance. For your legs, in a way it's kind of similar. If you wear clothing that is too tight on your legs, what you do is you restrict the blood flow on your legs. And so if you wear a size of tights that is amazing fit perfect at the end of September, maybe you're at like your most trim body composition, and then fast forward in January, you're not at your most trim body composition. So sizing is really important and this is where we can sort of amplify the message that wearing really high-performance and tailored cycling clothing needs to be matched with careful sizing of that clothing. It's the same in summertime when you put on a pair of say Premio bibs or Aero 6.0 bibs, you actually have to place the fabric in such a way that the pad goes where it should go. So winter clothing isn't that sensitive in terms of placement per se, but it is sensitive in terms of sizing. So we have to know that what we're trying to accomplish is the right fit for the application. So that principle, it applies to our hands, which means when we choose gloves, don't go for the race fit or the ultra direct feeling that we're used to in summer. It's not going to be possible because gloves have laminates. They have layers. That's part of it. Don't try to compensate for that by going tighter. Tighter is only going to mean less air. You need a bit of airspace and you need to be able to move without pulling tight across knuckles, right? Stuff like that. With feet, same thing. Don't go tight with footwear for cold riding. Go bigger to the point that it feels raw. That's what it has to be. For winter use, we can have a shoe, it depends where you are, you can have a shoe that is great, you can wear a thin sock, and you can amplify that with a really good shoe cover and Castelli makes options that are surprisingly effective. So like the Estremo shoe cover is incredible and works really, really well over a typical summer road shoe.
FRED TREMBLAY
The good advice you just gave is everybody should size up.
MATT SURCH
Generally, you need to be sizing up.
FRED TREMBLAY
Yeah, so if you're in between two size you go one size, the upper size not the...
MATT SURCH
The Intenso UL is a really well built shoe cover that will fit over a shoe that has mountain bike tread, right? So a lot of people will use that kind of shoe for winter time which is very intelligent to do and so that will really amplify what you can do with an existing mountain bike shoe or even a mountain bike boot. And a last tip here, this is more biological than it is technological. If we picture people doing cross-country skiing and we look at what they wear, we might ask ourselves what the heck, how does this work? Because they're not wearing much, right? And their gloves are very light. So how come? Well they're flinging their hands when they're pulling. They're flinging their hands down, right? And what we learned here years ago, because we used to cross-country ski a lot, some of us, was that that flinging, that whipping of the hands downward, it forces blood into the ends of your fingers. So the hot tip is before you start riding, you can stop and get off your bike and whip your hands like crazy downwards, pushing, driving the blood into the ends of your fingers. I call it charging of the hands. Just imagine you're double pulling cross-country skiing. If you do this, I find your hands will be fine for the rest of your ride, even if it's hours. It's insane. So it's like an activation that can really pay off big time. It takes one or two minutes to do.
FRED TREMBLAY
That's really, really... I'm taking notes for myself here. So it's a lot of like trials and errors, I'd say, like probably for people that start winter riding as far as layering and what to wear and combinations. Do you remember like a specific time where you realized you had a perfect combination? The gear you were wearing was saving your ride or making it so much easier. The gear was definitely the key factor to you having a good time in the winter riding? MATT SURCH Yeah, I was thinking about this before and it's been a lot of years of winter riding so I couldn't remember the first time for sure but I can remember some more recent going back maybe five years. So I initially had some first experience with the Elemental light jacket which is not part of the lineup anymore but a very innovative jacket and the first time I rode in that jacket on snurf, so these dirt roads covered in snow, I was shocked by how it created this sort of equilibrium of body temperature. I have never experienced anything like that before, never. And what I found was, oh I can go to the cafe 40 kilometers from Ottawa during my ride and actually have a coffee and whatever and not worry that I'm going to freeze because I'm actually dry. So that was a kind of an epiphany because prior to that our norm was you will be wet and you'll manage that and you can't stop for any length of time. That was the norm with winter riding. So I think that was an important experience to sort of redefine what I thought was you know correct and possible and so it set a bar. From that point forward I've been trying different options for different uses and I have the requirement, I can say because I know it's real, that I can actually be dry. Then the more recent ones like Alpha, RoS 2, shockingly effective jacket when it's cold and even like wet snow rain. I was shocked on a ride where it didn't become miserable and it should have because the jacket just kept me dry and warm. I couldn't believe it and I was using the Espresso GT gloves which are crazy good. They're similar. They're using Cortex Infinium and these gloves are unparalleled in my cycling life. They are crazy for the range that you can use them and what I have now is sort of a rule I implemented this a few years ago. I have a cutoff point for winter riding. My cutoff is minus 15 Celsius so if it's colder than that I don't start. That's when I start 15 Celsius minus or warmer. The Espresso GT gloves work for me down to minus 15 so it means I'm good to go. If I want to win a ride, I have the solution that's going to go to my threshold. If it's cooler than that, I don't care. I don't need anything. I don't care. It's not fun because it's actually a problem that's very hard to solve for feet. Those are standout pieces. The Perfetto in general is a mind-blowing product, I find. It's just so versatile. Espresso GT gloves, crazy good. And then Perfetto gloves, I have to throw a shout out. Those are just like the jacket. They're so useful. So those are the ones that I tend to think are sort of game changers.
FRED TREMBLAY
Pretty good. Pretty good. Minus 15 is probably also around my threshold. Like I used to commute a lot in the winter as well and I always said that anything below minus 20 is not riding, it's surviving. It's like you're just trying to get to point A to point B as fast as possible.
MATT SURCH
Let me throw a little anecdote on this. I need to ride, my commute was just 3 kilometers. It was only 3 kilometers, a very straightforward ride, not far enough that you really get going, right? Your heart doesn't really beat. You don't need to. You can just ride moderate 3 kilometers. And so many days I rode to work and my hands were so cold, and this was with all kinds of different big nicks, they were so cold I had to swear, I was swearing in my head and out loud to try to get adrenaline going so that I could handle how much lane is there. This happened many times over the years. It was just a losing battle. The handlebars met old. It's damage control when it's minus 20 and colder. Having a threshold is okay. It's not a sale for somebody to say, no, that's too cold for me and draw a line. Then you work within that boundary to figure out what works for you to that boundary.
FRED TREMBLAY
Plus the bigger the gloves get the harder it is to shift the brake to do everything. Here's a question I'm gonna ask. Do you think winter cycling is made for everyone?
MATT SURCH
So, no, definitely not. Because, you know, no activity is for everybody, right? That's just like, that's just logic. But, it's probably something that a lot more folks could do and enjoy than they might think, right? I think it looks crazy and it looks really complicated, but the complication and the challenge, it sort of scales to the time. Fat biking, for example, it looks really fun and easy when people see it, right? They go, oh, I can do that. If a trail is groomed, it is easy. If it's not groomed, it's really hard. There's some nuance, right? But if we had a groomed trail and we sent out some people on rental bikes for one hour, they could wear ski clothing, right? And they'd be okay. They could wear big boots and ski clothing and big mitts and a helmet and goggles and they would be fine. And if they got sweaty, it would be okay because they wouldn't be that far away from anywhere. So they wouldn't have to have a bad experience just because they didn't really know how to dress for fat biking, right? There's like a big window for a margin there. But when you go beyond one hour, it becomes more complicated. And so that's where it's really phenomenal, in my view, to be able to communicate how I can, what works, based on my experience, as a shortcut. So if people are thinking, maybe I want to do it, they're going to look around and see, well, how do other people do it? And in conveying, well, how do I do it? I tend to try to share nuance, right, because the nuance of the context it matters. So that's where like the intensity matters and the duration matters, right? So if we can kind of get our heads around that, we have a chance of success. Success being not a bad experience. But I mean the general understanding has to be it's not that easy, especially as you want to be more performance oriented. It gets more and more complicated the more performance oriented you want to be. That's okay. So it's a learning process. So the best thing you can do is try to be consistent about doing it so you can iterate, you know, and maybe also be okay with experimenting. It's not normal for bike riders though, right? To say, oh, I'm gonna go out and ride some little circuit, something near my house in winter. And if I don't like my setup with my clothing, I'll come back home and I'll change it and then I'll go back out and try it. That's not a normal move that people would think of, but as an investment of time for maybe an afternoon, it would pay off massively, right? But not everybody has that approach. So that's okay. So the best we can do is try to communicate, you know, what's the sort of context where we would use that kind of product, right? Which products are a little more versatile and give you more flexibility as a rider. Things like Alpha Doppio, Alpha RoS 2, right? Those kinds of things. Espresso GT Glove, it breathes, you know? We can communicate those options, that's kind of the game plan, and hope that people can build off of success. So the last tip I would say on this front would be for people not to compare themselves to other people, but know that all of us who do winter cycling and are successful at it, we can say, we also sometimes have rough experiences. But just know that success with this stuff and being really adept, it doesn't happen overnight. It takes a little while and that's okay. That's okay. That's part of the process. So maybe don't try to hurry into it and be pro, you know, right away.
FRED TREMBLAY
Starting by commuting and doing little things maybe first and then evolve into it, I'd say. You mentioned that snert does that it's learn. Would you think riding gravel hard pack snow on gravel in the winter is probably easier than riding road because you get less wet or because what once For once like the the cars are probably less You're less in the way, but like I'm just curious like it's probably it's a practicality thing or it's more comfortable for riding? What is it?
MATT SURCH
Yeah, you know, you're on the right track for sure, I think, in my experience. The snow that is hard packed by car traffic where they don't put salt down, they put down sand. So, sand, you know, sand with packing creates a surface that is generally quite good for riding on with cyclocross tires, the kind you would use for sand and for hard pack, not mud tires. So it's quite consistent, it's not for everybody, but there's some bike handling, yeah, but it is generally quite good and you don't have ice. So that's a big thing, on pavement you can get ice, on snert roads you would rarely ever have ice. So then when you're talking about you know dealing with cars and traffic, it's a de-risking to be on a surface that will rarely have ice. Right, so that's really good. Depends, some places have ice because you know, that's the environment's different and you use studded tires. So, like, the Snert will have a lower maximum speed generally because of the surface than pavement, yes. So I did tend to want to, you know, do more of the Snert riding away from so much traffic, more consistent surface, more elevation change, but not too much because we have a chance to keep doing some climbing and it's like a good temperature and it's fun. It's a bit fun, it should be, versus training. So it kind of ticked a lot of boxes I would say in our region, but in other places what's really interesting to experience firsthand, like Vermont, if you ride Snirt in Vermont, it's an extreme use case for kit because the climbs are much longer and so the descents are much longer and faster. So you need to have more like an alpine kit, which is more polarized. You have to have full venting on the way up and then full protection on the way down. It's very, very demanding. So, you know, whatever the case may be, paved in cold and maybe there's no ice, maybe it's above zero but cold, versus snert, the more rolling the terrain is versus mountainous, the easier it is to kind of regulate, but you also maybe want to shave your high intensity not to push it too far and be just kind of more steady, you know. So, yeah, I think it's a neat question to see how do you compare all the variables and how do you sort of apply your opportunity for riding. I much prefer to get off of the pavement in the middle of winter. Drivers don't really expect to see me there out of the city. You need a big shoulder. If you have that, you're okay, but if you don't, it can be very scary.
FRED TREMBLAY
I think where I live is pretty much in between Vermont, like as far as like roads. I live in an eastern township, so it's kind of in between where you're from and Vermont, as far as hills, so it's kind of a mix of both. And two quick questions about your bike setup. Do you ride full fenders? Do you ride, and do you ever ride studded, like, nail studded tires or?
MATT SURCH
Right, so kind of yes and no. When we used to ride north of Ottawa, Snert Roads, where we would drive 40 kilometers to a town and then ride about a three kilometer loop, that was before the pandemic, and for that it would not make sense to use fenders because actually the bikes did not have clearance enough so the snow would spray when it hits the fenders. It was a disaster. So during pandemic it became a different equation. We weren't driving places together, right? That remember when that was not a thing? And so I had to ride, I had to ride just do the ride by myself and for that reason I ended up setting up one of my bikes that has clearance with fenders and then I could use the fender with a mix of surface, pavement, wet, snert and I didn't have jamming and all that happening. And in that context I set a challenge for myself because it was the pandemic. I said well for winter solstice can I do a 200 kilometer ride and you know start when it's light and then get home when it's light. It's the shortest day day of the year and I did that two years in a row with full fender bike and I had to go fast. I had to go fast to get home before dark and so for that I had to wear kit that was actually pretty aero right so that's where I leaned on you know I used the Alpha RoS one year and I think I used Perfetto the other year and they were vital because they weren't flapping in the wind you know so sometimes these these situations we create for ourselves as a challenge incorporates a performance requirement that has nothing to do with bike racing, but it matters, right? Which is where I really start to have positive feelings about kit that is super effective.
FRED TREMBLAY
Pretty good. So how did you get in touch with Castelli? How did your relationship with Castelli start?
MATT SURCH
I was focusing racing in cyclocross at that time. That was my A game for each year and training mostly after work It wet all the time all the jackets at that time that were out on the market that I was aware of that were good and effective and breathable they were really expensive membrane jackets and We're talking, you know, shake dry these kinds of things very expensive and kind of fragile. So I was wondering, is there a solution for people doing a more rugged riding, right, that breathes well for high intensity and also protects the way we want? Is that a thing? And so I reached out to folks at Casselli, the team here in Canada, sort of asking about this thing, like, what do you have as a solution for that? I would like to test this and write something about this, because this is a sort of, I think something a lot of people were struggling with. In my club, a lot of people were saying, what even works? And so from that came the Elemental Light, which was not exactly the fit for the use case I was talking about. It became more of a use case winter, and it was an exciting product because it was very unique in its approach. And so instead of focusing on a solution for cyclocross, we got into this testing for this winter jacket, which opened a conversation that evolved into more, and then becoming an ambassador with Castelli, because I love talking about the product performance and the why and the how and iterating. It's just it's fun for me and it always has been. So this is how it started and ultimately became some opportunities here and there to be involved in some of the testing for prototype product, which is really fun for me, too, and really nerdy, right, and fine-ringed. And then conversations with the folks in Italy here and there and the folks your team in Canada around what what's coming and why how to understand you know where the products stack up within the ecosystem right the Castelli ecosystem and where things are going so all of this is a you know effectively passion project for me I've had experiences that were made it really clear to me that product that was well designed and engineered and fit for purpose can make such a big difference. You know, the difference between having a good day and a very, very, very bad day.
FRED TREMBLAY
Pretty cool. So just to end this, let's go with a couple of rapid-fire questions. What are your top three Castelli products?
MATT SURCH
Okay, so I'm going sort of generic Perfetto convertible jacket This thing is always one of the first things I tell people if you're traveling you bring that you're covered if it's Apocalyptic you're okay And then also you can take off the sleeves and ride that thing with no base layer up to and around 20 degrees Celsius It's wild. So the next one is the Perfetto gloves. I talked about them before. They're phenomenal. I don't know how you can make a better like range of gloves. You have the Max, you have the regular, the light. They're wild. So yes those essential kit. And then Premio bibs. The Premio bib I used for the first time this year, took them to Europe on a trip one month. I rode them as much as I could. I hand washed them all the time. They are the best bibs I've ever worn.
FRED TREMBLAY
You can't go back after those. Like, I'm on the same page. It's like, once you try these bibs, like you can't go to anything else.
MATT SURCH
They redefine, yeah, they redefine what a good bib is. And they're durable. I crashed on pavement in them and they were not affected. Literally, I crashed on pavement.
FRED TREMBLAY
Yeah, they're so comfortable on the legs. It's insane. And give me three key products for somebody that wants to start riding in colder conditions.
MATT SURCH
Okay, so I'm going to start with the lower leg. I would say depending where you are for some people the Nano Flex Pro Bibs that's just bib shorts they're really really versatile so if you're in a winter where it's only going to be it's never going to go below zero right and you it's usually going to be more like 12 like under 15, 12, 10, 8, around there Nano Flex Pro Bibs they're longer right they cover a lot of the knee itself and they're super comfortable so it's a thermal fabric we have the the best pad that Castelli builds with right so it's ideal for long days or short whatever you want and you can also add like warmers if you want to amp that up so for the milder winter that's the one for cold winter Sorpasso RoS bibs the bib tight are unreal. They are my top choice for cold because they are the most compliant and allow for the best blood flow with amazing protection and thermal regulation. So they're outstanding. For hands I'm going to go to Espresso GT gloves. They're the benchmark. If it's cold and you have sensitive hands get those you're going to be covered so darn well. And then I throw back again, Perfetto jacket has to be the one that people start with because they can just size it to do the layering they need to do. Right? So that's the starting point. Right? The starting point generally is not going to be Alpha Doppio unless somebody's for sure dealing with quite cold and they're committed. So the Gateway is more a Perfetto I would say.
FRED TREMBLAY
Perfect. If you could invent a new Castelli product what would it be?
MATT SURCH
Okay so this one is for the team in Italy, they're hopefully listening. The one thing would be a jacket that is probably most similar to the new either the new Alpha Doppio or the Fly maybe. We have a there's a few new jackets in the line that I haven't yet been able to to ride in but they're looking phenomenal. So the key feature it's not about the choice of fabric and insulation it's actually about my phone. Okay so my phone is with me and I'm taking pictures and everything else while riding in winter but I have it in an external pocket of my jacket and it's freezing and it's killing the battery. So I have it in a protection thing but it's not that good. I want my phone to be inside my jacket but also protected from moisture. So it's kind of a basic thing. It's a place to put the phone on the inside where you can also somehow get it out and it's not totally saturated with your sweat. That would be ultra cool. Maybe it's a me thing, maybe it's not, but that would be cool. One more thing though, this is maybe a base layer where you can put a water reservoir and then your water is just elegantly attached to you inside your jacket. That would be pretty sweet because keeping water from freezing in winter is a big challenge. Like, right? And bottles, it's a gong show. So, you know, you got to do something and it could be nice to have that integrated into a base layer and you can use it with whatever jacket, you know, this kind of approach. I've been thinking about that for a couple years.
FRED TREMBLAY
Yeah, they just did that with the new gravel jersey where like the the water container is attached to the jersey. So on a base layer that's interesting. Any advice for cyclists looking to start riding in winter?
MATT SURCH
Probably just echoing some of the comments before, you know, don't be afraid to experiment. Don't compare yourself to other people probably looking at the specifics of your region. What do people wear in your region? Not on Instagram necessarily in a totally different region, but where you live or similar. And last one, what's next for you in the future? Well at this stage my main kind of, well the things that get me excited the most about riding are multi-day adventure type things. Some of that is from here where I live to Quebec, and then I do a trip each year I tend to do with my family to Europe, and then do some kind of multi-day thing increasingly in mountains. That's what gets me most excited because there's so much possibility there. So those kind of adventure riding things. In wintertime, the name of the game here is fat biking in my region, and it can be incredibly good. And we have an opportunity to go to the Laurentians for a winter fat bike event, 100 kilometers, which will probably be in March, which I did last year, TransFat, which is phenomenal. So that's kind of, you know, my focus is not on racing, although I'll dip into this and that, it's more being capable of doing whatever big riding adventure I want to do and have fun and enjoy it. And that means it's going to look different at different times. But the next big thing is probably going to be a couple of hundred kilometer trail situations on Fatbike this winter.
FRED TREMBLAY
Awesome, thank you Matt. You know the product so well, it's incredible.
Hello everyone, I'm Søren Jensen and this is the Castelli podcast, the show that takes you behind the scenes of the iconic brand that has revolutionized how pro riders dress and pushed the boundaries of cycling clothing performance. On today's episode, we are diving into the topic that is crucial for all of us, how to dress for riding through the cold winter month. I'm joined by Castelli's Canadian social media guru, Fred Tremblay, who will talk to Matt Surch, a well-known figure within the Canadian, Ottawa and Ontario cycling communities. As thousands of Canadians cycle in the summer and use bikes to commute to and from work, most of them put their bikes away either when the temperature drops below freezing or when snow begins to fall, which could happen anytime now. However, there are a growing number of people who keep the wheel spinning through the winter and enjoy being outside. As Matt points out, we can't change winter, but we can change our perspective of it. Or as the old saying goes, there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing. For those who doesn't know Matt, he is a guy who is not afraid of taking on new cycling adventures or challenges, whether it's mountain biking, downhill racing, road racing, cyclocross, or even grass roots, gravel events. His stories are packed with experiences and tips to keep you warm and energized while cycling in cold weather. So we hope you will enjoy this episode and please make sure to rate us and follow the show wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to Fred and Matt.
FRED TREMBLAY
First of all, thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and your story, Matt?
MATT SURCH
Sure, Fred. Thanks. Thanks for having me on the pod. Just high level, I'm 44. I'm from Ottawa in Ontario, which is just in the border of Quebec. I won't dig into the parallels with cycling things but there are some that are kind of fun. But on the bike sort of front I started riding mountain bikes more than 30 years ago and got into racing 30 years ago which was cross-country old school and and then into downhill in the late 90s, so that was a few years of full-on downhill racing in this part of North America. Went back to school kind of early 20s and lived in Montreal for five years and spent time sort of riding street mountain bike, skate parks, dirt jumps, that kind of stuff, because I didn't have a lot of time and then started my family actually when I was 26 and got into riding bikes with my daughter when she was one year old in the trailer and then into road racing which started with Spring Classics what's now called gravel. I raced my first Spring Classic race on a fixed gear bike with some other friends on fixed gear that was OG fixed gear stuff and then transition into local road racing things we used to have a big local road race that was amazing in Gatineau Park and built from there into stage racing kind of was developing a shop based club and racing team and that kind of stuff and I eventually transitioned then into cyclocross full-on and criterium racing and all during that time we were riding what became known as gravel, we just called it dirt road riding, and I was involved in organizing sort of grassroots gravel events in our region. And fat bikes came in more than 10 years ago I guess and then really have been blowing up in our region over the last three or four years and so now winter time I get to spend on fat bikes full-on and we'll get into the contrast against another format of riding a little later. So a lot of bikes over a lot of years.
FRED TREMBLAY
Yeah that's really cool. I actually know you from doing one of your uh I used to do a ride of the dam that you used to be part of back in the day so I know you from that time. So from knowing you on social media it's pretty evident that you're all year round, you ride through all kinds of conditions. How do you adapt to riding in the arch condition of our Canadian fall-winter weather here?
MATT SURCH
Yeah, I guess the adaptation has just been an iterative process going back a long view. I started riding in winter at 13 years old and that was because there was a guy who played hockey at my outdoor rink who came to the rink with his bike and his stick attached to his frame and I thought that's dope. I'm like that is what? I'm like that is cool. He's riding in the winter. That's dope. And so I figured well I can bust out my bike and ride. Let's see what it's like. And it was gnarly, right? Like there's snow and ice everywhere, but it was cool. And so it was a compliment to playing hockey. And that was my life and my passion at that phase of my life. And riding was just a completely, you know, free kind of thing to do, free form, compared to hockey. Hockey training, practice, games, pressure. Bike was just bike, just fun. So over the years of dressing for the bike, you know, like skiing, like snowboarding, I had the chance to learn, you know, what's working and not working as I'm riding that bike two hours, three hours as a teenager on the weekend for fun, you know, exploring around the city and realizing, okay, there's some things that don't work so well. So it was certainly a long, a long period of learning, transitioning into riding, commuting year round. That happened in my teens to school, to work at the bike shop and all around town. And it wasn't until later, especially it was kind of cyclocross was what really drove me to start thinking about my kit as vital to training in really bad weather because in mountain biking prior you would just dress for two three hours four hours whatever high intensity you could kind of manage but in cyclocross if you're going to go train after work in cold rain you have to feel comfortable, high intensity, low intensity to make it sustainable. So through the process of doing that kind of testing, trialing with cyclocross training and carrying over some of the mindset into winter, it became a little more experimental, a little bit more about tracking results of what I was doing so that I could adapt in a more targeted way instead of having a recollection of two months ago what did I wear two months ago so consistency became more the norm for me riding in the bad weather increasingly cold longer riding and so the consistency allowed me to be doing little tweaks and trying adaptations and I actually started taking notes so that I would have the ability to do small tweaks and build off of what was working and put aside what was not working. So I think it became that kind of experimental sort of mindset that allowed me to adapt sufficiently to a broad range of winter, which is pretty gnarly in our region. It goes well below minus 20 Celsius.
FRED TREMBLAY
And as far as like, what could you tell me about like, what are your favorite product for Castelli for winter riding right now? And what kind of advice can you give people about what they should wear with our brand?
MATT SURCH
Okay, so favorite products for me are maybe not going to be the same as what would be favorite for other people, because winter is such a big category, right? So here in my region, which is very much like your region in Quebec, we have a winter that becomes kind of easy to dress for at a certain point because it's not wet anymore. So it's dry cold, you know, if it's precipitating it's going to be snow, it's not going to be rain. Rain is really really hard to deal with so I empathize with people who live places where it's cold rain and fall and spring. So for us winter dry cold The name of the game is managing moisture right against wind protection so wind protection and generating heat and Storing moisture and clearing moisture. That's the whole equation. We have to try to manage Right. So the whole what I like tends to differ based on the kind of riding I'm doing. So I kind of bracket commuting in a city you can do often with kind of normal clothing and like really big boots, it depends how far you're gonna go. But if you're gonna ride longer than an hour it starts to get complicated because you generate heat that needs to go somewhere and that heat is also pushing out moisture right from all of your skin. So if I'm riding a high intensity one hour, two plus hours, five hours, I have to dress for a really crazy and difficult regulation problem. So if it's fat biking, it's hard but it's not the hardest because fat biking is generally a fairly high intensity that's fairly consistently high intensity on rolling terrain so I have to have a good moisture clearing from my jacket but I don't have to have an extreme wind protection because the speed doesn't go that high. So for that I like things like the Perfetto. The Perfetto jacket is easily my favorite for fat bike because it clears moisture incredibly well. It's shocking how well it can clear moisture, but it's also blocking all the wind I needed to block. In contrast, the Unlimited Puffy Jacket is an insulated jacket that is quite amazing for its warmth retention factor, but it gets overwhelmed by moisture clearing when it's really cold. So that's an item that I know the team has been working on other sort of fabric combinations for that high intensity kind of output. If I contrast fat bike which is high intensity without generally high speed against what we call snert riding so that's like a snow covered dirt road when you combine it you call we call it snert it's a funny term. Yeah it's new to me it's a new term to me I like it. So, snow riding can be very very fast it can be at 60 plus kilometers an hour on descents that's a real tough one for Kit and when I do that kind of riding I will lean to Alpha RoS 2 jacket that's prior this year that's been the warmest jacket Castelli has made and it uses a dual construction right where you have an inner insulation layer but you can open up an external shell right and you have two zippers so you have the internal you can open or close it so you can ventilate so that jacket is incredibly good for the nastiest gnarliest winter weather that I ever want to ride in and that's good down to for sure minus 20. It becomes more an issue if you're going to do Alpha RoS day, can your hands stay warm enough? Can your feet stay warm enough? Because those become very challenging without having to do some very special moves. So those are jackets you know like Perfetto and Perfetto is amazing for people riding in terrain where there's going to be more climbing and descending also, but maybe they don't need as extreme insulation. But you can also layer under the Perfetto, right? You have to size, maybe size up so you can do a little bit more layering, right?
FRED TREMBLAY
And if we talk about layering, what kind of layering would you do, depending on the weather, but like how much layering and what are your products that you like to layer with?
MATT SURCH
Mm-hmm, so once upon a time myself and others I rode with we would have many layers because we had to. Today though, it's a lot simpler I find because the solutions that we have with Castelli are so effective that I don't have to result to an elaborate layering approach. Instead I have to choose generally the right base layer and then I wear the external and it's done. So for example with the Perfetto I can wear a ProMesh base layer that is a t-shirt base layer. It's very thin. I can wear that in the fall down to depending on intensity easily 10 degrees Celsius, no problem, and be very comfortable. Or I can add a full sleeve base layer under that same jacket, right, and I can bump down to a colder bracket, easily go down to minus 10, minus 10 Celsius with a Perfetto and a Flanders Warm base layer. No problem. So that's a higher intensity output like fat biking that combination works really really well and just a hot tip here I put a camelback like a backpack small bladder system I put that under a Perfetto jacket inside against me so my water doesn't freeze and for that I use a Perfetto that's one size up than what I would wear in summertime. So that gives me more space to do it and works incredibly well. So for the Alpha you can do, it depends because it's insulated right, you can go anywhere from a short sleeve base layer to a medium weight full sleeve base layer, like again like a Flanders Warm is on the more extreme end of the spectrum. There's a Prosecco base layer that I've used a lot that's a little bit lighter, doesn't have the high neck, right. It really just depends on how humid it is outside, what's your effort going to be, but the nice thing about a jacket like Alpha RoS or the new would be Alpha Doppio, is it has a tunability because of that dual layer, so if you go a little bit over with your base layer, it's okay, you can vent without having to deal with with full air penetration right so generally I'm pairing one base layer with the external and that Alpha or the dope you know those designs they're effectively giving you the equivalent of wearing two base layers but with the tunability that you wouldn't have had with a shell and two actual base layers where you're actually you know actually locked in.
FRED TREMBLAY
You mentioned hands and feet getting cold. Do you have any tricks for that matter outside of like product?
MATT SURCH
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so the general principle is if your core is not sufficiently protected and insulated, where again moisture management is a big deal, right? Because if you're retaining moisture against your skin, when your intensity comes down, you chill. So it's name the game is venting out your moisture. So if your core is good and regulating well, right, you stand a fighting chance to have warm hands and warm feet. Because you're pushing warm blood down a cold arm, by the time it gets to a hand it's pretty chilled. You have to make sure that you have sufficient protection and insulation all along those extremities, your legs and your arms, to give your hands and your feet a chance. For your legs, in a way it's kind of similar. If you wear clothing that is too tight on your legs, what you do is you restrict the blood flow on your legs. And so if you wear a size of tights that is amazing fit perfect at the end of September, maybe you're at like your most trim body composition, and then fast forward in January, you're not at your most trim body composition. So sizing is really important and this is where we can sort of amplify the message that wearing really high-performance and tailored cycling clothing needs to be matched with careful sizing of that clothing. It's the same in summertime when you put on a pair of say Premio bibs or Aero 6.0 bibs, you actually have to place the fabric in such a way that the pad goes where it should go. So winter clothing isn't that sensitive in terms of placement per se, but it is sensitive in terms of sizing. So we have to know that what we're trying to accomplish is the right fit for the application. So that principle, it applies to our hands, which means when we choose gloves, don't go for the race fit or the ultra direct feeling that we're used to in summer. It's not going to be possible because gloves have laminates. They have layers. That's part of it. Don't try to compensate for that by going tighter. Tighter is only going to mean less air. You need a bit of airspace and you need to be able to move without pulling tight across knuckles, right? Stuff like that. With feet, same thing. Don't go tight with footwear for cold riding. Go bigger to the point that it feels raw. That's what it has to be. For winter use, we can have a shoe, it depends where you are, you can have a shoe that is great, you can wear a thin sock, and you can amplify that with a really good shoe cover and Castelli makes options that are surprisingly effective. So like the Estremo shoe cover is incredible and works really, really well over a typical summer road shoe.
FRED TREMBLAY
The good advice you just gave is everybody should size up.
MATT SURCH
Generally, you need to be sizing up.
FRED TREMBLAY
Yeah, so if you're in between two size you go one size, the upper size not the...
MATT SURCH
The Intenso UL is a really well built shoe cover that will fit over a shoe that has mountain bike tread, right? So a lot of people will use that kind of shoe for winter time which is very intelligent to do and so that will really amplify what you can do with an existing mountain bike shoe or even a mountain bike boot. And a last tip here, this is more biological than it is technological. If we picture people doing cross-country skiing and we look at what they wear, we might ask ourselves what the heck, how does this work? Because they're not wearing much, right? And their gloves are very light. So how come? Well they're flinging their hands when they're pulling. They're flinging their hands down, right? And what we learned here years ago, because we used to cross-country ski a lot, some of us, was that that flinging, that whipping of the hands downward, it forces blood into the ends of your fingers. So the hot tip is before you start riding, you can stop and get off your bike and whip your hands like crazy downwards, pushing, driving the blood into the ends of your fingers. I call it charging of the hands. Just imagine you're double pulling cross-country skiing. If you do this, I find your hands will be fine for the rest of your ride, even if it's hours. It's insane. So it's like an activation that can really pay off big time. It takes one or two minutes to do.
FRED TREMBLAY
That's really, really... I'm taking notes for myself here. So it's a lot of like trials and errors, I'd say, like probably for people that start winter riding as far as layering and what to wear and combinations. Do you remember like a specific time where you realized you had a perfect combination? The gear you were wearing was saving your ride or making it so much easier. The gear was definitely the key factor to you having a good time in the winter riding? MATT SURCH Yeah, I was thinking about this before and it's been a lot of years of winter riding so I couldn't remember the first time for sure but I can remember some more recent going back maybe five years. So I initially had some first experience with the Elemental light jacket which is not part of the lineup anymore but a very innovative jacket and the first time I rode in that jacket on snurf, so these dirt roads covered in snow, I was shocked by how it created this sort of equilibrium of body temperature. I have never experienced anything like that before, never. And what I found was, oh I can go to the cafe 40 kilometers from Ottawa during my ride and actually have a coffee and whatever and not worry that I'm going to freeze because I'm actually dry. So that was a kind of an epiphany because prior to that our norm was you will be wet and you'll manage that and you can't stop for any length of time. That was the norm with winter riding. So I think that was an important experience to sort of redefine what I thought was you know correct and possible and so it set a bar. From that point forward I've been trying different options for different uses and I have the requirement, I can say because I know it's real, that I can actually be dry. Then the more recent ones like Alpha, RoS 2, shockingly effective jacket when it's cold and even like wet snow rain. I was shocked on a ride where it didn't become miserable and it should have because the jacket just kept me dry and warm. I couldn't believe it and I was using the Espresso GT gloves which are crazy good. They're similar. They're using Cortex Infinium and these gloves are unparalleled in my cycling life. They are crazy for the range that you can use them and what I have now is sort of a rule I implemented this a few years ago. I have a cutoff point for winter riding. My cutoff is minus 15 Celsius so if it's colder than that I don't start. That's when I start 15 Celsius minus or warmer. The Espresso GT gloves work for me down to minus 15 so it means I'm good to go. If I want to win a ride, I have the solution that's going to go to my threshold. If it's cooler than that, I don't care. I don't need anything. I don't care. It's not fun because it's actually a problem that's very hard to solve for feet. Those are standout pieces. The Perfetto in general is a mind-blowing product, I find. It's just so versatile. Espresso GT gloves, crazy good. And then Perfetto gloves, I have to throw a shout out. Those are just like the jacket. They're so useful. So those are the ones that I tend to think are sort of game changers.
FRED TREMBLAY
Pretty good. Pretty good. Minus 15 is probably also around my threshold. Like I used to commute a lot in the winter as well and I always said that anything below minus 20 is not riding, it's surviving. It's like you're just trying to get to point A to point B as fast as possible.
MATT SURCH
Let me throw a little anecdote on this. I need to ride, my commute was just 3 kilometers. It was only 3 kilometers, a very straightforward ride, not far enough that you really get going, right? Your heart doesn't really beat. You don't need to. You can just ride moderate 3 kilometers. And so many days I rode to work and my hands were so cold, and this was with all kinds of different big nicks, they were so cold I had to swear, I was swearing in my head and out loud to try to get adrenaline going so that I could handle how much lane is there. This happened many times over the years. It was just a losing battle. The handlebars met old. It's damage control when it's minus 20 and colder. Having a threshold is okay. It's not a sale for somebody to say, no, that's too cold for me and draw a line. Then you work within that boundary to figure out what works for you to that boundary.
FRED TREMBLAY
Plus the bigger the gloves get the harder it is to shift the brake to do everything. Here's a question I'm gonna ask. Do you think winter cycling is made for everyone?
MATT SURCH
So, no, definitely not. Because, you know, no activity is for everybody, right? That's just like, that's just logic. But, it's probably something that a lot more folks could do and enjoy than they might think, right? I think it looks crazy and it looks really complicated, but the complication and the challenge, it sort of scales to the time. Fat biking, for example, it looks really fun and easy when people see it, right? They go, oh, I can do that. If a trail is groomed, it is easy. If it's not groomed, it's really hard. There's some nuance, right? But if we had a groomed trail and we sent out some people on rental bikes for one hour, they could wear ski clothing, right? And they'd be okay. They could wear big boots and ski clothing and big mitts and a helmet and goggles and they would be fine. And if they got sweaty, it would be okay because they wouldn't be that far away from anywhere. So they wouldn't have to have a bad experience just because they didn't really know how to dress for fat biking, right? There's like a big window for a margin there. But when you go beyond one hour, it becomes more complicated. And so that's where it's really phenomenal, in my view, to be able to communicate how I can, what works, based on my experience, as a shortcut. So if people are thinking, maybe I want to do it, they're going to look around and see, well, how do other people do it? And in conveying, well, how do I do it? I tend to try to share nuance, right, because the nuance of the context it matters. So that's where like the intensity matters and the duration matters, right? So if we can kind of get our heads around that, we have a chance of success. Success being not a bad experience. But I mean the general understanding has to be it's not that easy, especially as you want to be more performance oriented. It gets more and more complicated the more performance oriented you want to be. That's okay. So it's a learning process. So the best thing you can do is try to be consistent about doing it so you can iterate, you know, and maybe also be okay with experimenting. It's not normal for bike riders though, right? To say, oh, I'm gonna go out and ride some little circuit, something near my house in winter. And if I don't like my setup with my clothing, I'll come back home and I'll change it and then I'll go back out and try it. That's not a normal move that people would think of, but as an investment of time for maybe an afternoon, it would pay off massively, right? But not everybody has that approach. So that's okay. So the best we can do is try to communicate, you know, what's the sort of context where we would use that kind of product, right? Which products are a little more versatile and give you more flexibility as a rider. Things like Alpha Doppio, Alpha RoS 2, right? Those kinds of things. Espresso GT Glove, it breathes, you know? We can communicate those options, that's kind of the game plan, and hope that people can build off of success. So the last tip I would say on this front would be for people not to compare themselves to other people, but know that all of us who do winter cycling and are successful at it, we can say, we also sometimes have rough experiences. But just know that success with this stuff and being really adept, it doesn't happen overnight. It takes a little while and that's okay. That's okay. That's part of the process. So maybe don't try to hurry into it and be pro, you know, right away.
FRED TREMBLAY
Starting by commuting and doing little things maybe first and then evolve into it, I'd say. You mentioned that snert does that it's learn. Would you think riding gravel hard pack snow on gravel in the winter is probably easier than riding road because you get less wet or because what once For once like the the cars are probably less You're less in the way, but like I'm just curious like it's probably it's a practicality thing or it's more comfortable for riding? What is it?
MATT SURCH
Yeah, you know, you're on the right track for sure, I think, in my experience. The snow that is hard packed by car traffic where they don't put salt down, they put down sand. So, sand, you know, sand with packing creates a surface that is generally quite good for riding on with cyclocross tires, the kind you would use for sand and for hard pack, not mud tires. So it's quite consistent, it's not for everybody, but there's some bike handling, yeah, but it is generally quite good and you don't have ice. So that's a big thing, on pavement you can get ice, on snert roads you would rarely ever have ice. So then when you're talking about you know dealing with cars and traffic, it's a de-risking to be on a surface that will rarely have ice. Right, so that's really good. Depends, some places have ice because you know, that's the environment's different and you use studded tires. So, like, the Snert will have a lower maximum speed generally because of the surface than pavement, yes. So I did tend to want to, you know, do more of the Snert riding away from so much traffic, more consistent surface, more elevation change, but not too much because we have a chance to keep doing some climbing and it's like a good temperature and it's fun. It's a bit fun, it should be, versus training. So it kind of ticked a lot of boxes I would say in our region, but in other places what's really interesting to experience firsthand, like Vermont, if you ride Snirt in Vermont, it's an extreme use case for kit because the climbs are much longer and so the descents are much longer and faster. So you need to have more like an alpine kit, which is more polarized. You have to have full venting on the way up and then full protection on the way down. It's very, very demanding. So, you know, whatever the case may be, paved in cold and maybe there's no ice, maybe it's above zero but cold, versus snert, the more rolling the terrain is versus mountainous, the easier it is to kind of regulate, but you also maybe want to shave your high intensity not to push it too far and be just kind of more steady, you know. So, yeah, I think it's a neat question to see how do you compare all the variables and how do you sort of apply your opportunity for riding. I much prefer to get off of the pavement in the middle of winter. Drivers don't really expect to see me there out of the city. You need a big shoulder. If you have that, you're okay, but if you don't, it can be very scary.
FRED TREMBLAY
I think where I live is pretty much in between Vermont, like as far as like roads. I live in an eastern township, so it's kind of in between where you're from and Vermont, as far as hills, so it's kind of a mix of both. And two quick questions about your bike setup. Do you ride full fenders? Do you ride, and do you ever ride studded, like, nail studded tires or?
MATT SURCH
Right, so kind of yes and no. When we used to ride north of Ottawa, Snert Roads, where we would drive 40 kilometers to a town and then ride about a three kilometer loop, that was before the pandemic, and for that it would not make sense to use fenders because actually the bikes did not have clearance enough so the snow would spray when it hits the fenders. It was a disaster. So during pandemic it became a different equation. We weren't driving places together, right? That remember when that was not a thing? And so I had to ride, I had to ride just do the ride by myself and for that reason I ended up setting up one of my bikes that has clearance with fenders and then I could use the fender with a mix of surface, pavement, wet, snert and I didn't have jamming and all that happening. And in that context I set a challenge for myself because it was the pandemic. I said well for winter solstice can I do a 200 kilometer ride and you know start when it's light and then get home when it's light. It's the shortest day day of the year and I did that two years in a row with full fender bike and I had to go fast. I had to go fast to get home before dark and so for that I had to wear kit that was actually pretty aero right so that's where I leaned on you know I used the Alpha RoS one year and I think I used Perfetto the other year and they were vital because they weren't flapping in the wind you know so sometimes these these situations we create for ourselves as a challenge incorporates a performance requirement that has nothing to do with bike racing, but it matters, right? Which is where I really start to have positive feelings about kit that is super effective.
FRED TREMBLAY
Pretty good. So how did you get in touch with Castelli? How did your relationship with Castelli start?
MATT SURCH
I was focusing racing in cyclocross at that time. That was my A game for each year and training mostly after work It wet all the time all the jackets at that time that were out on the market that I was aware of that were good and effective and breathable they were really expensive membrane jackets and We're talking, you know, shake dry these kinds of things very expensive and kind of fragile. So I was wondering, is there a solution for people doing a more rugged riding, right, that breathes well for high intensity and also protects the way we want? Is that a thing? And so I reached out to folks at Casselli, the team here in Canada, sort of asking about this thing, like, what do you have as a solution for that? I would like to test this and write something about this, because this is a sort of, I think something a lot of people were struggling with. In my club, a lot of people were saying, what even works? And so from that came the Elemental Light, which was not exactly the fit for the use case I was talking about. It became more of a use case winter, and it was an exciting product because it was very unique in its approach. And so instead of focusing on a solution for cyclocross, we got into this testing for this winter jacket, which opened a conversation that evolved into more, and then becoming an ambassador with Castelli, because I love talking about the product performance and the why and the how and iterating. It's just it's fun for me and it always has been. So this is how it started and ultimately became some opportunities here and there to be involved in some of the testing for prototype product, which is really fun for me, too, and really nerdy, right, and fine-ringed. And then conversations with the folks in Italy here and there and the folks your team in Canada around what what's coming and why how to understand you know where the products stack up within the ecosystem right the Castelli ecosystem and where things are going so all of this is a you know effectively passion project for me I've had experiences that were made it really clear to me that product that was well designed and engineered and fit for purpose can make such a big difference. You know, the difference between having a good day and a very, very, very bad day.
FRED TREMBLAY
Pretty cool. So just to end this, let's go with a couple of rapid-fire questions. What are your top three Castelli products?
MATT SURCH
Okay, so I'm going sort of generic Perfetto convertible jacket This thing is always one of the first things I tell people if you're traveling you bring that you're covered if it's Apocalyptic you're okay And then also you can take off the sleeves and ride that thing with no base layer up to and around 20 degrees Celsius It's wild. So the next one is the Perfetto gloves. I talked about them before. They're phenomenal. I don't know how you can make a better like range of gloves. You have the Max, you have the regular, the light. They're wild. So yes those essential kit. And then Premio bibs. The Premio bib I used for the first time this year, took them to Europe on a trip one month. I rode them as much as I could. I hand washed them all the time. They are the best bibs I've ever worn.
FRED TREMBLAY
You can't go back after those. Like, I'm on the same page. It's like, once you try these bibs, like you can't go to anything else.
MATT SURCH
They redefine, yeah, they redefine what a good bib is. And they're durable. I crashed on pavement in them and they were not affected. Literally, I crashed on pavement.
FRED TREMBLAY
Yeah, they're so comfortable on the legs. It's insane. And give me three key products for somebody that wants to start riding in colder conditions.
MATT SURCH
Okay, so I'm going to start with the lower leg. I would say depending where you are for some people the Nano Flex Pro Bibs that's just bib shorts they're really really versatile so if you're in a winter where it's only going to be it's never going to go below zero right and you it's usually going to be more like 12 like under 15, 12, 10, 8, around there Nano Flex Pro Bibs they're longer right they cover a lot of the knee itself and they're super comfortable so it's a thermal fabric we have the the best pad that Castelli builds with right so it's ideal for long days or short whatever you want and you can also add like warmers if you want to amp that up so for the milder winter that's the one for cold winter Sorpasso RoS bibs the bib tight are unreal. They are my top choice for cold because they are the most compliant and allow for the best blood flow with amazing protection and thermal regulation. So they're outstanding. For hands I'm going to go to Espresso GT gloves. They're the benchmark. If it's cold and you have sensitive hands get those you're going to be covered so darn well. And then I throw back again, Perfetto jacket has to be the one that people start with because they can just size it to do the layering they need to do. Right? So that's the starting point. Right? The starting point generally is not going to be Alpha Doppio unless somebody's for sure dealing with quite cold and they're committed. So the Gateway is more a Perfetto I would say.
FRED TREMBLAY
Perfect. If you could invent a new Castelli product what would it be?
MATT SURCH
Okay so this one is for the team in Italy, they're hopefully listening. The one thing would be a jacket that is probably most similar to the new either the new Alpha Doppio or the Fly maybe. We have a there's a few new jackets in the line that I haven't yet been able to to ride in but they're looking phenomenal. So the key feature it's not about the choice of fabric and insulation it's actually about my phone. Okay so my phone is with me and I'm taking pictures and everything else while riding in winter but I have it in an external pocket of my jacket and it's freezing and it's killing the battery. So I have it in a protection thing but it's not that good. I want my phone to be inside my jacket but also protected from moisture. So it's kind of a basic thing. It's a place to put the phone on the inside where you can also somehow get it out and it's not totally saturated with your sweat. That would be ultra cool. Maybe it's a me thing, maybe it's not, but that would be cool. One more thing though, this is maybe a base layer where you can put a water reservoir and then your water is just elegantly attached to you inside your jacket. That would be pretty sweet because keeping water from freezing in winter is a big challenge. Like, right? And bottles, it's a gong show. So, you know, you got to do something and it could be nice to have that integrated into a base layer and you can use it with whatever jacket, you know, this kind of approach. I've been thinking about that for a couple years.
FRED TREMBLAY
Yeah, they just did that with the new gravel jersey where like the the water container is attached to the jersey. So on a base layer that's interesting. Any advice for cyclists looking to start riding in winter?
MATT SURCH
Probably just echoing some of the comments before, you know, don't be afraid to experiment. Don't compare yourself to other people probably looking at the specifics of your region. What do people wear in your region? Not on Instagram necessarily in a totally different region, but where you live or similar. And last one, what's next for you in the future? Well at this stage my main kind of, well the things that get me excited the most about riding are multi-day adventure type things. Some of that is from here where I live to Quebec, and then I do a trip each year I tend to do with my family to Europe, and then do some kind of multi-day thing increasingly in mountains. That's what gets me most excited because there's so much possibility there. So those kind of adventure riding things. In wintertime, the name of the game here is fat biking in my region, and it can be incredibly good. And we have an opportunity to go to the Laurentians for a winter fat bike event, 100 kilometers, which will probably be in March, which I did last year, TransFat, which is phenomenal. So that's kind of, you know, my focus is not on racing, although I'll dip into this and that, it's more being capable of doing whatever big riding adventure I want to do and have fun and enjoy it. And that means it's going to look different at different times. But the next big thing is probably going to be a couple of hundred kilometer trail situations on Fatbike this winter.
FRED TREMBLAY
Awesome, thank you Matt. You know the product so well, it's incredible.
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