OR Updates 2
More cool stuff from the Outdoor Retailer show:
Custom Soles foot-beds made quite an impact for their first trip to the OR show. They had 7th place Primal Quest Adventure Race Team SOLE as well as the PQ race director in booth for a first time public viewing video presentation of the race. Team SOLE also visited the Wingnut Gear booth since they used the new modular pack with great success. Custom Soles also had trialist Ryan Leach riding the courtyard of the convention center. Ryan preformed that amazing scene in the Roam video where he rides a wheelie on a chain that is suspended in the air.
Marketing antics aside, Custom Sole foot-beds are a solid product. Runners have long understood the benefits of a quality foot-bed which can provide ankle and arch support. Custom Soles are heat modeled to fit each of your feet perfectly. I have been using the Slim version in my cycling shoes for a few months and have been very happy. Besides overall comfort, the Custom Soles offer cyclist a more stable platform to apply power to the pedals, and better weight distribution. If you foot-bed does not support your arch then all of your weight goes to your toes, which can cause & or exaggerate hot spot issues.
I even had them put some of the special edition Dean Karnazes footbeds in the shoes I was walking around the show in. If Dean can run 50 marathons in 50 days in these things surely I can handle the 10 miles or so I seemed to put in every day around the show. Actually, I was just finishing Dean’s book when I arrived at the show, so it seemed fitting.
For the gel users out there…The Gel-Bot. The Gel-Bot is another “why didn’t I think of that” idea from Venture Design Works. The Gel-Bot has a gel flask integrated into the bottle so depending on where the mouthpiece valve is situation you can have water, plain gel, or a combination of the two. I usually tape my gel pouches to the bottles, but this allows you to use the recyclable gel bottles (and no gel wrappers left on the trail), make the hand off a little more simple, plus it gives you more options in regard to how to ingest your gel. The Gel-Bot lids fit to Specialized bottles and everyone seems to own at least a couple of these. I’ve ordered a few of these for Namrita & I to test out.
Venture Design Works president, Anthony Pigliacampo, tells me there are some other really cool products due for release at Interbike as well, so stay tuned.
I liked the concept of the BigFoot Cargo Bag so much I bought one and had it shipped home for me. The one I bought holds a huge 37.3 cubic feet of stuff….racing, riding, camping stuff. This bag can be used as a foot print 
& to pack your stuff up in . It has ties downs to stow it on the roof too. I figure I can pack all of my race stuff in there and use the bag as the foot print in my pit tent and then when it’s all over just wrap it up and head home. Once there I can open it up and begin the cleaning process. I should have when I get home, so I’ll let you know how it works out.
Set up just down the row from the Wingnut booth was Photon-Light. They had all sorts of tiny, but incredibly bright LED lights. I picked up a pair of these 
in red to use a tail lights in races. In some 12/24 hour races the director will require a red tail light or reflector. These are usually bulky contraptions that require AA or AAA batteries that are always dead when we get to the races. This tiny little light weighs mere grams, but is much brighter than any other blinky light I’ve used in the past. They through in this hands free clip 
which is strong enough to stay put on the rails of my saddle on my mountain bike. The cool part is that they retail for $9.95 which is even cheaper than the bulky ones that bike shops usually carry.
There was a ton more stuff at the show that would have been cool to be able to show you, but I could busy doing so until next year’s show. I’ll get all the details together on the new Wingnut Gear HyperPerformance Modular Pack, the Hyper 2.5 and the Solar Tent because those are things I spent the most time checking out.
Thanks,
Eddie O