On The Tin Donkey, Leslie Reissner likes to go into lots of detail about everything he writes. That’s good, especially when he’s writing about Global Ride DVDs. He now has a couple posts about our products that have illuminated them quite well. Thanks, Leslie.

Please, visit his blog and read what he says.

“Just wanted to let you know that the StrenDurance DVD arrived last week and last night I had a chance to watch it. Of all the DVDs I have gone through so far, this is one of the best. I thought the music was very good, and I think having a strength training program after the cooldown from the ride is very innovative and adds a great deal to the program.” - Leslie Reissner, Tin Donkey

The ever-popular Blog, Donald’s Daily Draft, reviewed our Hawaii series of DVDs. Visit his blog and take a look at the original post here.

He really enjoyed them as he cycled away in his garage, or what he calls his “man cave.” You could too!

“It’s easy to let your mind wander when you’re on a trainer staring at a wall or some TV show… but not with Global Ride. The first person perspective of climbing the cliff side roads of Maui or testing your endurance along the ocean roads below makes the ride entertaining.” - Donald Jones

Cycling Blog “The Soiled Chamois” reviewed the Hawaii series of Global Ride DVDs.

He said, “”I would recommend these DVDs to a cyclist who find themselves riding inside due to weather or schedule. I really dig the P.O.V.. and enjoyed it WAY more than any other spinning video I’ve tried.”

Please take a look at his original blog post.

The Global Ride cycling team does their weekly outdoor training route in preparation for the Giretto d’Italia - a Cycling Fusion LiveStrong fundraiser.

Global Ride, producers of virtual cycling training DVDs and main sponsors of Cycling Fusion’s Livestrong Fundraiser, Il Giretto d’Italia (The Little Giro), are giving heavily to support the Fundraiser and raise money for the cancer research foundation. The fundraiser will be taking everyday cyclists to Italy to ride the first five stages of the Giro d’Italia, only hours ahead of the real racers.
Global Ride is launching two campaigns to help drive donations to the Giretto. They are offering their entire boxed set of Hawaii virtual cycling DVDs, an $80.00 consumer value, for free to anyone who donates $100 or more to the fundraiser via rider sponsorship. Riders are sponsored by everyday folks wishing to support the event and give money to the Lance Armstrong Foundation, from pennies to several dollars per mile.

Second, Global Ride is donating 50% of the revenue from all their everyday DVD sales to the Giretto between now and May 14th, 2009. This includes all sales from their own website, www.globalride.net, and any other third party sites where their products are listed, such as www.cyclingdvds.com.

“Being the main sponsor for this event, we want to help create as much buzz and generate as much money as we can for Livestrong,” said Global Ride spokesperson Jeff Saporito. “The Giretto is a big deal for us and we’d love to see it become an annual event with more and more of a turnout each year.”

For more information about Il Giretto d’Italia, to become a rider at the event, or to make a donation, visit www.cyclingfusion.com.
For more information about Global Ride Productions, visit www.globalride.net.

Wow, we’ve been busy! Under the helm of our new side project, Cycling Fusion, we have put together a fundraiser for Livestrong. This year, at the Giro d’Italia, we are hosting “Il Giretto d’Italia,” or “The Little Giro.”

A group of strong intermediate to advanced everyday cyclists are traveling to Italy and riding the first 5 stages of the real Giro, just hours ahead of Lance Armstrong and the rest of the racers. It is a huge undertaking and gives the cyclists involved a chance to ride with the pros and raise money for a great cause.

Each rider is being sponsored by all sorts of regular folks, required to raise at least $1,000 each for LiveStrong. So far, this hasn’t been a problem for the riders as nearly 1/3 of the target $10,000 fundraising goal was reached in the first week of collecting donations. We encourage all of you to donate, or if you are brave enough, join us in Italy and ride along with us! We are still looking for riders, and the cutoff for applications is April 7th.

Please, go to Cycling Fusion and check out all that we have put together for the Giretto:

Here’s a bit of jargon, all official and ominous sounding, about our two new coaches that will be joining us for the Italy DVD series. We’re pretty excited to have them on board as they will provide a new dimension to our coaching crew:

Global Ride, producers of one of the leading virtual cycling training DVDs, will be expanding their international coaching appeal by adding cyclists from two new countries to their next series of virtual ride DVDs, filmed in the Dolomite region of Italy.

Representing Germany is Suhela Dighe, a British triathlon coach and indoor cycling instructor with years of training and coaching experience. She is also the co-owner (with multiple Ironman husband Rav Dighe) of Industrial Multisport, a coaching, marketing, e-commerce and product testing organization for the endurance sports scene.

From the UK is British triathlon coach and triathlete Fiona Moorehead-Lane, who holds many gold medals and accolades from triathlons around the world over the past decade.

The presence of these two qualified coaches mark the first time a German or UK native will be included as a coach on Global Ride DVDs, thus developing the international element Global Ride’s mission seeks to reflect.

Wasn’t that wonderful? It’s going to be even greater when you get to enjoy their coaching abilities in your own home or club in about a month. You’re thrilled to death - admit it.

Somehow I forgot to post this earlier! Ironman and double leg amputee Scott Rigsby recently visited our home Spinning facility here in Pittsburgh for a back-to-back Global Ride DVD spin amidst a full house of inspired indoor cyclists. It was quite a nice event, and Scott enjoyed cycling to our DVDs. We tried to put together a video of the classes, but you know… Spinners have a thing for exercising in near pitch-blackedness, especially when doing virtual cycling with a DVD. Thus, our footage looked more like a wacky-lit spelunking adventure than a room full of people on bikes.

A lot of people gained inspiration from seeing Scott Ride and hearing his stories about participating in the Hawaii Ironman. We did put out a press release about his visit, which you can read here to learn more about him and the responses we received from the club members, coaches and teachers that attended.

If you hang out on Facebook, we have a milieu of photos from the event available for you to peep at here on the Global Ride page. I’m the half dead guy in the brown t-shirt. If you don’t use Facebook, well… what are the chances of that, really?

Later.

Today, Global Ride has decided to respond to the wide world of pop culture and create a silly new video for release. Despite actually happening nearly six months ago, the hottest topic for the past few days has been actor Christian Bale’s freakout on Director of Photography Shane Hurlbut on the Terminator: Salvation set. During a tirade of nearly four minutes, Bale verbally flips on the DP for making himself visible while Bale attempted to act. If you are one of the few people left who haven’t heard the audio of Mr. Bale yelling his lungs out at the crew, find it here. (Warning: obviously, very non-safe for work)

The clip has become so popular that it has even been transformed into a few dance songs, most notably by RuPaul producer Revolucian. Listen to it here. (Warning: even more non-safe for work than the original audio)

What’s all this have to do with Global Ride? Nothing, really. However, we thought we’d put our efforts towards humor and see if we couldn’t come up with our own Global Ride-related video inspired by the flip out. And by George, we did. You can view it below, chuckle at it, and enjoy. (It’s even safe for work!)

Our next series, due to release before the end of this year’s offseason, was filmed in Italy. We are still hunting down someone to be our Italian cycling coach. The person can live anywhere as the audio can be recorded remotely - we can even send the equipment to record with. It is not a charity gig - you’d be paid - you wouldn’t be able to retire from it, but it wouldn’t be beans either. It wouldn’t require a huge time investment either.

The only requirements are that you demonstrate an Italian accent and speak good English, and are an active cyclist or cycling coach. Check out our website to see more info about our DVDs and see examples of what you’d be getting into - there are even audio samples of the coaches on the first series. Please mail me - jeff@globalride.net - if you are qualified and interested.

Thanks.