It’s that time of the week for my weekly update but things around here have been kind of slow. My wife continues to mend from her surgery (a six to nine month full recovery time frame) and I got in a couple of rides. The weather played some weird games this week which caused me only to get two rides in. I was all set for a long ride on Saturday but mother nature wouldn’t cooperate. I got up at 7:00 AM, looked outside, and it was iffy at best. I pulled up the weather map on my computer to have a look and I wondered if I could slip a ride in anyway. As I’m sitting there I look out the window at the tree tops and they’re moving some. Looks like it would be a windy ride. After about five minutes I look out again and it’s raining. It looks like a light rain and I decide to try and wait it out. After about 30 minutes it’s still raining but the wind is really gusting. It turned around to rain on and off all day and then it rained all night last night. Needless to say, no riding was accomplished.

That brings me to today’s subject on bicycle contests and giveaways. I came across three this week with two on one site. Here’s a quick rundown of what they are.

At The Bicycle Tutor

Alex over at The Bicycle Tutor has got one contest and one giveaway going on. The contest is a Logo Design Contest where the winner can take home $100 cash. The deadline for entries is September 26, 2008 and contest details can be found here.

The second item Alex has going on is a giveaway each month thanks to the fine folks over at Genuine Innovations. They sent Alex six SecondWind Road Carbon Minis to give away. Alex will give away one a month for the next six months. Entering your name into the giveaway is simple. All you do is enter your email address here and click on the verification link that gets sent to the email address you entered. If you already receive email updates from Alex’s tutorial feed then your name is already entered. At the end of each month he’ll choose a winner at random.

On a side-note, if you’re not visiting The Bicycle Tutor or reading his feed then you are missing out on some great stuff. I’ve used several of his video tutorials to do maintenance on my bike.

At Ride-Strong

This giveaway has been going on for a while but I just got a reminder for it today. If you don’t know about it, Ride-Strong is giving away a new 2008 Colnago Carbon CLX road bike that retails for $5,500. How cool is that? Entering your name for this giveaway is easy. Just visit this link, Ride-Strong.com Colnago Carbon Bike Contest, and follow the directions to subscribe to the Ride-Strong RSS feed and newsletter. A winner will be randomly chosen when Ride-Strong reaches 1,500 RSS subscribers. At the link above you can also find information on how to increase your chances of winning.

I’ve entered both the Colnago Bicycle and CO2 inflator giveaways. I just don’t think I have the talent to enter in the logo design contest. Anyway, I could sure use that Colnago bike just as I’m sure many of you could too. I will tell you that I would subscribe to both The Bicycle Tutor and Ride-Strong even if they were running some contests. They’re both have great content on their sites. Good luck to anyone who enters.

Remember, Bike To Live.

Fat Cyclist Forever Tattoo

I discovered Fat Cyclist about a week ago and have really enjoyed reading some of the great stuff over there. Today Fatty announced a cool little contest where you enter to win some DZNuts Chamois Cream, a DZNuts tshirt, or a DZNuts flexfit cap. Also on the list of prizes is a box of Jelly Belly Sports Beans.

What do you have to do? Help design a tattoo for one of his friends named Kenny. If you can photoshop something that’s great. If not, just describe what you think might be a good bicycling tattoo.

The full list of prizes and rules is available in the post here.

My submission is to the right and was accompanied with the following text:

“There I was…rolling down the trail when I come across two dudes taking pictures of themselves in their form fitting hot pants. The guy pictured below had some weird lookin’ jailhouse tat that said, “Fat Cyclist Forever” written across a red heart decorated with roses. I’m guessing the flames represented burning desire for this Fat Cyclist dude. I don’t know who Fat Cyclist is. Maybe it was his Daddy in the big house. What really did it for me, though, was what he was yelling. He’s standing there trying to pull off his best Arnold impression yelling, “Take a picture of DZNuts!”

Realizing there were two of them and one of me, I quickly snapped this pic and took off before I became another tragic victim of tough love.”

There you have it. Good Luck!