July is when cycling earns its reputation. The roads are hot, the racing is live at 7 a.m. on someone’s kitchen laptop, and the question everyone gets asked at the café stop — “did you watch the stage last night?” — is either the start of a good conversation or a very long silence.
Here’s what’s worth paying attention to this week.
The climb that changes the race
The high Alpine stages are the Tour’s annual reminder that raw power is not enough. What you’re watching when a rider survives an attack on a 12% gradient is not just fitness — it’s pacing intelligence built over a decade. The riders who blow up do so because they started the climb at the pace they wanted to hold, not the pace that was actually there.
This applies to your Sunday ride too. If you’ve ever gone out too hard and cooked yourself before the halfway turnaround, you know exactly what’s happening in miniature when a Tour contender cracks on the lower slopes. The data is different; the mistake is the same.
The kit trend worth noticing: louder than necessary
There’s a clear drift toward loud kit this season — oversized block prints, high-contrast colorways, and logos that don’t try to be subtle. Some of it is racing team identity. Some of it is the creeping influence of gravel aesthetics pushing back against the aero-everything minimalism of the previous decade.
What makes this interesting from a clothing standpoint: the loudest kits on the road tend to be worn by the most relaxed riders. Serious racing kit is still mostly white, team-branded, and aerodynamically invisible. The people in the eye-watering jerseys are often the ones stopping for a pastry at kilometer 45. This is not a criticism. They are correct.
Gravel and endurance cycling have pushed the idea that what you wear on the bike is an expression of your relationship with riding, not just a functional layer. That’s a shift worth tracking if you care about how cycling apparel evolves.
The base layer question in July
The counterintuitive one: even in July, a merino base layer on an early start is the right call.
Once the sun is fully up and you’re climbing, you’ll overheat regardless of what’s against your skin. But in the first 20–30 minutes of a cool morning start — especially if you’re descending anything in the first few kilometers — a thin merino base layer between your skin and your jersey makes the difference between “this is a good start” and “I wish I’d packed another layer.”
Merino’s real advantage isn’t warmth. It’s moisture management. It pulls sweat away without holding it against you in a cold way. On a mid-July morning that starts at 15°C and climbs to 26°C by the turnaround, it handles the transition without making you carry extra.
One piece of gear worth considering before August
If you ride on roads with any car traffic — especially solo or at early hours — the Garmin Varia radar is one of the few gadgets that genuinely changes how you ride rather than just adding data. It knows when a car is approaching from behind before you can hear it. The alert on your head unit is a quiet pulse; the light on the back signals the driver. Both things happen automatically.
For early-morning rides and any July training block that pushes into higher-traffic windows, it’s an easy recommendation.
Cycling Notes goes out weekly through the season. If you have a route, stage pick, or gear question worth including next week, you know where to find us.