Monday, 4 May 2009 14:14 At last, a decent freebie at the start of a race. And what an honour – to be one of the first athletes to wear the new X-BIONIC Spyker in race conditions! It's always the same procedure at registration: you open the race bag, take out your start number, sort out the useful items and dump the rest. What’s this? A gift voucher for over € 40 – could be interesting... I made my way to the nearby X-BIONIC Shop on the road to Torbole, next to the Pizzeria Villa Aranci (viale Rovereto, 25) and soon had the object of desire in my very own hands. The new X-BIONIC Spyker certainly look cool. You wear them on the calves, where the partial compression system reduces vibration, improving performance. In addition, as with all X-BIONIC products, they turn sweat into energy. Now, I’m really curious. The next day, it was still pretty chilly at the start of the race so I was I glad I was wearing the Spyker. In my experience, knee warmers get too hot at some point and taking them off during the race loses too much time. Things got straight down to business in what was the first race of the season and there was jostling for positions from early on. The ascent got tough following the 5km flat section. However, the compression function worked well and I arrived at the top (a good 1000m up) feeling relatively fresh. I’m not normally a fan of downhill sections, warm muscles tend to quickly cool through excessive sweating and end up feeling like lead. But this time it was completely different. My calves warmed up on the descent and sweat was stored and then slowly released for cooling purposes.Fantastic. Seeing as they provide such an advantage, I was a bit puzzled as to why more riders weren’t using the Spyker. Never mind, I can only recommend them!