Pick ’n’ Mix

Five items to pique your pedalling fancy

1 THE PROTEIN BALL CO

£17.99 (10 packets), theproteinballco.com

Marketing balls as food is a tough sell. There are difficulties preserving product shape, the headache of transport tessellation and that’s before you’ve tried to navigate the innuendos. But The Protein Ball Co has said bollocks to all that and gone ahead to create protein-packed, all-natural, super-tasty ball-shaped balls.

2 CASTELLI PERFETTO ROS GLOVES

£60, saddleback.co.uk

Sadly, no, that isn’t a button on the palm labelled CO2 that means you can put your finger on your valve and pump up your tyre. Instead it’s part of the ‘Castelli Damping System’, which again sadly isn’t an Italian way to stop bathroom mould, but a pressure pad to keep hands comfy. And comfy they’ll be, as the gloves use a weatherrepellent Gore-tex Infinium fabric that is fleece-lined and oh so snug.

3 NEATCLEATS CARABINER

£27.95, neatcleats.cc

Bathroom mirror suction cup windscreen wipers; umbrella handle cup holders; under-chair cat hammocks… every now and then humans invent something so good that even future alien archaeologists will be impressed.

And so it is with Neatcleats, a device onto which you clip your cycling shoes, with the other end clipping to anything you want. Oh, and just in case you were worried about weight, the carabiner is ENcertified to hold up to 2.4 tonnes.

4 MUC OFF PIM TUBELESS PROGRAM

From £12.99, muc-off.com

‘PIM’ stands for ‘Prepare Inflate Maintain’, which is both the precise strategy employed to cultivate Boris Johnson and Muc-off’s new range of tubeless niftery. The Puncture Plug Repair Kit (£12.99) and Road Inflator Kit (£24.99) do exactly what they say on the tin, plugging bigger holes in tubeless tyres and inflating them, while the BAM! (Bottled Air Magic, no less) simultaneously inflates and shoots latex into a tyre via the valve.

5 FRANK GREEN + RAPHA CUP

£20, rapha.cc

You can be certain of three things in life: death, other people’s deaths, and that Rapha will take a regular item related to cyclists and make their own version that’s just that little bit nicer. This time it’s the coffee keep cup, which here is double-wall insulated, leak proof, has a sprung button to press for imbibification and, nicest of all, is the precise diameter to fit in a bottle cage.