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prendas new generation long fingered gloves

prendas long finger gloves

as i could readily tell from my late evening cycle to bowmore after an enjoyable, if damp excursion on the jura ferry last sunday, autumn has fallen. and even though it has felt like autumn here since the beginning of august, the piles of colourfully dead leaves at the roadside, joining reddish brown ferns is a bit of a giveaway. it may not have encapsulated your own part of the world, but unless you are preparing for summer in the southern hemisphere, autumn is on its way.

while autumn is a season for which i have a great deal of affection, its real problem is that it's not winter; it is, to place it in context, a transitional season, performing a similar function to that of spring. if we take summer and winter to be the two monster seasons when, if they perform true to character, we'll have extreme cold and extreme heat (these are relative terms and depend entirely on your place of ensconcement). spring slides us more or less easily from the depths of winter into the short sleeved months of early summer. autumn ignores completely the fact that summer has, once again, failed miserably to materialise and drags us all kicking and screaming into winter.

however, it's possible that we, as an earthbound race, can be divided into two separate camps: those who eagerly await any hint of summer and mourn its passing from september through to may. and those of us who rather enjoy, for whatever reason, the cooler, darker, colder and wetter months of autumn and winter. the big advantage that autumn has over winter are those superb colours on the trees; somewhat of a rarish occurrence over here, due to severe tree rationing.

this is sort of why many of our favourite appareliers (i just made that word up) populate their catalogues and websites with items that will shield us from the elements while we're out and about enjoying our seasons. prendas, rather timeously, are now proffering a pair of new generation long-fingered gloves to keep those digits warm while you smile from helmet to helmet. some of us are more desirous of such than others. brian smith likes to be the hard scotsman and ascribes to wearing no mitts whatsoever, though we only have his word for that. the mighty dave t, after a lifetime working mostly out of doors seems to spend at least a couple of months more than the rest of us still wearing short fingered mitts, while i, on the other hand (pun intended) leap at the first falling leave to wear long fingered gloves.

prendas long finger gloves

the arrival of the prendas new generation version was a moment greeted with open fingers. similar in concept to their summer mitts, there is a grippy padded surface covering the palm which not only bears the prendas lettering, but cleverly has their logo engineered into a repeating pattern: functional and corporate. the padding toes the fine line between too thick and too thin, by which it doesn't feel as if your personal mechanic has wound a second layer of bar tape overnight. nor does it feel as if you're holding an old pot handle. the thumb, forefinger and middlefinger continue with the grippy padding, ideal for the current crop of ergo/sti levers, and there's a terry towelling strip on the back of the thumb for autumnal nose wipes. cuff is elasticky stuff to keep the draught out.

now for some reason or other, i thought that these gloves were intended to be windproof, until it was pointed out by andy that that wasn't strictly true, and that they had made no such claim. i only found this out after the first extended ride; they seem plenty windproof to me. the gloves are cosy, very light and exceptionally well made, coming up a tad larger than the norm. i would usually wear medium size gloves, but my review pair were small size and fitted snugly without restricting the fingers.

prendas new generation long finger gloves can be had with a black or white back, in small to xl in both colours and all for a comforting £34.95 ($56)

i shall now face autumn with glee and warm fingers.

prendas ciclismo

twmp

posted wednesday 30 september 2009

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