By Brett Ratner and Yasmeen Schuller

Thanks to an ever-growing and evolving bike industry, there truly are a mind-boggling array of products that we feel are worthy of praise. And since we here at The Chainlink have had the opportunity to test so many in recent months, we wound up needing to split our holiday gift guide up into three parts.

Last week, we published our Gift Guide for the Commuter, Urban Cyclist and Casual Rider. This week, we’re offering our picks for Road Cyclist. And (just in time for Black Friday), we’ll do a Gift Guide for Mountain Bikers and Adventure Cyclists. We were planning to do a women-specific gift guide, but reader comments from last week made us decide to simply combine men’s and women’s gear into the same guides. Women-specific items were added to last week's gift guide as well. 

Anyway, in putting together this week’s guide, we focused on stuff that we think will be fast, comfortable and functional whether you’re doing century rides, epic single-day gravel adventures, racing, training, and even commuting.

First Gift: LifeBeam Smart Helmet

Learn more about Chainlink product reviews (and FTC-related things).