Roadie Virgin No More

Joined my first ever proper roadie group ride on Monday. Real, card-carrying roadies with matching bib shorts and jerseys and slogans written on their butts. None of us MTBers posing around on skinny tires this time. (Except me, of course.) Intimidating before the ride, as hordes of people arrived for the start, apparently having stepped directly out of catalogs and magazines. Someone said 30-plus in attendance. Almost ran away, but steeled myself for a thrashing. I already survive a variety of humiliations; what's one more? First conversational exchange I had started off with a guy pointing out that I had hay sticking out of my helmet. He didn't mention the dried mud on my beat-up shoes, but I'll bet he noticed it. Very interesting cultural experience. Fun. Easy at first, then harder near the end as the novelty of serious drafting effects wore off and folks started turning up the heat. At one point as I realized I was working awfully darn hard all of a sudden, I looked down - very quickly, so as not to cause a disaster - at the cyclometer. 31mph on the flats! Good thing I didn't take the big ring off the road bike, huh? I didn't get dropped, though. I would do it again. Maybe wear the leg and arm pads next time, just to see what people would say.

Passed By

Went out for a road ride today, in the unaccustomed sunshine and dry air, sporting my new Bates jersey. Within the first ten minutes, two different riders turned onto my route ahead of me. The first one emerged from a side street about fifty meters ahead, Even though I had fresh legs I was unable to catch him in the course of two miles, before he veered off in a different direction. “Just as well,” I thought to myself. “Stupid to burn yourself out right at the beginning, trying to keep up with a stronger rider.” At this same intersection a different rider happened to join me. We waved and exchanged a couple of words. Then he put away his bottle and settled down into his aero bars and rocketed away before I knew what was happening. We were on a long straight with good visibility, and within the first mile I think he was about a half mile ahead of me. Sheesh. After a while I resigned myself to my middle-aged-guy-with-a-desk-job level of fitness and successfully gave myself a pep-talk about how nice a day it was and how I would be fitter at the end of the ride than I had been at the beginning, and never mind what other riders could do. In fact, I was feeling pretty good at about the fifteen mile mark. I was averaging about 19mph, which is very solid for me. There was not much traffic, and the brilliant sun was uplifting after our recent month of near-continuous rain and gloom. That’s when my loop started turning from north-east to south-east to south and ultimately south-west. This, as it emerged, was the direction from which a stiff breeze was blowing relentlessly, with brief intervals of fierce gusts. “Well, I guess that pretty much explains my pace on the outbound leg,” I realized with an inward groan, as my speed slowed drastically. For the next hour and a half I labored head-down against the wind. It felt like I was trying to ride through soft sand. Finally, as I neared home, at about the thirty-five mile mark, two twenty-something guys caught up with me and offered some cheerful conversation. “How’s it going?” etc. I muttered something about how I had been doing better twenty miles earlier. I think they were on the verge of saying something like “feel like a lift, old man?” As they started pedaling away in earnest, I made a last valiant effort to hang on the second guy’s wheel, hoping to poach a pull for the last couple of miles. I managed it for maybe two or three tenths before I fell back, quads burning. To add insult to injury, I looked up at the receding rider and for the first time registered the big polar bear and the single word “Bowdoin” emblazoned on the back of his black-and-white jersey.

Drinking the 29er Kool-Aid

Trek / Gary Fisher had their demo trailer at my favorite local riding spot yesterday. I had my bike on the roof of my car, but the line at the trailer wasn’t too long, so I decided to dive in and try some other rides. Good decision, as I had a blast and learned some things.

Before I get to my notes, I just want to comment on why these kinds of events are worth attending, even if you’re not currently in the market for a new bike. The main thing is that you get to test your prejudices and assumptions about bikes against the reality of experience in harsh daylight on your own trails. Even if your leanings were once well-founded, both you and the state of the bike building art change with time, outmoding old conclusions. It doesn’t matter whether your experiences at the demo confirm or blow apart your preconceptions; either way you have gained valuable current knowledge. And if you don't have any preconceptions, then this is the perfect way to start forming some.

Here some of the things I learned about myself yesterday:

• I validated that smaller frames fit me better, no matter what the factory reps, the guys from the LBS, and the sizing charts may say.
• I validated that my body is too old and spoiled to enjoy riding a hardtail on my rocky, rooty local trails.
• I learned that it doesn’t matter how much state-of-the art long-travel suspension technology I have under me if the shocks aren’t set up exactly right for my weight and riding style.
• I learned that the 29er evangelists really have something to proselytize about. :-)

These are the bikes I tried:

• Fisher Roscoe all-mountain rig with 5.5” of travel
• Trek 69er single speed
• Fisher Hi-Fi Pro 4” full suspension 29er

I’ll get the morning's lone disappointment out of the way first. One of the Trek reps attempted to set the Roscoe's suspension up for me, but I think he hadn’t worked with this particular unit before and it seemed like he was having technical difficulties with the shock pump. Maybe there was something off about the shock itself. By the time I got out of the staging area, several people were already waiting for me to get started on a ride segment, so I did not take time to get out my own pump and re-adjust the sag and let some air out of the tires. That was my big mistake of the day. The first ten minutes or so were on smooth, fast singletrack, and I was all over the place trying to keep up with the guy in front of me. The first hurdle was that the bike was a size medium, which felt big to me, and I found I needed to make some fairly major adjustments in posture and cornering technique to keep the wheels on the dirt and my shoulders away from the tree trunks. Probably the somewhat more raked-out front end - compared to my own bike - did not help. None of this was really the bike’s fault, obviously; an all-mountain bike with a 17.5” frame is not going to ride like an XC bike with a 15” frame. On the other hand it’s possible to feel a certain connection with a new bike right off the bat, and I definitely was not feeling the love here.

Next we turned onto a tight, twisty loop with a much higher density of roots, small logs, etc. By this time I had adjusted enough to the geometry of the bike to be able to pick lines with more confidence, but here is where the suspension set up really made my life miserable. According to the o-rings on the shock shafts, I was getting 20 – 25% sag, which sounds not too far off the mark. But I was only using about half the travel on either end, and the travel I was getting was so harsh I might as well have been on a hardtail. (I played with the rebound, compression damping, and pro-pedal controls, but they are for fine-tuning, and there was nothing fine about this tune, so it made little difference.) This impression was driven home at every root by the racket of the chain against the stays. Yuck.

You’d think 2.4” tires would cover a multitude of sins, but no. The ride became a series of linked recoveries as the tires continued to lose traction on the rooty corners because of the lack of compliance in the suspension. And this on a bike whose claim to fame is a rear air shock engineered to provide a plush, linear, coil-like experience. So much for that!

I can hardly offer a valid opinion of the bike under the circumstances, but I think I can say with some confidence that it seemed a bit heavy and sluggish, even though the claimed weight is a respectable sub-30 lbs – only a pound or two more than my Turner Burner that has only a bit more than half the travel. I doubt that a perfect suspension setup would have fixed this. Probably the big tires were partly at fault.



Anything positive to say? Well, the Avid Elixir brakes worked well. And the bike was very nice to look at. From a distance.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

After the Roscoe, I took a short spin on a Trek 69er singlespeed. (A 69er has a 29” front wheel and a 26” back wheel.) I could tell right away that this bike would be really fun in the right hands on the right terrain. It was geared too high for my skinny-legged spinner blood, but it was light, handled nicely, and had a frame that felt compliant over minor trail chatter without being too flexy when standing up and mashing – which was pretty much all the time for me, given the gearing. (Full disclosure: a frame has to be pretty darn cheesy to seem unduly flexible to me, so if you're a clyde, find a writer that has a hundred pounds on me for a solid evaluation on this front.) If I lived in a place where the singletrack was mostly smooth, instead of littered with a network of thick roots and granite baby heads, I could definitely be sucked in by a bike like this. As it was, the going was just too rough for my taste in the chop. (I have riding acquaintances who ride all our local trails on bikes like this with enjoyment … but for the most part their backs and knees are 20 years younger than mine.)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Now for the surprise of the day. Out of the start gate in the morning I snagged a 16” Fisher Hi-Fi Pro 29er full suspension bike. I had not spent more than a few experimental minutes on a 29er before - never on one that really fit me and never on a suspension frame. Note to factory demo teams: bring more small bikes! Chris, from local Trek dealer Cyclemania, set up the rear shock spot-on the first time. (Way to go, Chris.) After an encouraging but rough first foray on the bike I stopped and dropped the front-end pressure significantly to match what I run in my own 100mm Fox air fork. This transformed the bike from promising to delivering serious fun... immediately.

After an hour and a half on the bike I can tell you that it’s true what they say: big wheels really smooth out the terrain. This pleased me - insert HUGE grin here - but didn’t surprise me, since many others have said as much. What surprised me was that I had so little trouble adjusting to the handling in tight quarters… especially in light of the received wisdom that it’s difficult to achieve good geometry on a small frame with the big wheels. If that wisdom was true at one time, obviously Fisher has solved many of the issues with this bike. We were riding a demanding trail with some very tight technical rocky switchbacks, heavily constrained by trees. I was behind Chris and a couple of other strong young riders. I was on a new bike but still almost managed to keep up with them. I was not thinking - most of the time - about having to adjust my technique. (Panting too hard, for one thing.) I honestly think that I have never ridden that trail more cleanly than I did yesterday. The moment that really sold me on the big wheel format was when I successfully crested a challenging low-speed move but found myself off line at the top and therefore facing a small but steep roller with an abrupt transition to flat at the bottom. I had made the exact same mistake just the day before on my 26 inch bike. That time I put on the brakes and bailed, afraid of stuffing it in the transition. This time I let it rip, somehow knowing that I would be okay… and I was. Yee ha!



Too bad it's so ... well, red.

Suspension performance was excellent front and rear - surprisingly similar to my regular bike, despite the dissimilar designs. I can’t help but wonder, though, what a 29er with 5” of suspension would be like. Are the geometry challenges too great? I have been thinking of moving from my previous-generation XC bike with 3.5” of travel to the emerging standard of 5”. If I could get that extra plushness and have the big wheels into the bargain, would that be nirvana? Am I just greedy?

Complaints: I did clip an awful lot of boulders with the pedals. Not sure whether this was due to a low bottom bracket or longer cranks, or what. I suspect the bottom bracket, because I also had trouble on one of bigger logs that I usually roll easily. This was not a deal-breaker, though, as I think you just get used to whatever your pedal height is and learn to adjust unthinkingly; it’s only an issue when you’re new to the bike.

I did have a little more slippage on the roots than I’m used to. I’m going to chalk that up to tires that may not have been the greatest for local conditions and that may have had too much air. (The tread pattern had that dry-dirt, west-coast look to it. If you've been riding in the Northeast for a while you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.) I know 29er tires have more total air volume for a given tire width, so you run them with lower pressure. But I’m not sure how much lower. Maybe I had them too firm. If you know your preferred pressure for a 26” tire, what is the rule of thumb for how much you reduce pressure on a 29” wheel?

The Avid Elixir brakes shuddered horribly on the back wheel. I did not experience this symptom on the Roscoe with the same brakes, so not sure what was behind this. The Bontrager saddle was made for someone else’s rear – or maybe the rear of another species - and some plastic pieces on its undercarriage snagged my lycra shorts repeatedly. Come on, Bontrager, take it for a test ride before you put it into production!

One doubt left in my mind about whether I’d really want to live with a 29er has to do with acceleration and climbing. The bike clambered okay up all of the pitches we hit, but they were all extremely short, and it did not feel as snappy getting back up to speed over the top as my 26er. I would want to spend some time on steeper and more extended climbs before committing to the format.

Finally, I did perceive more lateral flex in the rear end than on my Turner, but nothing that really distracted me. Not sure whether this came from the wheel or the frame or both. Later, messing with a different Hi-Fi 29er from a prior year, belonging to an acquaintance, we held the saddle and pushed gently sideways on the top of the rear wheel and did see what looked like significant pliability in the rear triangle. This points up some of the things that demoing bikes (or anything else) does NOT tell you about: durability, maintainability, and customer service. When taking this into consideration, I’m thinking that if I were to buy a 29er, I’d really want to look at something from a maker that has a strong track record for building really solid suspension frames.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Unfortunately I was unable to try one of the new Fuel EXs with the full-floater suspension design. Maybe next time.

Driving Home from the Ride

I am not a "car guy." I drive a five-year-old Subaru wagon with paint flaking off the rear quarter panels. There is no 1970 BMW 2002 hiding under a tarpaulin in my garage. Most of the time I'm a competent driver. Maybe I'm even an above average driver. Sometimes - when I have to drive in Boston, for example - I'm an assertive driver. But the act of driving a car is just not something that I think about a lot, or put energy into.


I have noticed something about myself many times now, though, on my way home from a ride. I've noticed it so often and so consistently that I'm convinced it's a real phenomenon. What I've noticed - especially after a ride when I've ridden well, and am not totally wrecked - is that my driving skills are WAY better than they normally are. Things seem to happen much more slowly. My reaction time is much faster and I see better. I drive faster than normal, but it seems like I have more control, not less. I believe I actually am in better control. (No, I do not drink after my rides. At least, not until I've gotten home, had the ritual glass of chocolate milk, and taken a shower.) In particular, my peripheral vision seems to be about double its normal width.

I draw the conclusion that the level of concentration and reactivity demanded of me when I'm riding singletrack at speed is way beyond anything I otherwise encounter in daily life. After I've been doing it for two hours, that level becomes a habit. When I get behind the wheel afterwards, the demands of driving are trivial by comparison.

With Bar Ends Upon Thars

A few years ago, when I first started riding a mountain bike, I had a sound but unremarkable stock hardtail. I put some inexpensive Nashbar bar ends on, because that's what a friend who knew more than I did at the time advised. I liked them. They provided a variety of hand positions that relieved fatigue. And they let me get a few inches farther forward on the steep climbs, which was very helpful.

Then as I started reading the bike press - Dirtrag, MBA, MTBR, MBR, and what have you - I learned that bar ends were not cool. They were especially not cool on riser bars (which I had) and for people who were not XC racers (which I wasn't). I learned that I didn't really need bar ends. They were a holdover, an anachronism, a vestige. Wider bars with rise and generous back sweep obviated the need for them. "Just keep your wrists down and you'll be good," was the lesson.

When I got my next bike, a huge leap up in sophistication, I did not get bar ends. I wanted to be one of the cool kids. I found I could get up the climbs without them, if not quite as happily. On long rides, though, I deeply missed the option of being able to rotate my hands ninety degrees, and the change of torso angle that those couple inches of extension provided.

After a couple more years of riding I had more confidence in my own skills and preferences. I decided I wanted to try bar ends again. My new bike had a fancy carbon bar. I learned pretty quickly that the manufacturer did not support using bar ends on their carbon bars. No reinforcements to resist the crushing force of the clamps or, potentially, their scoring edges. Crap.

After another year I bit the bullet and bought a new bar that would support bar ends, and new Braids Jr. ends. Wow. What a HUGE difference. I was SO much more comfortable on the bike. I was worried that I would start catching saplings with them, but as it has turned out that only happens about once a year. More often than not, the inward angle makes them act as a kind of shield for my knuckles, actually saving me some tree-related pain, rather than causing it. Since making this move I have never for a moment looked back. I am a much happier rider with my bar ends. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

- q

see also Dr. Seuss's The Sneetches.

Brilliant on Friday, Klutz on Sunday

I was riding really well on Friday evening. Just three of us. In the first half hour I cleaned two sections on which I average well under .500. I was floating over the bike, flowing with the terrain. On the last turny and undulating section I was drifting in the loam and the pine needles like a downhiller: chin and shoulder diving into the turns, head up, knee out, bike leaned way over, unconcerned about the skipping and skidding due to my excessive speed. I just knew that the knobbies would hook up and I would be good. And I was.

This morning, only 36 hours later, I again rode with two (different) friends. What happened to my Friday skills? It was like I hadn’t ridden in a year. Instead of friendly stars flying by excitingly at warp speed, the saplings were scary and hard and out for blood. I had to scrub all kinds of speed to keep them at bay. I went down twice in the first half hour because of stupid errors. The first time I braked hard for a sharp left that I was late for. Once around the turn, a small hole faced me immediately. Routine. But instead of letting go of the levers altogether and pushing the fork down into the hole so it could roll out nicely, I managed to grab some panicky front brake, forcing an instant graceless dismount. A few minutes later I came around a tight uphill corner with several greasy roots underfoot – a corner I’ve ridden a hundred times. I was feeling confident and strong. I leaned in hard – not just the bike but my whole body. Predictable result: The bike skated and I went down fast and hard on my hip.

Why does this happen?

Inadvertent Plagiarism

Yikes. I was looking at the latest issue of Mountain Bike Action at breakfast this morning and noticed a full page spread for Specialized, prominently featuring the title of this blog - A Singletrack Mind - as part of the ad copy. I feel really dumb now. I have to wonder if I had seen that before and subconsciously remembered it when trying to come up with a clever tag line. I DID have the presence of mind to Google the phrase before putting it up there, and came up with virtually no hits, which surprises me in light of the ad mentioned above. Oh well. Now taking suggestions for replacements.