CX on singletrack- followup

I wrote a year ago about riding my Soma Double Cross Disc everywhere, including "mountain bike" trails. While it was a fun experiment, it ended a few months ago. The DCD was a great bike for roads, easy trails, commuting, and gravel races, but it ceased to be sufficiently useful to me after a while.

This bike served to do all the things that I thought my mountain bike would do poorly- commute, roads, gravel, occasional single track. As it turns out, my Some Juice mountain bike does everything I need it to do, hence the DCD becoming redundant.

My current job requires a 20-mile commute each way, so by bike, it would add about 3 hours or more to my work day. While I commend the bike warriors who would make such a commitment to pedaling that much, it's not for me. My wife would be constantly worried about me in traffic, especially in the dark and there's no shower at work to wash off 90 minutes worth of sweat from the Texas sun. At this point in my life, commuting by bike to work is just not practical. Maybe someday things will be different and I will start riding to work again, but I'll get a commuter bike at that time.

Road riding is something I wish I could do sometimes, but I have found that riding a mountain bike on roads can be fun-er! I had signed up for a nighttime gravel race and intended to do it on my mountain bike. I have done several gravel races in the past and always did them on a CX bike (more on that in a minute) but decided that I would have more fun on a hardtail MTB this time around. The race ended up being cancelled due to heavy rains, so I ended up doing a mixed-surface, 4-hour ride in the pouring rain with a friend. We mashed just short of 50 miles and riding mountain bikes made us fearless to hop curbs, ride through the soggy grass, and smash through some ditches.

bar ends, frame bag, and DIY fenders all seemed necessary!

I rode the 62-mile Castell Grind  this spring on the DCD. I had a ton of fun crushing 100 kilometers of remote central Texas country roads. The weather was perfect, my recently-installed WTB Cross Boss tubeless tires performed wonderfully, and the course was challenging. I found that having skinny tires floated over the hard-packed parts of the roads swiftly, but this course, like most of the gravel courses I have ridden, has just enough soggy sand pits and stretches of washboard surfaces that it really took a lot out of me. It left me thinking "wouldn't this be more fun with a flat handlebar, balloon tires, and a squishy fork?" The answer is probably yes.

The only real hill on my 100K Castell Grind.

Singletrack where I live is pretty darn chunky. Even the flat "easy" sections are peppered with exposed rock and boulders that keep me on my toes. While riding the CX bike on singletrack was a fun new challenge, it was a bridge too far. I would frequently have to slow down so much to tackle the terrain that my front tire would catch the toe of my shoes, something that never happens on my mountain bike. Toe overlap was never a problem on my mountain bike, but ratcheting over and around rocks on my CX bike was disastrous for the tips of my shoes. As fun and fast as it could be, I realized that all of it would be a lot more fun on my mountain bike.

After all that consideration and looking at the deteriorating condition of my mountain bike, I concluded that I would rather have a few hundred bucks in my pocket to spend than a bike that doesn't offer the maximum number of grins per hour. A nice local gal bought my DCD and is commuting around town on it now. I hope she loves that bike as much as I did.

A good day to stick to the roads.

back from the real world!

I have not been sleeping well lately. Last night I woke up at 2 a.m., like most nights in the last few weeks, and could not shut off my brain. I was thinking about bicycles, of course. I spun in bed like a stuck pig in a blanket with a lot of ideas boiling in my head. "You should blog this stuff, bro," my conscious intoned. I considered the phrase "my conscious intoned" and decided to time-stamp that gem. 3:49 a.m. My eyes are burning under their lids, but still no asleep!

You can't will yourself to sleep. I find that if I am fixated on something, that persistent jerk in my head won't let go. (Who is that guy, anyway? Get out!) I finally got some sleep, but not before I outlined some objectives to write about to get this blog rolling again. Hopefully my findings will be of some help to other riders and mechanics.

To bring readers (all 4 of you) up to speed, I was working at an independent bike shop about this time last year. The general state of disarray of that shop was my inspiration for this blog. I combined my past experiences of what was good about past bike shops and juxtaposed it to all things that were wrong and unfixable with that shop and started writing.

I worked at that shop for one month and it was a letdown on several fronts. Providence smiled on me a few weeks in when someone from a newspaper company called me about a job. I had been working in bicycle shops for the past six years (minus a 6-month foray as an apprentice commercial electrician, which was a hoot!) after being laid off from a magazine gig at the beginning of the "great recession" in early 2009. I loved the bike shop jobs, but, as I have written, it's generally a low-paying career choice and I wanted my Journalism degree to count for something. For the past year, I have done some writing and proofreading for publications.

This is a trajectory for my career that makes sense, pays more (but not much), and gives me weekends off and enough time in the mornings to squeeze in a short bike ride. It's not as fun a wrenching on bikes, and I don't have ready access to deeply-discounted bike parts like I did, but it all comes out in the wash. Nitpicking newspaper pages is actually very satisfying to me.

I was not surprised to learn that, less than a year after I left my previous bike shop for the newspaper gig, that bike shop went out of business. It's sad to see another independent bicycle shop go, but I saw a lot of issues there that I knew would have that result. Those issued inspired me to write in the first place, so we have that. I hope everyone previously involved in that shop is doing well.

I have a few ideas in the hopper so stay tuned. Coming soon:

• review of the Soma Double Cross Disc and the limits of cyclocross bikes
• review of the Soma Juice I have been riding
• more retrogrouch ranting
• thought experiments (and actual ones, hopefully) in mountain bike fit and geometry