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.