Battered Cyclist Syndrome

Last night I went mountain biking with Rightcoast at Borderland. No, I did not fix the Yo Eddy, we used two of his bikes instead. Our seat heights have always been about the same so we just put ATACS on both his Trek Fuel dualie and his IF Deluxe with a Reba and Thudbuster. Jeff's been bugging me to try the Fuel since he bought it, and I finally caved.

Having not been off road since the snapped fork incident seven months ago, what a better way to do it than to ride a foreign bike on twisty boneyard singletrack with an Expert racer ten times more skilled than me? Truth be told, along with having never ridden a carbon or titanium frame, I've never even ridden with a suspension fork before. Simple bikes man, just simple bikes.

My right knee has been making clicking noises the past few days. I think things got pretty tight and overused during my big week of training, and after Monday's massage some tissue loosened and some didn't, and the tracking got f'd up. That's my crackpot theory anyway. Nothing serious, but cringy creaky stuff. For treatment, I went with bashing it repeatedly on watermelon sized rocks, and on the handlebars of the Fuel. Good as new, and only bleeding in three places. Before even getting that far, I managed to try and take a two foot diameter tree down with my left shoulder, all while at a conversational pace. This left me with a raspberry the size of a grapefruit, and a non-functioning medial deltoid. So the ride was great.

We ended up doing almost 2.5 hours. Things were getting a bit dark at the end when we switched bikes. At this point JG realized I'd had the fork on lockout most of the ride. Whatever. Seemed plush to me. Not sure if I really liked it, but for an old dude the suspension surely saved the body. Much less of a workout for the arms and shoulders than riding the Yo through all this stuff. If I got it dialed in to my liking and took the time to get used to the steering, I'm sure I'd be faster. I'm not convinced that is a good thing. Since I don't race MTBs anymore, all a dualie might accomplish for me is some fatigue reduction (which really means less of a workout in the same amount of time, right?) and higher crash speeds. Frail and old as I am, not sure this is what I want. Disc brakes though, I liked them. It's nice to have that kind of braking power.

Let's see what this one gets for comments. The last post on equipment got the most in a long time, but it was still only eight commenters, myself included. I think blogger should default with a "number of commenters" line for each post in addition to the number of comments. Maybe I'll suggest that. Thanks for reading.