OtherGrant profile

Back when I pretended to race XC and endurance-y things, in ye olden NORBA days, we called ibuprofen "Masters' Candy."  Just shoveling that stuff after a race was the joke. And as I write this pushing 50, with ankles that need alone time to get their game together in the morning, I see what a snarky thing it was to say about someone on the (gasp!) north side of 30.

Just please point me to whatever cycling shoe works with my EEE Flintstone feet.

Gah....that bike is like Proust's Madeleine for me, too, and it's not even my bike. That was my era of top (for me anyway) speed and occasional podium placement....      Why not hook up with whatever Sterling Lorence equivalent you know locally and shoot a super classy portrait of the thing so you can really turn it into the art it is. Then let it go.

This is a good column. The "You think you're having fun on a bike. You could be having more."  vibe at the heart of most MTB journalism led to me to not read any of it for like....five years. Rip Van Winkled through the entire longer slacker posts be droppin' shift. I sure did enjoy riding my bike, though now I see that bike was long inadequate......

Seem like very fancy Stumpjumpers. Like the McLaren to the Stumpjumper Vette.

that's the stuff

Quite an arc of progress. The Panaracer Fire @ 2.1 used to be my paragon of performance. They broke predictably in flat corners and wired my brain for just the right twitch of countersteer. My now year old Big Dumb Bike, however, has gummy things which to my eye looked like downhill tires. Love 'em. Here's to this Golden Age of Traction.

I run a T9 Butcher as a front tire. My first experience with something so gummy. The grip is pretty phenomenal. It's a lot of loose, quartzy grit over clay here where there's a month in the Spring and another in fall where the moisture makes things just right. Even so, all the little instinctive counter steer moves for popping yourself back upright in a loose corner have most of the year have become kind of useless.

"Who ever said life is fair?" my Dad would say.

I'm in the deep South, so my riding is like yours minus any benefits of glaciation. In a fit of midlife crisis, I bought a modern full suspension trail bike last year. As long as things are chunky and I'm pedalling, it's great, but I do wonder what a wonder bike would look like if the big companies treated short up/short down with general jank all over as the normative "trail."