New look.

Playing around with a new Blog face....the old one was limiting a few things...bear with me and try not to get nauseous while I mess with it.

Old Dogs, Old Tricks part II

Last night I flowed.  I was moving down the trail like water spilling around the rocks in a streambed...not resisting, not rushing, not stumbling.  Only a smooth and peaceful motion over the path of least resistance.

Then I woke up in bed.  Drat!

However, I did put part two of my 're-edu-ma-catin' of singletrack technique into play - Turn before you see the turn.  Yeah, I know, kinda Zen and I have no real fascination with Buddhism outside of the lines in subtitled Chinese movies or Po's dilemma in Kung Fu Panda.

The idea is this...once you see the demands that the next turn/corner in the trail requires of you, it may be too late to get smoothly onto the line you need.  So you usually use too much brakes and lose speed as you overcorrect your way through the turn.  Preventing this requires that you initiate the turn-in before you can clearly see where you are going.  Hard to do.

And, 29ers are a bit slower steering so they require even more initial turn-in then a typical 26er.  They reward with increased traction and better cornering grip, but you need to adjust a bit.  Miss this part of a 29er's personality and you end up going slower, not faster.

Now this is not hard to do if the course of the trail is open and visible.  You still need to 'pre-turn' depending on speed, etc, but at least you can see what you are committing to.  It gets hinky when you need to do it in tall spring grass on a tight trail or around an increasing radius, off camber trail that falls away to the downhill side with a cliff to the inside shoulder.  Man, that is an act of faith worthy of Joan of Arc.

But, I was getting it done and the result was a smoother, faster, easier ride down the trail.  Flow.  Flow is the holy grail of singletrack.

And I was better at that on last night's ride then the night before and that is a good thing, even if it was only truly beautiful in my dreams.

Hydration Pack Junkie

I have to admit it...I could be a hydration pack junkie.  Lately I have been testing a fair amount of the fancy little (and bigger) water sacks and if I add those to that the ones I have bought, well....I am overflowing with silnylon encased H2O.

Do I need any more packs?  No, not at all, yet I still find myself looking at the catalogues and picking out the next model.  Silly.  I can't help it, but look at it this way...it's waaayyy cheaper than meth and I get to keep my front teeth.

The search for the perfect pack drives some of that.  I wish I could design my own as none of the ones I have tried get it 100%, not that they are not good packs, they are.  It is just that I always think, "Well, if I only had this feature there or a pouch here, a nip-tuck-stitch, etc.

I am wearing a new model from Osprey, the Raptor 6.

Mine is a spiffier color, but this smallish pack has a lot of nicely thought out features and looks to be very well made.  I am enjoying wearing it and I will do a full review in time.  But then I think, "If only this was tweaked here and there..."  Sigh.  The junkie in me is not satisfied.

Maybe I should shop for investors and open up Granny's Packs.  Do it my way.  Or not.  Meanwhile, I will try and restrain myself and limit my pack habit to a dozen or two.  That outta do it.

So that is why they make custom frames?

It occurred to me as I drove home from Sea Otter - there is not one production SS frameset that meets my wants/needs/desires.  Not one.  Nuts!  I have been thinking of replacing the SS Jabberwocky with another steed.  I really like the Jabber and it is still a very good bike, but I have tasted some geometry in the recent SS' Rockhopper that I really liked.

I want steel.  I want a max of 17.5" chainstays.  I want a 25" - 25.25" top tube, I want it in a 20"-ish seat tube so the seat post is long and has room to flex under me, I want something other than the normal Paragon type sliders (uuuuuggllleeeee!!!), and I want it now.  Nothing off-the-rack gets there.

The Salsa El Mariachi, the new one, gets in the ball park but I need a 22" frame to get the TT in the 25" range and the CS length begins at 17.5" and gets longer from there.

The SIR 9 from Niner Bikes needs to be an XL as well, but they build with a lot of seat tube showing so that might be OK...more stand over.  Still, the EBB system they make is finicky and does not really play well with an internal BB set-up and the SIR is not the stiffest pedaling steel bike for a bigger guy.

Hmm.  Hello custom builder?  Like Burger King, they have it your way.  I see the appeal, but not the price tag reality.

But, just as I was giving up hope, an offer popped into the horizon that may get at least 90% there on my check-off list of gotta'-haves.  It is too soon to talk details yet, but if it happens, it will be interesting.  Meanwhile, I will ride the Jabber, deal with the compromises, and enjoy spring.