Ugh crazy work week and poor sleep kept me off the bike 4 days this week and then today I couldn’t quite muster the gumption to do an actual workout when I got on the bike. Gotta get myself doing some actual spicy riding sometime soon.
Tomorrow: road ride with a friend, I’ll try to get 30 min of intervals done early and then we’ll get a little climbing in. Sunday I’m torn between a short local not that appealing mtb ride with a friend vs a longer not local more appealing mtb ride with a group.
On the equipment front, finally after 4 years Mr H has buried my rear brake cable on the TT bike. It has been explained to me but I still don’t 100% understand why it was so difficult. My cockpit now looks totally hot though. It previously made me cringe.
And the second piece of equipment news is that my birthday is next week and I’m getting a dropper post for the mtb, it arrives Tuesday. I had one on the old mtb but it was a KLev that always seemed to need fixing. When I got the Spark, the light weight of the bike was such a revelation that I resisted adding a dropper to it. I’m also considering doing Rebecca’s Private Idaho (a hundred mile gravel ride next year) on the Spark. Since I won’t have the aero benefit of riding in the drops, I was wanting to keep the bike light. I was pulled in two directions, then saw my fitter last week who assured me that pro mtb-ers are huge weight weenies and pretty much all have droppers nowadays.
So tl/dr I’m getting a Rockshox Reverb AXS, which is an electronic wireless dropper. No cabling means I can take it off to put the Spark in a pure cross country or gravel config or leave it on for actual mountain biking. Swapping out seat posts will be a 3 min thing vs pulling the bike apart.
There was some hope it would arrive the shop today, but it didn’t which means I won’t have it until Tuesday. The unfortunate thing about that is I’ve committed to a 100 mile road ride next weekend (heaven help me, I’m in no shape to be doing that right now, thankfully my friend is fairly slow) so I won’t get a real mtb ride in on it before I head up to Mammoth for my Trek Dirt Series clinic Aug 2.
And along those lines, @
TMonk and @
Ttoc6 or anyone else who mountain bikes, I’ve reserved an enduro bike to demo but now I’m wondering do I just ride my own bike with the dropper and get some time in on that in the presence of the instructors? The enduro bike is I think maybe 10-12 pounds heavier than the Spark, and we’ll be riding at altitude which will make the whole thing more fatiguing. But I’ve never tried an enduro bike and this would be a great venue to demo one. I’m torn. The format is two days of instruction- morning skills and afternoon ride with instructors. There’s a lot of stopping and starting and talking though, it wasn’t physically grueling by any means when I went last year. I’m not sure I’ll even get the demo, I signed up for it pretty early but there’s only one 29er version in my size, so maybe it will be a moot point anyway. What say you? Demo the enduro or ride the Spark? The Spark is a very confidence-inspiring bike for me, so there’s that too.