pdlamb

I just went back and looked at the OP and noticed the bit about the fork with travel. Is it possible to lock out the suspension on this fork? You can lose a bit of power into making the front end go up and down. Maybe with some practice you'll smooth out your pedal stroke, but that would be something to try in the meantime.

jnb22019

Update:

Removed the cassette last night and put it back after looking around and at first it seemed like the issue had been resolved but after some time while I was indexing the gears the freehub started getting caught again.

Sadly I didn't have all the necessary tools to take it apart.

Nonetheless I rode the bike in to work today, the freehub getting caught was annoying but not much of a problem, unless I would start pedaling the moment it happens. The work around was to keep pedalling like a Fixie.

in retrospect I'm thinking the slack in the chain when the freehub gets caught could be dangerous.

jnb22019

It does have the option to lock the suspension and I always have it locked.

jnb22019

Thank you everyone for the comments, all are very informative and very true.

I'm really loving the bike commute, definitely much better than taking the subway every day.

I do think that my time won't change much even if I had a faster bike, too many traffic lights and stops but there definitely is an effect from "feeling" faster.