Originally Posted by
Chick
CW and all the rest, great posts, great info. Thank you very much. I used to ride every day, on my old Pro-Flex, even did a couple of centuries with 35# MTB tires! Then I traded up to a Felt F60 immediately followed by an elbow injury. Off the bike for 3 years. Now I want to re-enter the world of riding, but where I live now the roads have no shoulder, so kind of spooky for road work. And that laying over position is not very natural feeling for me. Thinking of trading back to a MTB, like a Jamis Durango and put hybrid tires on it. What say the wiser folks than I? Should I make the switch? Or should I keep the F60 and dodge the meth users around Mendocino County?
The great thing about a MTB is that you NEVER have to worry about what the road surface is going to throw at your on your ride, (well except for ICE), My wife and I have done what your thinking about, I've got a Jamis Trail-X 3.0 and the Mrs. a 1.0, for now were doing mostly multi-surface MUPS in and around Colorado Springs, CO. to get miles on before we try some of the area singletrack. We are thinking of switching out our full knobby's for a hybrid tire that has a street tread in the middle and a couple of lines of small knobby's on the outer edge. This will make the ride on concrete/asphalt smoother(maybe a tiny bit faster) but still allow us to have confidence on the "dirt/packed gravel" that makes up the other surface of many of our area rail-trails!
I had thought real seriously of us trading next year for Hybrid's like the Specialized Cross-Trail (Men), Maya (Women), that have the 700cX45 size tire with a semi-knobby tread. BUT, for the same price level, you get more upgrade equiptment on our Jamis MTB's so we will just end up having a different set of wheel's made up for "pure" Road Riding, when the funds are available and keep the MTB's. As stated it's NICE to have "no fear" weither we want to take a hard surface road/rail-trail/dirt road, that's the veristility of the MTB over a Road Bike, jmho. FYI, YMMV.