Two Wheel Blogs

Yesterday I took the opportunity to head over to the 'wood and roll the trails for 90 minutes or so. This ride marked the first time back on the mtb following my shoulder separating crash in January. I decided to take the Niner s/s (which was also the bike I crashed on) so the ride had some significance in my return to the dirt.

Surprisingly, the trails were in perfect shape with little to no evidence of the rains from earlier in the week. I decided to climb Love trail and descend Rollercoaster to Grotpeter. This is by far one of the purest s/s trail routes you'll ever find. You can literally put geared bikers into the red zone on the way up the climb, but the payback comes when the trail points downward, as you'll run out of gear trying to hold a geared wheel. After my descent, I ran over to Justin's Trail and halfway up ran into John Peiffer. Since he was heading down and I hadn't seen him in a while, I turned around and joined him. We rolled the creek loop and decided to climb G'peter to RC and descend the Ranger cut-off. When then climbed Love and hit RC again and took the connector over to Justin's.

All in all, a very solid ride for me and one where I could feel a lot of my strength training paying off. For one, I've swapped my 32T front chainring to a 34T. In the back I'm still running the 20T, but will be swapping that for a 19T for the next run. I climbed everything either seated or standing and never felt overly challenged anywhere. In the back, I'm running a WTB Nanoraptor that generally hooks up just about any trail.

John is looking really fit right now and since he was on his Niner Jet9, it was really tough holding his wheel when the trails flattened out or pointed downward (my Niner One9 is fully rigid, too). Regardless, had I been on my Spider 29er, I think I would have had problems keeping up with John.

It was nice to get back off-road and have such a strong feeling on the bike. The only downside is that riding the s/s required a lot of pulling on my shoulder's AC joint. In the end, my shoulder was pretty sore but it was a good pain to deal with.