The inch has gotten massively into Mountain Biking, last year for his birthday he got a cheap department store Schwinn with some money he earned and gifts from family. At first I forgot who I was dealing with (a 12 year old) and tried to talk him into buying a better (used) bike. He had his heart set on the
Schwinn and I eventually realized I was being a colossal buzzkill and what was important was that he loved this bike. So I zipped it and shared in his revelry.
This year we've gone on three rides together so far. It is tough because the mm "hates mountain biking" and the single parent thing creates complications that I'll skip explaining.
I'm trying to set up playdates to keep her busy so the inch and I can go for rides. Today she spent the day with grandma so the inch and I were able to go to this place that he's been telling me about for two weeks, after he went there with a friend.
Again, being relatively obtuse, I didn't realize how much he was looking forward to sharing the experience with me, I thought he just wanted to go biking. Despite some near disasters; we had to repair his shocks and couldn't get them back together because the bastard bolt wouldn't catch the threads. Success after an hour at 7 pm; his front tire got destroyed when his bike fell off his mom's car and the rim was sorely tweaked. I ended up clamping it in my vice and bending it back into shapish shape. Trued it as best as I could; we went to the bike shop - a little too high end - they don't really carry 26" tires these days, but they could order them. "Well... we're heading out to a ride and we have no tire at all..." The dude at the shop was so awesome, he found a tire that they had mounted on a rim as a repair that the owner never picked up and just gave it to us.
So we made it to
the trails, me on my
1984 Ross Mount Rainier, and him on his
Schwinn Ranger. First of all, the trails blew my fucking mind. They were so well laid out and designed. It has been decades since I did any real mountain biking and the intermediate trails tested my reaction time and balance mostly. I also need to adjust to riding with glasses. I did not have them and realized that was a handicap.
When I rode there were no trails laid out like this, we just bushwhacked and made our own trails, following deer paths in the woods, hiking trails, dry river beds. (Old school technical) So this was a real treat to have somthing well groomed with a great mix of twists and turns, climbs and descents, rocks and trees and so on.
It was also about ten thousand degrees and eleventy five percent humidity. NO HEART ATTACK TODAY! W00T
But, in the bike shop I felt like Rip Van Winkle; I didn't even recognize the bikes as bikes. First, they are fucking HUGE. The tires are 27.5 and super bloated, the H Bars are about a yard wide, everything has disc brakes, there isn't a round tube anywhere in the shop, and everything has front shocks, and the choice is 'hard tail' or 'soft tail'.
I grilled the salesman for a half hour about the rationale behind all the changes. (We did not get into electronic shifting, I kept it at tube shape, H-Bars, disc brakes and the pros and cons of rear suspension.)
One thing I noticed about this trail system is that it was designed for today's bikes. There were a number of parts where a soft tail would have allowed me to bomb down the trail much faster (assuming I could react quickly enough) As it was I was able to negotiate it by not sitting down much and letting the bike move under me while I acted as the shocks. What we used to do with varying degrees of success.
I need to get up to speed with the world of bikes and I'm hoping Griff, you might be able to shed some light on the industry.
More specific questions will be forthcoming if you'd be willing to answer.
In the meantime, for budget reasons, I'm sticking with my vintage mountain bike.