Spring finally broke through yesterday. After having more snow here in March then the entire months of November through February, it finally warmed up into a perfect day for riding. The rain had held off since the middle of the week and the wind and sun helped dry out the often muddy Peaks View Park trails.

I ended up riding by myself since all my buddies had other things they had to do. I stayed out on the trails for a good while and got a nice long ride in. I also had a good many crashes to. It’s amazing how the trails seem to get more technical and steeper the longer you ride. My legs started to get tired which means I started to get lazy which means I didn’t turn in time to miss that tree. I came out with a good many cuts and bruises and a nice big raspberry on my left arm. Mmmmmm felt good in the shower.

I also did my good deed for the week. A tree had fallen over the trail and was being propped up be some other trees and was sitting about chest high to me. So I got off the bike and grunted and sweated until I had pulled tree the rest of the way down and drug it off the trail. I like to think that I kept someone from flying around the corner and getting closelined and dieing. Go me.

For the ride yesterday I took out the Gary Fisher X-caliber. I have been riding it for awhile and am just now starting to get a good feel for it. Pretty quick I pulled the crappy Shimano M505 clipless pedals off and put on my Egg Beaters. Now Mike has been trying to ride with the M505 pedals for awhile now and is about to ditch them for the Candys. They may work a bit better in other parts of the country, but here in the sloppy south east, they get clogged with mud really quick which then makes them worse then riding with platforms. Mike said instead of writing a long drawn-out review on them we should just say “These things suck, don’t buy ‘em” and be done with it.

Other than the pedals though, the X-caliber has been performing great. The 29 inch tires make such a big difference in rolling over objects. I had heard about it and read about it, but you don’t really get the feel of it until you ride one. I’ve been riding it for awhile but yesterday was the first time I had the 29er on familiar ground at Peaks View park and in familiar conditions of warmth and lack of mud. So this was my first real test of riding it in familiar conditions and seeing its performance. The technical climbs and log crossings were all noticeably easier by having the greater wheel diameter.

Also something I really paid attention to was how the RockShox Reba SLs did. I have read a lot about the technology behind them but it doesn’t really make sense to me, and it doesn’t really matter. What matters to me is how they work. One of the features I was really interested in was the ability to adjust the travel on the forks while riding down the trail. There is a knob on the top of the forks on the right side that you push either direction based on how much travel you want at the time. In other words, you lock out the forks on a climb and open it back up on a descent.

Now before we ever got the X-caliber I asked a few people about this feature. I got varying degrees of response, mostly leaning to it not being all that great. One guy that I was talking to at Bikes Unlimited while he was figuring out the final specs on his three thousand dollar Santa Cruz Blur, said he had never used it on his previous bike. I have to say that I strongly disagree with these people. I love it! I could really feel it when I stood up to take a particular long, fast climb. When I took the climb without locking out the forks, I felt them bobbing underneath me which meant a good portion of my pedaling power was going into the shocks and not into the climb. So I went back and hit the same climb, this time with the forks locked out. The climb was so much easier, faster and smoother. Obviously, this kind of thing takes a knowledge of the trail you are riding on, but I started locking out the forks on all the big climbs I came up on and I could tell such a difference in my pedaling force going into the climb instead into the forks.

Well that was my ride yesterday. Beautiful day on my favorite trail. I am so ready for the summer to be here.