the benefit of the trails

I used to be a roadie prick...

I admit it.

I thought road biking was the end all be all of the bicycling world.

I still am partial to the joy of flying down the road on my speed demon of a road bike, but I'm learning to appreciate some of what mountain biking has to offer and what it can offer my road biking.

That main gift that mountain biking gives back to the roadie is bike handling.

I first started to really learn how to handle my road bike after I bought a pair of rollers for winter training. If you're not familiar with rollers, they're devilish little devices sort of like a self powered 'bike treadmill'. You balance on the cylinders and pedal... centrifugal force wants to push you out to the left or right so you learn balancing skills very, VERY quickly lest you fly off your rollers and crash into a wall.

When I first got my trail bike (I'm hesitant to call it a mountain bike because while it's got knobby tires, they're not the kind that I'd dare take on an adventurous trail... but maybe that's a bonus for what I'm talking about here) I bought it because sometimes the easiest way to get around the springs is to hop onto the local trail system. I thought it would be nice to ride the trail that heads north towards my office in the morning instead of braving the beaten down utility path that followed I-25 or climb into the hills and come back down again.

For a while, everything was fine... it was a slight grade uphill that made me work the entire way to the office, but coming home was always a joy. Then, one day in checking my tire pressure I pumped my tires beyond where they were supposed to be. Being a roadie, I was used to inflating my bikes tires up to and beyond 100 psi. I don't remember what I pumped those trail tires to, but it was well beyond where they should have been. How was I to know that less rolling resistance sometimes really IS better.

That day I had my first 'handling' experience on a ride towards downtown. I hit a patch of loose gravel on the trail and all of a sudden my wheels were going in every direction but straight. Somehow, I was able to correct and compensate before wiping out and a new exercise was born... staying upright.

There have been other incidences since then... ruts that appear seemingly out of nowhere, snow patches and most recently (as of yesterday actually) mud. I'd had the mud experience before, but not with my trail bike and not for some time. My first major mud experience was on the 2002 Paul Bunyan double century ride... traversing several miles of sandy muddy under construction road with a wheel with broken spokes was not fun. I remember calling it a death march and that's what it felt like. Road tires on snow had the same slippery effect and effectively got me out of the winter riding business after my first experience with it. But I was surprised at how much like snow the mud was on my trail bike. Maybe it was that my tires were completely coated thus creating a skating layer between mud and rubber, but all of a sudden my bike was sliding through the mud like it had on loose gravel and ice.

I was a bit proud that I managed to not wipe out, but it did get me back to thinking that roadies could have something to learn from figuring out how to control what's underneath you. Road is too forgiving... there isn't generally very much you have to do to stay upright on your bike, but learning to navigate these sliding situations and getting comfortable not falling off when you're climbing a steep incline have made me a better roadie.

Am I going to permanently trade in my lovely Fuji Team? NOT ON YOUR LIFE. It's too sleek and fast to toss it out the window, but I can appreciate her more after putting away my steadfast but heavy and slow mountain bike. The mountain bike will never win any speed awards... she'll never win best in class for the performance that she does have. But, day in and day out when I do need her, she's a workhorse that gets me from point a to point b and I've learned things because of her... and she makes me appreciate everything else that much more.