Like King Arthur pulling his sword from the stone, I too have pulled this from my local bike shop; This is X-caliber (Jealous?--You should be. Don't hate it because it's beautiful). Due to my obsession with all things self-propelled and two-wheeled (except recumbents) and wanting to try something new, I decided to finally pull the trigger. Nothing could be more foreign.
Aptly dubbed a 29er, this thing has massive twenty-nine inch wheels (the standard bike is a twenty-sixer), freakish hydraulic breaks, and feels and sounds like a tank. It is everything a road bike isn't: huge, heavy, and dirty. What a road bike packs in simple elegance, the Gary Fisher X-Cal makes up for as a monstrosity. Rolling over and crushing everything in its path, 29ers leave everything in their wake--like standard MTBs (mountain bikes for short), me (X-cal proved a bit too much to handle and dumped me on several occasions during our first outing), and hopefully the competition (we shall see next week).
What else? This bike allows me to feel free in ways a road bike cannot. I actually feel limited when I'm on the road with it, but not off of it. With it, I can go almost anywhere yet despite this, and despite the lack of cars to contend with, it has its cruelties. Being so close to nature, you would think that you would have time to enjoy it. Not so. The trail requires almost constant attention and delivers almost constant battering. Where road cycling offers much time for introspection, mountain biking requires quick reaction times to avoid trees, holes, roots, and gnarly snakes. Differences aside, they are both fun. I think I could get used to this.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment