New sneakers, new stoppers

I guess I've been slacking on updating the blog, to my six followers, I apologize! 

I have been riding a mix of the road bike, RIP9 and the Fatboy pretty regularly. All good fun! We had a beautiful weekend to ride last weekend and I took full advantage doing 4 rides in 2 days. 

The tires on my road bike had dry rot on the sidewalls, they are 18 months old so I guess that's good life, though I really only had about 1500 miles on them, I would have expected more miles out of a pair of tires on the road. If this was my mountain bike I'd ride them until failure, or more evidence of impending failure. The road is a different animal though, I started to think about those sidewalls on every downhill - a tire failure at 50mph would be pretty dramatic, in a bad way. 

I figured I'd swap out the brake pads at the same time, wow glad I did, the old ones were really worn down. 

I got some new tires for the bike, they were $45 each, which doesn't seem so bad compared to the average cost of a mountain bike tire, but when you take that road tire out of the box and see how little it weighs, let's just say on a dollar/pound basis these things are expensive! I didn't take any pictures of the road bike tires, lets face it one slick tire looks an awful lot like any other one. 

I was really surprised I noticed a huge difference on a short ride yesterday, I expected to notice the brakes with much better stopping power. I was surprised how much of a difference the tires made, the bike is so much smoother. I wouldn't have thought one slick tire would feel different than another.

Speaking of expensive tires, they finally release the Specialized Ground Control tires for purchase on the Specialized website (and to dealers) - $160 per tire - yep PER TIRE! There must be some gold in the construction of that tire somewhere! I love those tires, but I thought for the summer season I don't really need 4.6" tires and considering how the rocks and stuff wear out tires I figured I'd be better off getting some cheaper tires for summer. I had been running On One Floaters on my old FB-4, so I went there again for the new bike. They now have some colored versions of these tires and they're even cheaper than the black tires. I wish they had red to match the rest of the accents on my bike, but orange will have to do. 

Winter is over!

I think I can safely say that winter has left the building. I suppose there's a chance we'll see a bit more snow before it really starts to warm up, but cold rides on frozen ground are done for the season. I feel like a psychic buying a fat bike this past fall, perhaps the best winter for riding that I can remember. I am certain that at least some of those rides would have been fine on a regular bike, but there were some that would have been impossible and most would not have been as much fun.

Specialized just released the tires that are on my fat bike for sale individually, tires are a consumable and you know you're going to have to buy new ones eventually. The tires on that bike are $160 a piece! They are great tires, but I could put four tires on my car for the price of two bike tires? Crazy. I ordered some cheaper (though still stupid expensive) tires for summer use. I figure riding in snow doesn't do much to wear down a tire, so if I only use these in winter they should last 2 or 3 seasons. The new ones I ordered are a bit narrower too, I don't need 4.6" of tire for summer riding anyway.

I took a ride on my Niner yesterday, it was great to get out and push a bit. I feel like I'm in pretty good shape, riding two hours at a pretty good pace did not seem hard at all, even after doing 30 miles on the road bike the day before.

So I guess its on to Spring time, warmer weather and all the great things that come with it.