…and I am incapacitated.
I took the bike up to Sals for its maiden voyage, and I managed to catch a tree with the left handlebar — the handlebars are much wider than the ones on my Turner, or any of my other bikes — on a downhill no less, just after the 3 B’s climb, and it dumped me at speed into the rocks. I landed on my right knee, hard enough to see stars, and to literally bounce across the trail and roll down the hill. It took me 10 minutes to even get up, I was convinced I’d broken something, and I had to walk most of the way home. I spent most of the afternoon and evening with ice on my knee, and I will be doing the same today.
Other than that it was an OK ride, not awesome but OK. The Santa Cruz rides quite differently than the Turner did, and there will be some things I will just have to get used to, and a few things I’ll need to do — suspension adjustments, seat height, possibly change the handlebar length (shorter) and the stem length (longer) — to dial in the ride. I would like for the bike to be a bit more responsive in turns, but that may come with time and those adjustments.
There are three pieces of new technology, new to me anyway, on this new bike: tubeless tires, an adjustable seatpost, and 1×11 gearing. The tires are probably an improvement, but one — the absence of flats — that I might not really notice, and the seatpost is a cool gimmick so far, but it’ll be a while before it’s really incorporated into my riding; the new gearing is a bit more problematic. I went from 17 effective gears on the Turner’s 3X9 to just 11 here, and it seems like I have less of a high end, and less of a low end, as well as a less fine-grained set of gear choices. This may be the hardest thing to get used to, but there is apparently no going back: triple chainrings, and even doubles, are being phased out on mountain bikes, this is a weight savings for what could be a bigger and heavier bike, and I think the Santa Cruz has a lower bottom bracket, so a smaller, single chainring helps with ground clearance.
Anyway, the bike seemed to perform well, especially on downhills, though the big crash wasn’t my only one yesterday, and though it seemed both twitchy (the short stem) and hard to turn (the long wheelbase) it did well enough at Sals. Unfortunately, it’ll be a while before I get to ride it again, and even worse, I’m going to have to bail on the Wilderness 101 this weekend.
That’s right, no W101. We saw Renee last night and I had to give her the bad news. I felt like such a disappointment, but I won’t be walking much, much less riding, in the next week, and even if I could ride, my knee could never handle 100 miles the way it feels now. Timing is everything.
