~ Temped by the Fruit ~

I find this article about a cyclist being cited for being hit by a car rather interesting. On the one hand, I didn't realize that if one rides a bike on the sidewalk, that one is responsible for a different set of rules than when one rides a bike on the road...I wonder if this means that there are a whole slew of pedestrian rules that I am not familiar with. And the implications... It seems that perhaps one should need to have a pedestrian license just to walk or ride a bike along a sidewalk. How do we determine competency to travel via sidewalk? For some reason, I thought the law was that if you are a driver in a vehicle and you crash into something, that you are responsible, regardless of whether that which you crashed into was operating based on the laws of the road or the laws of the sidewalk. Does this seem fucked up to anyone else?

In other news, this weekend I had the opportunity to experience the fruit of satan and have been tempted beyond the point of return. If anyone is agonizing about what to get me for my birthday, I must mention that a gift certificate to Josh's bike shop would come in handy, as I have decided that I am going to purchase for myself, to celebrate the anniversary of my birth in June, the Gary Fisher HiFi Deluxe full suspension mountain bike.

Here is the full scoop...

Currently and for the past two years (which comprises the totality of my mountain biking experience), I have been riding a Gary Fisher Tassajara, a wonderful hard tail mountain bike that I have grown very fond of. During the past two years of blogging about my mountain biking experiences (which I am sure are very entertaining), you may have failed to learn about some of the pain and discomfort that I have felt. This pain has tended to occur while I have ridden down particularly choppy, rocky, gravelly, and did I mention choppy?, steep downhills. If you have never ridden a bicycle down an extremely choppy downhill section of a trail, I don't know how to describe it in such a way that you would fully understand.

Imagine, if you will, riding a bike down a mountain. It's pretty steep, so there's a good angle that you perceive from your handlebars, to the ground that your wheels are touching, from the distance that you will reach in a nanosecond of time because you are traveling fast. Your butt is pulled behind the saddle so that your bicycle doesn't begin to perform summersaults down the mountain. Add to this, a trail that is similar to a washboard, with thick deep ruts that you best avoid getting your tires in, loose rocks that threaten to disrupt your traction, and all sorts of other obstacles that you should avoid if you want to remain in one piece. Now, during such a mountain biking experence, if you were me riding my Tassajara, your body would be jerking violently at each bump, rut, rock, and washboard drop off, jerking uncomfortably so that it sometimes sends you into something of a panic because it is unpleasant. What is more, this jerking sensation stimulates an intuitive response that you are invovled in something dangerous, regardless of how under control you actually are. This sensation of danger causes you to feel afraid of what you perceive to be impending doom.

My Tassajara has a front shock. And while the bicycle is my size, the front shock appears to not be for someone of my weight, as I have never received more than an inch of travel from it. Other people have gotten more travel from it, but even if I slam all of my weight down upon it, it gives no more than a single inch. Which is not much if you're going down a steep and choppy trail. In fact, I have often thought that it wouldn't be much different if I had no front shock. At the end of last year, after giving this a lot of thought, I decided that this year I would invest in a better front shock. I've spent a month or so looking into this and doing some price checking. For those of you who have never considered upgrading your shocks, it's pretty expensive...like almost $1,000 expensive. If you think that it seems slighly unreasonable to put a $1,000 shock on a $700 bike, you would probably understand my hesitation about this. At the same time, I feel that having better suspension would greatly improve my enjoyment of mountain biking. I feel that, during the past two years, I have engaged in mountain biking enough that I could be thought of as a "recreational mountain biker." I feel that, because of my vested interest and enjoyment in mountain biking, that it is conceivable that I will continue to mountain bike well into the future. Additionally, mountain biking, for me, isn't just an outdoor recreational activity that provides an outlet for exercise. It has become an incredible source of joy and enthusiasm, as well as a wonderful social opportunity. Thus, it seems reasonable that I would invest some money to maximize my enjoyment in mountain biking.

During this process of trying to decide about the front shock, I have consulted my main bicycle information resource at length. This resource, whose name is Josh, has provided me with all kinds of things to think about. What is more, he has done a good job at complicating this decision. As he is somewhat familiar with my finances, he has not been overtly trying to persuade me to do one thing over another. Which is irritating because I am left to make up my own decisions. At some point, he planted the seed into my mind that perhaps I should think about upgrading the entire bicycle to a nice full suspension one. For some time, I was resistant to this idea because I did not fully grasp the benefits of full suspension. Josh articulated that a good full suspension bike would come with a much better front shock and that most of the components would be high quality as well. Nevertheless, I remained a disbeliever in full suspension.

On Saturday, Josh and I went on a three hour mountain bike ride which we entitled 'Tour de Foothills.' We rode up Bogus Basin Road to Corrals, up and up and down and up to Upper 8th Street, down Trail 4, down Freeway, across the Military Reserve to Buck's Trail, up Rocky Canyon Road, up Three Bears, and down Central Ridge. By Josh's estimates, it was a 20 mile ride that was pretty intense, and a lot of fun.

For this ride, I had "borrowed" a Gary Fisher HiFi Deluxe from Josh's Bike Shop in order to test ride the full suspension. There are no words from the language of English that adequately convey how amazing and wonderful it was riding this full suspension bicycle. For one, there was no pain or discomfort during the steep choppy downhills. Because of the lack of jerking discomfort, my person did not perceive the situation as dangerous, and so I did not experience a single moment in which I was afraid of plummeting to my death. Because of both the lack of pain and fear, there was nothing getting in the way of my fully enjoying the downhill. This means that during the sections of downhills that I have never before experienced joy, that I found joy, happiness, and had a lot of fun. What is more, the handling of the bicycle was simply amazing. The shifting was perfection, the turning was heaven, and the bike enabled me to experience moments of mountain biking zen in which I mountain biked with no effort, it was so natural. Another notable mention was that the bike enabled me to ride terrain that has been much too extreme for me to ever ride successfully before. There is a section of Three Bears, for example, that is very very steep with huge rocky drop offs, and I have never been able to ride hardly any of it and have actually fallen on it a few times. With the HiFi, I made it almost all of the way to the bottom and was not afraid in the least, which is worth mentioning because I frequently feel like the biggest scardie pants and I become paralyzed over steepnesses and heights that don't seem to bother others. The fact that I enjoyed riding what used to make me shit myself is impressive.

In sum, because of the loss of pain and fear, coupled with the drastic increase in fun and joy, I feel that the time is ripe for me to purchase the Gary Fisher HiFi Deluxe. June is not only my birthday month, but it is also a month in which I should receive a raise, along with a few extra dollars for various things, so a perfect time to award myself with a fantastic birthday present. Some of you may feel that this is foolhardy and not the best use of my dollars, but I place joy and fun above financial responsibility and I am confident in my ability to come up with the money because my desire is so great. If I must, I will even get a second job.

Posted by jennifer at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)