Vince convinced me to shut down the grinder for an hour and a half or so just after mid-day today. The sun was shining, the air felt like Fall, and who knows how many more days like this we’ll get. I had planned to borrow Amy’s bike the next time we went riding because it’s got disk brakes, so I’d at least have a shot at not killing myself hitting something technical or slippery under braking after riding through a puddle. But today Amy had her bike up in Whistler so she could chase rollerskiers and do the whole coaching thing.

So Vince took me down to Tantalus bike shop to rent (for a six-pack) the Kona Dawg they’ve got there for that purpose. I wheeled my bike into the shop and the guys whistled - “look at the wicked XC rig!”. “XC” seems to mean “uphill”, or maybe it means “weenie”. I’m not really sure, and I was back in the “mandex”. Then one of them asked if I was riding that thing in Squamish. “Trying”, I said.

The Dawg is a dog. It must weigh 32 or 33 lbs, and it sucks to pedal the thing uphill. But truth be told, after climbing for fifteen minutes up a forest service road, I didn’t really notice. It’s not like we were hurrying. And it’s got five inches of travel, front and rear. The position is ridiculously upright and the angles are really slack, so I felt plain silly for a while. The single-track descending started pretty tame, and I felt like I could have ridden my own bike through it faster. I was trying to move the bike with my body, the way I’m accustomed to doing, and this thing just wanted to ride its line. Once I figured out that my job was to sit on the thing and steer, and the bike was going to handle the terrain, it got a lot more fun. And then we hit pseudosuga (or something like that) and it got a LOT more fun. I was riding stuff I’d never have dreamed of riding, and it felt secure, and we were hauling ass.

So, I was kind of a rental-local for a day. Next time I ride I’ll be back on my wicked XC rig and beating myself senseless. For a mere $4000 I could be riding something in the 5″ range at about 27 lbs. So if you’re still reading this and you’re a skier, arrange to send me all your skis and all your friends’ skis and pay for really expensive grinds. I’ll give the skis some therapy sessions as well for an extra $50 per pair. I’m going to have some dept here pretty soon.