It made it to about 38 degrees today, which felt like heaven after so much cold weather. I managed to buy a very lightly used Surly Pugsley off of CL yesterday and got a chance to test ride that some more and take the Cross Check out for a spin as well. The Pugsley is fun to ride - for those of you that don't know this bike, it has HUGE tires. The bike was actually designed around the tires, which are 3.7 inches wide (a typical mountain bike might have 2 or 2.5 tires for comparison and a road bike tire is about an inche wide). The idea is that a large tire has more air volume and thus much less susceptible to pinch flats, so you can run it at a low pressure. This gives you a bigger footprint (and yes, some more rolling resistance) but you can float on soft snow, mud, sand, etc. much better. It is very stable and not nearly as ox-like as you would think by looking at the picture.
This is not my bike, but it's similar to mine. Because I am short, mine is a 16 inch frame, which exagerates the size of the wheels even more. It just looks so... wrong. There are all kinds on interesting design modifications that had to be made to the frame to accomodate the wheels and I am pretty impressed that Surly put that much effort into a bike. I'll post some more about the design mods once I get some picture of my actual bike so illustrate the modifications further.
This afternoon I ran to the Hub for a bottle cage. The wind was pretty gruesome and you just had put your head down and pedal, but is was so much more fun to be out and on a bike than stuck in the basement on a trainer.
Busy week coming up but looking forward to being in MPLS for the next week or so.
No comments:
Post a Comment