I don’t wear bike shorts.

About two weeks ago I decided it was time to get myself a new bike. Having left my (decidedly inferior) bike in Houghton when I left, I’ve been using my father’s old, poorly-maintained bike in the interim. Unfortunately for my bank account this proved to be completely untenable. An exhaustive list of the bike’s problems would be pointless, but it’s sufficient to say that the brakes, tires, shifters and derailleur all probably need to be replaced. The practical consequences of this? I couldn’t shift out of the middle gear on the main ring and only three of the seven gears on the rear ring were usable. Oh, and I was entirely unable to stop. So there’s that.

Anyway, I dropped by American Cycle and Fitness with my brother and walked out an hour later with a Trek 4300 Disc. It ended up being more than I wanted to spend by nearly a hundred dollars but I’m quite happy with my purchase. It’s significantly lighter than my old bike, which is great, but the real draw was the shifters. Looking around at other bikes, it seems that in the years since I bought my original bike shifting technology has gotten better, or cheaper, or both. These new shifters are basically a pair of triggers – pull one to shift up a gear, push the other to shift down a gear. The whole thing is very digital and takes a lot of the thought out of shifting on the fly. No worrying about getting halfway into a gear and jumping the chain, no worrying about over-shifting while climbing a hill, no accidental shifts when you nail a particularly difficult root or pothole.

Since buying the bike I’ve done two different trails, one at Lakeshore Park in Novi and another at Island Lake in Brighton. Both of them are highly technical trails, though I’d say that the Novi one is much more difficult in terms of obstacles. There are tons of logs, log piles and tight curves to deal with.

That isn’t to say that Island Lake is easy, at least not for me. In fact, when I did the trail this morning it was like a clinic in “things Norm can’t do.” The problem, when you come down to it, is sand; I am simply incapable of making tough climbs on sandy slopes. What’s worse, the heavy rains we got earlier in the week washed tons of sand onto the trail surface itself. The net result of this was no less than five wipeouts on my part, almost all of them on curves just after descents that were covered in inches of sand. As the morning wore on I got better about maintaining my balance and sticking to the extreme outside or inside of corners where the sand was shallowest, but the climbs never really got any better.

Nonetheless, I’m pretty excited about my new trail escapades. I’m not nearly fit enough to try doing them daily, at least not yet, but for now my goal is every other day. Hopefully within the next month or so I’ll see major improvements in stamina, trail confidence and general physical fitness. I wouldn’t mind losing a couple of pounds, either.