It’s been a while. And it’s the slow time of the year so let’s my put some words down.
I’ve been sick with a head cold for a week+ and its a slow recovery. My watch is telling me my recovery data score is definitely improving, but I think it’s going to be a while before I get back to where I was right before I got the cold. As is usual, I was feeling great on the bike in terms of aerobic fitness and to lose it is a little frustrating. But maybe I can take this frustration and use it to focus on making some small improvements in self help and diet to come back stronger.
Today I went for my first outdoor ride of 2025 and I felt like shit. The trails were really frost heev-ey so it took a little more power to move and there wasn’t much flowy fun happening because my momentum would get lost in the crunch.
(Look at all the drones)
On the ride, I kept running into the issue with my touchscreens (Garmin, phone, and watch) and gloves. They’re older gore winter gloves and work well for sub 30 degree days but they are useless when you want to swipe. I need suggestions on gloves that don’t suck at this.
I also recently upgraded my brakes to some 4 pot level g2 ultimates. I know they aren’t everyone’s favorite brakes, but for my use, they check the boxes of light, more powerful than 2 pot brakes, and they’re SRAM. Which I’ve become very proficient in installing internally, and bleeding. But my problem was I just installed them and needed to bed them in. I went to a hill on the road near the trail head, and went up and down a few times to bed them but they never stopped screeching. Maybe it was too cold to bed them in? I’ll try a few more downhills before I resort to more drastic attempts to quiet them.
Lastly, I was thinking of buying a new bike since it’s certainly a great time to do so. It’s hard to browse the internet and not be inundated with killer deals on leftover bikes. But the problem is selling my old bike for enough that I’m not dropping a ton on a new bike. And the more I think about it, the more I realize I don’t want to spend any money on a bike at the moment . So new bike day will be rescheduled for a later date, possibly in 2026. i ride my Epic Evo the most right now and regardless of what bike I go to, the improvements are so marginal that it just does not make any sense. I’l leave here with a picture of the bike and someone can try to convince me that a new bike would be any better…
(This site really kills the quality of the photo)