Cy Writes....

I decided earlier in the week last week to do a Big Dumb Ride. Further than I have ridden a mountain bike for a looooooong time. After doing the closing 90ish km of the Peak200 in 2020 I have been wanting to tick off the tougher northern loop. This route wasn't exactly that, but close. I tweaked the start so I could ride from home, and ended up with a little over 80km and around 1650m vertical according to the nav app.

I was a bit scared about whether I could do it and nearly cancelled the day before. Literally zero prep, just decided to go. I figured the dry weather and long days meant the trails wouldn't be against us. Sometimes you need to push the old comfort zone a little.

We rolled out from mine at 8am with no idea of how long it would take, except that it would be most of the day. Given about half of this ride is on trails I already know, I was pretty nervous!

The great thing about Big Dumb Rides is that you spend hours pedalling and you get some time and space to think about all sorts of things.

Some things I thought about on Saturday:

Take a friend: Mark is a way stronger rider than me and was immediately up for it. Having someone to chat to and consult with on nav disasters (we got fully Komooted* at one point) makes the whole thing go nicer.

*Komooted is when your nav software tells you to go a certain way and it's a push/completely unused in years/impassable/a bear pit/a peat bog [delete as appropriate]

Party pace is the right pace: Particularly at the start, go super steady. If your legs are hurting a little on the climbs, shift down, spin, go slow. If you have a few years riding experience, a ride like this is totally doable if you keep out of the red when you need to make efforts.

Ride an Appropriate Bike: Given the Peak200 sells itself as a gravel ride, that is nonsense. This is proper rocky, technical, physical mountain biking for about 50% of the ride. It would be miserable/unrideable on a gravel bike. Baybutt did it on a Cascade, but that is about as drop bar as I would consider for this route.

I borrowed the Solaris C4 size demo bike, and tweaked it to fit with my own stem, pedals, grips and saddle (I usually ride a C5 size mountain bike, but we don't have one on the fleet). Mark was on a lightweight hardtail.

My main mountain bike is a Jeht at the moment, and haven't ridden a hardtail for any amount of time for a fair while. Mark also mostly rides an enduro full sus, but we both had a fantastic time. We were both concerned about Cut Gate descent (a notoriously rocky descent - watch between 4 and 8 minutes here) and having to manage that, in exchange for the light weight and rolling speed of the bikes that worked everywhere else.

As it turned out they were mega on Cut Gate, we really didn't need to hold back (for the hardtail element at least - see next section). They were light and responsive for trialsy climbing sections, whizzed along old railway trails, winched up steep road climbs. We discussed it at length on the ride, and there was not a single moment where we were on the wrong bike. The bandwidth and capability of a modern XC hardtail is as breathtaking as it is brilliant.

WTF Is It With Stiff Handlebars?!!! You know how I said I hadn't ridden a hardtail for ages, and this was serious mountain bike terrain for a good proportion of the ride? Well, thanks to the Solaris being a beautifully smooth riding beast, my legs, feet and back are completely fine after the ride. You know what isn't fine? My hands! The Solaris demo bike has lightweight carbon bars on it as part of the Platinum build spec, and they beat my hands to death! I had to stop on Cut Gate not to fix a puncture or rest my feet, but to shake out my incredibly sore hands. And it only got worse on anything even remotely bumpy.

I'm not calling out particular brands, because at least these were sensible 31.8mm clamp. I had to take a different brand's 35mm clamp, 50mm rise aluminium bars off my Rocket last year because they made my wrists feel like the suspension was broken.

It saved maybe 100 grams putting carbon bars on the bike, yet it made it so uncomfortable to ride for any kind of distance on rough ground. It's mad! As cyclists we are almost pathologically bothered about the weight of our bike, because the whole industry tells us "Lighter Is Better". And whilst I'm not an advocate for pointlessly heavy bikes either, if you ever wanted a more obvious example of why the compliance of steel is worth carrying a few hundred grams extra weight in the frame, it's this experience. Sure a super stiff carbon frame might save a few watts in a lab, but if you can't stand to ride it on rough ground it's pretty dumb!

I'm so incensed and curious about this I am putting the prototype Cotic steel handlebars on the bike this week and going for a ride to see how big a difference it makes. Seriously, you need to consider this kind of thing. It might have saved me some tiny amount of watts carrying a lighter bar up those hills, but I literally had to stop for 30 seconds on the main descent because I couldn't hold the bars anymore, and was regularly shaking out the rest of the ride.

Take all the food and eat constantly: I learned this from the nutrition episode on Downtime Podcast in January. That framebag is almost entirely full of jam sandwiches and apples. Proper food with high sugar and carb content. Worked a treat. Don't wait to get hungry, just eat every 30 mins or so.

Enjoy each part of the ride for what it is: The tech and rock of the early sections is what I love about mtb, but we still took moments to take in the view. Komoot landing us in the only wet peat left in the Peak, we still had to laugh and enjoy being in a part of the Peak we would never have seen (and will never see again!).

Later on through the Transpennine Trail over Woodhead, really easy going riding, but again, big views we don't often see, places we have never ridden through, but seen from afar. Stopping on the last climb multiple times to rest, but also to eat a lot of blackberries.

Take it all in. It's ace.

My biggest mountain bike ride for about 5 years. As we sat on the platform at New Mills Central waiting for the train home, eating very salty crisps and drinking cold fizzy drinks, it was a lovely, floaty, satisfied feeling. We didn't talk much now. We didn't need to. We had done it, the Big Dumb Ride. It felt good.

Cheers,

Cy
Founder and Director
Cotic Bikes - A Truly Independent Bike Company Since 2003