Singletrack Staff Blog

OK, so all thoughts of going out and riding one of our test bikes this lunchtime dissolved in the rain. Instead I’ll make sure we get a few more brakes bolted onto bikes for the grouptest and that pesky slowie on the Merlin is fixed, so there’ll be no excuses for not riding over the weekend. I reckon if I organise enough people to turn up tomorrow, then I’m going to have to ride, whatever the weather. Fortunately it looks like it might be a little less grim over the weekend - fingers crossed.

Looks like I survived my first full week of being 40, nothing’s dropped off yet and things look like they’re going fine. Despite my best efforts, the weeks and weekends on the wallplanner are filling up with things to do and places to be. I’d better make sure I schedule in some fun and bike riding too…

Chipps and I are at IceBike, a trade show for distributors Madison, plenty of new things to see including some amazingly light and amazingly pricey carbon rims.
There’ll be a story of everything we’ve seen on the site when we escape from Milton Keynes.

After several years of doing various “Enduro” events (Mountain Mayhem, Dyfi Enduro, Selkirk Merida etc) I feel the need to return to the type of short, fast n’ furious XC racing I did “back in the day”. It should be interesting to see how the 30 year old Benji compares to the 20 year old Benji of the 90’s canti’s-and-bar-ends race scene of yore.

I’m sorting out my Klein Attitude for these duties. I need to find the “right” handlebar for it and sort it out properly with a decent tubeless tyre system (it has a Bontrager Tubeless wheelset already but I need to find the “right” tyres and sealant gunk).

I also need to find some races! Answers on a postcard please (or you could just leave a comment at the end of this blog posting :-))

I’m in the fortunate position that I get to ride a lot of bikes, most good, some great and very few that I don’t get along with. The really special ones though are the ones that keep me awake at night reliving the brief time we’ve had together and see me daydreaming of ‘that’ corner that I pinned like never before on ‘that’ bike. One of those bikes for me last year was the Giant Anthem. As well as being a lot of fun to ride it could happily go out and make it’s living as a race bike or be ridden all day every day. We liked it enough to give it a Singletrack Recommended seal and you, our esteemed readers, voted it Bike of the Year ‘07 in our recent Singletrack Reader’s Awards. So I think we’re in agreement that it’s a fantastic bike.
For those of you who haven’t come across the Anthem before here’s a quick run down…
It’s a short travel, 90mm, full suspension bike available in aluminium and carbon flavours that weighs very little and loves to be screamed round race tracks or through twisty singletrack. Think that sums it up quite well.


When I asked Giant if I could get hold of an Anthem frame for my long term test bike I was pretty pleased when they sent me the Anthem Advanced. I say pretty pleased, I was over the moon. The Advanced is the carbon version of the Anthem, and it looks something like this:

Pretty, huh?


I’m still working on what to kit it out with, but so far I’ve settled on some Ritchey Carbon Low Rizer WCS bars and Ritchey Carbon WCS seatpost. Carbon shiny and light as well.

I’ll be documenting the build up here on the blog and there’ll more about our long termers in the mag. It’ll be interesting to see if my experiences of the Anthem were just a sweet holiday romance or will become an enduring love. Either way, I can’t wait to ride it.

The awards, as you’ll see from the front page of Singletrack, were great fun and I reckon everyone had a good time. It was good to see a good turnout and some truly well deserved winners picking up their awards. The celebrations went on late into the night… Not so good for those of us that had to get to Birmingham Airport first thing on Sunday morning…

I’m on holiday in the Vercors in France this week. I’ve been downhill skiing, which I’m pretty rubbish at, and cross country skiing today, which I’m truly terrible at… The snow and the scenery is great though, as is the chance to sleep in late. I’ll be back on Monday, energised and ready to ride bikes. Yay!

hi from table 1 at the awRds bash.

We are less than an hour away from revealing this years winners and so far everyone seems to be having a great time. Even Simon barnes seems to bevenjoying himself

Standby for an update of the results later tonight

Mark
from his iPod touch on table 1

I’m happy to confess that I love building bikes almost as much as riding them, and thanks to a miserable start to the year I’ve been more than happy to tinker with bikes and swap components around on my bikes whilst the planet tries to remind us we’ve broken it by dumping more water than Noah would know what to do with on the trails.
Fixing and tweaking is good fun but nothing beats the process of building up a brand new bike. Starting with a load of bits and a tool box, finishing with a smooth running vision of perfection that you can’t take your eyes off.
Possibly the most exciting bit is deciding what you want. For example, at the moment I’m taken with the idea of a lightweight short travel full suspension bike. So hours are spent looking at different manufacturers line ups for frames that fit that criteria. Angles, shocks and weights are compared, frames are ruled in or out, colours considered (This can come first in truth). Eventually a handful of contenders are decided upon. Now I need to decide what to hang from them. Which forks match what frames, what wheels, finishing kit, bottle cage bolts, the lot.
It goes on and on until I’ve got it, the bike I want to build.

I then go and move the bikes that currently reside in my house around like some 3D puzzle, hoping that a bike sized space will appear that means I can fit another one in somewhere without it becoming too much of a fire risk or poking me in the ribs in bed.
Defeated I start moving various bits of bikes and components back to their original resting places, discovering bits I forgot I had.
Why, I’ve nearly got enough bits to build a new bike, it’d be a shame to not use them and it’d help clear some space…