Look, I’m under no illusions about my contributions to mountain biking. I’ve buried some rocks, hammered some nails, and dragged some dirt from here to there. A lot less of all three than many of my friends have. I’ve also taught my kid and any number of other riders that Courtesy has the right of way on singletrack – assuming Courtesy is the name of the rider going uphill.
In my role as what’s been referred to, in both a complimentary and denigrating way, as a “beat writer” for NSMB.com I’ve mined some 500 pieces about mountain biking. Plenty of pyrite, and maybe, if I can be so bold, a few ounces of gold. Enough gold to keep me chipping away at least.
I actually don’t really know what the end game is for someone who writes about mountain biking. One of my favourite writers, buying bike magazines as a teenager, wrote a history of the banana. I guess at some point I could pick a fruit and start researching?
*Cover photo by JacAttack
Anyway, every once in a while I get an e-mail from someone who’s seen my work shared somewhere interesting. It doesn’t happen much at all, so it’s still a five-year-old’s Christmas for me every time that it does. So thank you to my friend Larry ‘Model-T’ Talker for the cherry on an awesome day today (thanks to Claire & Nina for dinner, Tiramisu, and a bottle of Woods Limoncello).
As Model-T knows, I really enjoy the company Rivendell because they do their own thing, successfully, and I identify – rightly or wrongly – as someone who does my own thing too. I’m not jumping back on rim brakes, and within a couple of years there in the noughts, I broke enough low-normal derailleurs to equip their whole staff, but I follow what they’re up to and love their take on quality. I even, as some folks have noticed in photos, have one pair of their MUSA Baggies that I mountain bike in all the time (I’d have two pairs, but they don’t make them in black).
To make a short story medium length, if you happen to read their newsletter, and you scroll all. the. way. to the bottom (all the way), there’s a link to my NSMB piece about just how awesome Shimano’s new LinkGlide M8130 works with a friction thumb shifter (and some cable malarky). And, to me, that’s really something cool.
I’m giddy that it’s maybe inspired some other folks, especially folks with a lot more influence than I’ll ever have with the thumb-shifter crowd, to try it out. I’m still very much hoping to get my own two hands on CUES and Deore M5130 for future review projects, but in the meantime, it’s also neat to know other folks are experimenting with mix-matching what’s old and new. I’ve ridden a lot of different friction setups, and none have come close to LinkGlide.
Cheers,