Ride And Abide

"A man's gotta know his limitations..."   Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan. Today turned out to be fairly amazing.. Starting out with a pretty great ride around Los Alamos but the highlight was conquering obstacles outside of my comfort zone. On the ride returning to the AirBnb, we happened upon a rock that had obviously been ridden before.  However, it did look fairly menacing.  Parker rode it without much fanfare.. but each time I would look at it.. or start an attempt, I would "chicken out".  Finally... one of the attempts just sort of "happened" as I was past the point of no return and fortunately my mind turned off the fear response and just let it happen. @angryparker got me out of my comfort zone and it all worked out. A post shared by James Radtke (@rideandabide) on Dec 25, 2017 at 9:00pm PST

My friend Parker Roenfanz , who lives in Colorado and works for Rocky Mountain Bicycles, graciously offered bikes from his demo fleet for us to ride on our 4-day adventure.  I opted for a large carbon Rocky Mountain Altitude. For comparison, I should mention my current (personal) fleet: 2016 Pivot Mach 429 Trail (currently a 29'er) 2017 Ibis Mojo 3 (currently 27.5 x 2.80) I also should mention I typically ride Minnesota trails (well managed/maintained) and trails around Washington DC (some maintained and some are fairly rugged).  The riding out here in Albuquerque and Los Alamos is quite a departure from what I have grown accustomed to.  First, elevation... we're over a mile high here... and the cactus and thorny shit growing in to the trails ;-) At first I was not in love with the Altitude.  It felt like the front-end was super heavy, and the turn-in was much quicker than I was expecting a bike focused on downhill activity would be.  At this point I s...