Somehow in a decade plus of riding and racing bikes in New York City I never really delved into the mountain biking scene. Which isn’t to say that I avoided the trails - I have spent countless days off-roading in the Hamptons or at Six Mile Run. It’s just that I always did so on a CX bike. Somehow I even decided to ride a single speed cyclocross bike at the last MTB race that I did. No surprise here given the equipment choice, but I am pretty sure I finished in last place.

But after a few too many days getting beat up on a suspension-less CX bike, and with no sign of road racing or cyclocross in sight thanks to COVID, I finally decided that it was time to try something new. The end result of which was this very fancy and very colorful mountain bike.

Technically it is Lisa’s bike, but with an ongoing dispute over proper handlebar width for a bike that we may on occasion share, she has been letting me borrow it for a few weeks. Combine the new bike with a stretch of perfect weekend riding weather (for November in NYC at least) and we have been working our way through the plethora of MTB trails within an hour or so of Manhattan.

We started at Stillwell, which, surprise-surprise, is much faster and smoother on a mountain bike compared to the many days we have spent there on CX bikes. Then last week, with Lucia as a guide we headed out to Sterling Forest. This was all new terrain for me - there are enough rocky sections that I always perceived it as too aggressive for CX bikes.

But on a mountain bike it was an absolute blast with a nice mix of technical features, many of which have multiple line choices, as well as a few super fast and flowing sections of trails. While I’m very much still getting used to straight bar riding, I have no doubt that we’ll be back at Sterling multiple times this winter.

As we have written about in The Daily Grind, training motivation has been hard to come by in the midst of everything 2020 has dropped on our collective plates. But mountain bikes are new and exciting, and in these strange times, sufficient motivation to get me back to training. It is going to take some work - which likely means getting back on the Zwift train - but hopefully this is my relative low point for fitness. Here’s to many more days of MTB’s…

PS - this was my first day riding in TBD’s new team kit and just let me say that I absolutely love it, both the product and the design. Especially what is definitively the best part of the design: the baby blue vest.

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