By Mike Genovese

Feb 05

So I'm in the garage the other day doing a little car maintenance when I happen across the bike tucked away in the corner amidst a pile of other memory inspiring items of warm weather. With the short attention span that I have, I wander away from the job at hand and over to the bike to pull it from the tangled mess of lawn chairs and gnome statues (my mother has a fetish for such things). Sitting on it, daydreaming of cutting through the hard pack trails behind my home, I realize that I never ordered the forks that I planned to install this winter. With the below zero temperatures we've been having here in Western New York, the idea of anything bike related had almost completely left my mind. Except, of course, that which has to do with Mountain Bike Tales, as I can work from the comfort of my computer desk with a warm cup of coffee nearby.

   At this point, I put the bike aside and quickly finished up the car stuff and headed inside to search for bike upgrades. Browsing the web of numerous part stores and outlets nets surprisingly good results. For whatever reason,  my winter amnesia also includes the good deals that can be had in the off-season. Tires, forks, brakes, frames, and full bikes have their prices slashed to some degree on almost every major outlet. This makes for some hard decisions. I went in with all intentions of ordering some nice light weight CC forks, but after soaking in some of these deals, my mind went a little haywire. I was like a little kid in the toy store with fifty bucks to spend on the birthday, so many toys, so little money. After browsing goodies on-line for about an hour, I decided that I needed new rubber, seat, pedals, and shock, along with the forks. After some quick calculations, it turns out I can get only one or two parts for now. But then again I started thinking about the quality of my frame (not good) and wondered if it was worth upgrading all these parts. It would be kinda like putting a blown Chevy 350 into a tractor trailer, sweet motor, but its not gonna get you far in that set-up.

   So I turned my attention to complete bikes. Then I quickly turned away. As much as I would love to drop $1000 or more on a new rig, I just can't do it, funds are against me. So I go back to square one and browse back to the forks that I was going to originally going to purchase and stare at them for a good five minutes. While I'm staring, I replay my currently equipped forks' performance in my head. Are they even that bad? Sure, when I air it out pretty big, they bottom hard, but I'm mainly riding CC and trails anyway. So is it worth pairing a set of $400 forks to my overweight frame? I'm not sure, so I logged off the net. I headed back to the garage to contemplate while looking at the bike. I finally decide that it will get me trough one more season, and in the meantime I'll save for an entirely new rig. So I wrestle the bike back into it's winter resting place and push the thought out of my head until the spring. I just hope that when the time comes, I can commit and actually make a purchase without bailing out and making due with what I've got. Oh well, one more season of the occasional wrist snapping, jaw crunching bottom upon landing won't kill me. I hope.