Every bike needs to be cleaned and lubed every once in a while. Your bike should also be washed after especially dirty rides. Washing your bike is easy and does not take that much time, so there is no excuse to not have a clean bike! After you wash your bike, make sure to check all of the areas that require a lubricant and lube ‘em if needed.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED:
Soap
A dish washing brush
A toothbrush
lube – not WF40! use a high grade lube such as Pedros
Sponge
Towel

1. Mix the soap with half a bucket of warm water. Using a sponge wash down the entire bike.
2. Give the bike a once over. This will allow you to find any spots that you missed or didn’t come off in the first wash. Use the brush to get rid of any dirt from the tight places the sponge couldn’t fit.
3. Rinse off your bike with a light spray. Make sure that you don’t use full stream when rinsing your bike. A full stream can wash away grease from bearings.
4. Dry your bike and lube up the chain and any other area that needs grease.

Never pressure wash your bike. The bearings will not be able to keep the water out.

Every once in a while, you should check your bike to ensure that it is in perfect working condition. It may also be a good idea to perform pre-ride checks. This may not matter if you are just going to the store, but if you are going for a long ride, it’s a good idea to make sure that your steed isn’t going to break down. The amount of time that it takes to check your bike is definately worth it. You don’t want to break down in the middle of nowhere.

Make sure to check these things prior to your ride:

1. Brake tension- check to see that you have sufficient tension in the brake cable by pulling on your brakes hard. Your brake pads should hit the rim of the wheel before your levers hit the handlebars.
2. Brake pads- look at the brake pads by releasing the straddle wire. Check to make sure they have some substance. This will depend on the type of pad you get – compare a new set to your current set.
3. Derailleurs- Check gear cable tension and also that your derailleurs are set up properly by running your bike through the all of the gears.
4. Chain- make sure your chain has no stiff or damaged links. Do this by spinning the cranks backwards. If the chain jumps, it means that a link may be damaged.
5. Handlebars- check to make sure the bolt that clamps the stem to the handlebars is tight.
6. Stem- make sure that your stem bolt is tight in the frame.
7. Seat and seat post- make sure that your seat is at the correct height and that the clamp is on tight.
8. Tire pressure- squeeze the sides of the tires to make sure that they are properly inflated. They should give just a little. Use a tire gauge if you have one for a more accurate reading.
9. Wheels- check that the wheels are straight by spinning the wheels and listening for a scuffing noise. This noise is the rim hitting the brake pads. And means your rim is untrue.

Now give your bike a quick ride to make sure everything is ok. After that you’re ready to role!

The best biking experience of this young year happened for me the other day. First let me provide some background info, the 411 as our friends at Bike Magazine like to term it. I’m nearly thirty and the only activity that I’ve ever partaken of even closely resembling aerobic is mountain biking. I’m an ex plate-head (weight lifter), with baseball leanings. My wife on the other hand runs incessantly, always has and always will. Second only to running as her favorite past-time is pestering me that I never run with her and Chester (our freak dog).

Just recently the weather here on the East Coast went truly wintery (I had ridden three times a week up until Christmas). Add to that the fact that the Breezer and the winter bike – my wife’s old Giant; an unsuccessful foray into mountain biking – were both on the verge of major mechanical repair and one arrives at the saddest of all phenomenoms, the ‘husband-cave-in’. I ran.

Sure I know, no better cardio fitness, weight bearing, but this is running – without being chased. I hate running. I’m not built to run. Most importantly, its not fun. Well here’s the thing, it hurt and all, but I had a ball – outdoors with my wife and dog. Our two separate passions are a good thing for our marriage. Healthy couples need interests outside of each other. But our busy lives coupled with my 3-5 bike rides a week and her daily runs had recently been making both of us feel a little isolated. I mean I married her because I love her company. It was great to be with her. And she was great. Just the right amount of encouragement mixed with competition. It was also really cool to reaquaint myself with my accomplished wife. I tend to forget sometimes that she’s incredibly good at things other than picking husbands.

I know, have I forgotten that this is a mountain biking site. No. Here’s the point. I hadn’t even realized it but the bikingwas getting stale. Ride to get better, to keep the beer-gut at bay, because everybody is fitter and more technically proficient. What about why we all fell in love with mountain biking – because it’s shit eating fun. I had a great time running with my amazing wife and our dog. As a matter of fact I have since ran for two weeks straight. I have never wanted to bike more in my entire life. Come on January Thaw!

Morals:

• Unless you’re training for the Olympics or are paid to ride don’t forget to enjoy other activities.
• The people you love might miss you – you freaking dirt head you… hell you probably miss them if you think about it.
• Mountain biking should always be fun.

Advanced riding requires advanced fitness to be sure. By incorporating a few simple techniques into your technical repertoire, you too can emerge from the gnarliest single track with a stupid smile instead of an open wound. In some ways, mountain biking is a game of momentum. But momentum sometimes yields loss of traction and wipeouts. The equalizer in this equation is balance. Balance is basically your butt, or more precisely, what you do with it.

For example, a sketchy left-hand corner may secretly desire to defeat your side knobs and bring you to a crashing halt. You can foil this insidious plot by leaning the bike sharply to the left while hanging your butt out to the right, keeping your center of mass over your bottom bracket and driving those side knobs directly down into the ground. The smaller the frame, the more sloping the top tube, the easier it is to slap your bike from side to side. (They’re also lighter and more rigid.) This is why most au courant frame designers have gravitated to the overgrown BMX look.

Good balance will also help you climb steep pitches. You need to apply enough pressure on the rear tire to keep it hooked up and you moving forward, but enough pressure on the front tire to prevent you from looping out over the back and hooking up your head with the soil.

Conversely, descending extreme slopes obliges you to keep enough weight on the front wheel for maximum braking power and enough weight on the rear to prevent the bike from catapulting you down slope like a bean bag when you stub your front wheel into a rock.

Rule of thumb:
Going up? Move forward on the saddle.
Going down? Move back.

For the steepest climbs, you need to be on intimate terms with the extreme nose of your saddle. Slide all the way forward, grab those bar ends and concentrate on pedaling smooth circles up the smoothest line. Gut-busting climbs are where clipless pedals really shine. The ability to haul back on one pedal with your hamstring while mashing the other pedal with the opposing leg’s quads radically increases your torque and the range of slopes you can climb. Clipless pedals are worth their weight in gold.

On technical, free-fall drops, you butt has to be over the rear axle. Here, unrestrained momentum is your enemy. The key to keeping things under control is your front brake, which is incomparably more efficient than the rear brake. Put your waistline behind the rear of the seat and maintain just enough speed to keep moving by “feathering” the levers. I like to get so far back that I actually place my chest in the seat itself.

Sometimes the only way to clean a section is to come to a complete halt, balance for an instant and then move off on a new line. Called a track stand, this is the second most important skill besides a wheelie. It’s also a breeze to practice. Find a grassy area, pedal forward, bring the bike to a stop with your feet in the 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock positions and see how long you can balance. When you start to fall over, pedal just enough to regain your balance and try again.

An even more basic skill is the wheelie. No, you don’t need to be able to ride a figure eight on your rear wheel. However, you do need to be able to confidently loft your front wheel over rock, log and slippery root at speed. A simple yank on the bars timed to coincide with a pedal stroke is often sufficient to get things started. If you have front suspension, a sharp push on the bars can facilitate a rebound that lifts the wheel. Again, practice on a lawn and do not remain clipped into your spuds while you learn. Your butt will thank you, trust me.

A very cool (and very handy) variation on the wheelie is the nose wheelie. This advanced move often immediately precedes the endo, short for “(rear-) end-o(ver-the bars)” for most riders. Unanticipated nose wheelies have a tremendously high pucker factor, but the angle required to launch you into a low orbit is much greater than you think, especially if your butt is all the way back like it should be.

Nose wheelies are essential for those special occasions (like a downhill switchback) when your bike is too long to fit through a turn. Roll past the apex of the corner, loft the rear wheel, swing it to the outside, set it down, reorient the front and off you go. Mastering this move will also give you the confidence to reassert control of the bike when the trail gods throw that unannounced “Nose Wheelie Pop Quiz” at you.

Between the wheelie and the nose wheelie, in terms of difficulty, is the bunny hop, of which there are also two basic species. The simplest involves a two-wheel takeoff and landing. Ride up to the obstacle, leap into the sky (take your bike with you) and use your momentum to carry you forward and beyond the problem with your wheels level throughout the jump. This move, however, has its limitations, chiefly in the height of the obstacle you can clear.

There’s a slightly more advanced derivation that I call the “porpoise” (for lack of a better term) because your bike describes a swooping arc like a dolphin leaping from the water. On this move, ride up to the problem and loft the front wheel first (you are now rolling on the rear wheel). Then, as the front begins to pass over the obstacle, lift the rear by jumping. Push forward on the bars as you jump (your butt goes back). This helps the rear wheel gain elevation. The front wheel will continue to describe a downward arc and contact the ground first. The rear will describe the same arc as you roll forward. The porpoise allows you to save energy because you don’t have to jump as far to clear something. With the basic hop, the bike maintains a level attitude in the air, so the rear tire has to clear the problem before the front wheel can descend. With the porpoise, you adjust the attitude of the bike in the air so that you only have to clear one wheel at a time. The energy you would be using to get distance can now be directed towards gaining maximum elevation or better yet, accelerating down the trail.

For really big logs, gauge the required elevation by lofting the front wheel so that it just kisses the top of the log. That’s your mark. Now jump so you put your rear wheel on that mark. Your muscles will remember how high the front wheel had to go. (You now have rear wheel on log, front wheel on ground. If your butt is not way back, you are also flying over the bars.)

A crude variation of this move drives the big ring into the wood of the log for traction. While it lacks a certain elegance (and is hard on your big ring), it’s an effective way to claw over the biggest logs.

These are obviously dynamic moves that require trial and error to master. To survive the error part, you first have to master the single most important skill of all, crashing softly. The worst wrecks happen when the front wheel suddenly begins to move much slower than the rest of the bike and the attached rider like a dead stop), driving that rider up, over and into the ground.

Endos stink. And they happen. When the light bulb of recognition flashes on in your oxygen-starved brain and that little voice says, “Hey man, I think you’re screwed!” you have to eject. Get away from the bike. Number one, it can take care of itself. Number two, it’s going to be pretty ticked off at you for getting into this unseemly mess. It will add insult to injury by landing on you. Getting free may not be easy if cranked down the retention spring on your clipless pedals.

Whether or not your bike is on your tail, release the bars and bring your arms up to help absorb the impending blow from the ground. (This is why we wear gloves.) If you’re in a slow-speed, pile-driver sort of affair, absorb the impact with bent arms. It beats catching yourself with your face. (This is why we wear helmets.) If you’re in a Wide World of Sports-type endo, dissipate the energy by tucking a shoulder and rolling. This assumes your trajectory isn’t taking you into a large, immovable obstacle, like a tree or rock. And if you are silly enough to get yourself launched in a boulder field, you’re going to have to pay for your foolishness.

Finally, remember that discretion is the better part of valor. This means that you don’t go for the big move on top of a group of hikers. All it takes is a couple of chuckleheads to close a trail. Then where are you going to practice?

Every bike needs to be cleaned and lubed every once in a while. Your bike should also be washed after especially dirty rides. Washing your bike is easy and does not take that much time, so there is no excuse to not have a clean bike! After you wash your bike, make sure to check all of the areas that require a lubricant and lube ‘em if needed.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED:
Soap
A dish washing brush
A toothbrush
lube – not WF40! use a high grade lube such as Pedros
Sponge
Towel

1. Mix the soap with half a bucket of warm water. Using a sponge wash down the entire bike.
2. Give the bike a once over. This will allow you to find any spots that you missed or didn’t come off in the first wash. Use the brush to get rid of any dirt from the tight places the sponge couldn’t fit.
3. Rinse off your bike with a light spray. Make sure that you don’t use full stream when rinsing your bike. A full stream can wash away grease from bearings.
4. Dry your bike and lube up the chain and any other area that needs grease.

Never pressure wash your bike. The bearings will not be able to keep the water out.

There will come a time for all of us when we are fully responsible for a beginner rider (at least we think we’re responsible). With this comes the tension of watching every mistake that rider makes. I recently was blessed with this responsibility and here’s the story.

As the weekend rolled around, anticipation grew because I had friends from out of town who were visiting. They live about four hours away and don’t get to ride with them often. They arrived with another of my old friends whom I hadn’t seen in years. This guy is like a 70′s ghetto stud if you can imagine that. Anyway, I let him ride my old Paramount RS3.0 since that’s the whole reason the others were coming down to visit. We arrived at the trailhead which is in some old farmers pasture and believe me, old farmers like to talk. He said my VooDoo Canzo was “pretty salty”. Cool.

We are ready to ride. We aren’t ready to ride. Beginners shoe comes untied, oh well, it happens. A slightly technical section comes upon us and I let the rest of the pack go ahead and ride behind the newbie. He did great through the whole thing. Using body English, low speed manuvering, good bike handling skills all around. So maybe I don’t really need to watch him that close after all!

Now the ride has come to the middle of a priarie with a four foot creek that the group must cross. We ride all along the legnth to find the most attractive place to cross. The whole pack splashes across the creek except for the newbie. No, he’s speeding full throttle toward the creek at a uncrossable section. An attempted bunnyhop fails and turns to catastrophy in an instant. Here is the new rider, laying on the ground and bleeding from the mouth. We circle around him to make sure he will be alright like vultures around a dead coon. Tooth through the lip and a bloody lower lip were luckily the only injuries he sustained.

On the other hand, cracked frame. I celebrate and rejoice for him. First ride and he has a major equipment failure, or was it Mountian Dew commercial syndrome? Yes, you can get really hurt at this sport. Yes, it can be dangerous at times. No, we don’t need to be exploited as mindless idiots with really nice insurance companies. I really believe this is becomming a problem. My friend, as groovy as he may be, thought of us like that. All we did was go down hills as horrific speeds because we were addicted to adrenalin. We have jumps the size of houses built all over cause we need to get mass amounts of air and get bikes stuck in trees. Am I crazy for being slightly pissed at some select large companies who portray mountian bikers as morons?

This Halloween, a friend of mine had a trick or treater come to his house with a bike helmet on, torn oversize clothing all stained in red, and a fake cast on his arm. When asked what he was supposed to be he replied, “I’m a mountian biker”.

Watch for this. Think about it. Don’t support those who give us this mindless image. Join I.M.B.A. Walk a trail and see how aggrivated a hiker can become an bikers. Just think about how wonderful our sport is, how much better it could be. Remember, being a consumer, you vote every day.

When you realize that you’re lost in the woods, especially an unfamiliar woods far away from home, you learn something important about yourself. One of two particular personae emerge under these conditions: Bushwhacker or Backtracker.
Last autumn under cover of a mass carpet of red, gold, and orange, my friends and I lost our way on the trail. Still perched on the saddle of our bikes, we found ourselves scratching our heads, looking around for the lost blaze. The leaves covered most everything so completely, there was little to help us find our way. Instead of agonizing about the structure of staying on the trail, we decided to press forward and carve our own path. The reward was a ride filled with more challenging topography and a wilder sense of place.
Backtrackers are from more sensible, logical stock. They stop pedaling. Examine the landscape. Determine the position of the sun. Pinpoint where it was exactly they rolled off the predestined path, so they may rejoin the trail. These are all good qualities. Having a Backtracker in the pack is a great asset to any group ride. They are like a personal insurance policy in case you get lost. The Backtracker will get you back on the trail.
Then there are the Bushwhackers. Pushing forward, Bushwhackers are excited by the unknown that lies ahead. They go wherever their bike may take them. Challenged by obstacles like thick vegetation, random trees, unexpected terrain changes, bushwhacking via bicycle takes every bit of your focus and attention. Plus, that thrill of being a little lost places you smack into the middle of an adventure. Bushwhackers embody the spirit of mountain biking.
If you’re interested in doing a little bushwhacking during your next excursion, here are some tips to make that risky ride a bit more fun and worry free.
Be kind to the woods. Common trail courtesy still applies in the back country. Leave no trace and avoid delicate vegetation. Destroying the woods is not cool so if you get into a really dense area, choose to reroute. Many state forests and reservations allow mountain biking on designated trails, but prohibit off trail riding or hiking. Respect the rules of where you ride. Ride free and wild! You choose your own direction. Bushwhacking puts you in touch with your inner explorer. Bring a friend. If you’re going to get lost for a while, at least you won’t be lonely. A compass and a topographical map are not fun killers. Eventually, you’ll need to find your way out of the bush. Always pack a first aid kit. This should be standard operating procedure. First aid, tire tube repair kit, and hell, throw the cell phone in the pack in case you really get off trail and into a bind. Bushwhacking is great riding but getting stuck in the woods overnight is just not fun. Having a sense of adventure is one thing, but having no sense at all is quite another. Many mountain biking trail guides have “Rescue Indexes.” This tells you how far away, in miles, you are from assistance should you need help. This information can be useful when your tired of being lost and want to be found.
So the next time you hit the trail, consider falling off the map for a while. Your sense of adventure will thank you for it.
We remind you that you should always respect your environment. Do not ride in protected or sensitive areas.

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It’s very important that you eat right to insure you’re getting al the vitamins and minerals you need. Supplements can help, but certainly don’t rely on getting your daily recommended allowances through a supplement. Fact is, your body only absorbs 10% to 15% of the nutrients in pills. Your body would much rather break down foods to get nutrients, so before you spend extra money on supplements, make sure you’re eating healthy. If you eat a variety of foods, you’ll probably meet the requirements of vitamins and minerals you need each day. If you’re dieting and you are consuming less than 1500 calories per day, you might be missing some of the important nutrients and a multivitamin would be a good idea. Try to take it approximately the same time each day with food. There is no evidence that extra intake of vitamins and minerals improve your performance. What your body doesn’t need, it doesn’t keep.

The key to taking weight off, and keeping it off, is balancing your caloric intake and your physical activity. As long as you are consuming the number of calories you’re burning off in a day, you won’t gain weight. But when the balance is shifted and your taking part in more calories than you’re getting rid of, you’ll gain weight. Therefore, exercise will play a big part in retaining the proper weight. You will burn calories while you’re working out, and after. Studies show that after exercise, your metabolism is increased, so you’ll still be burning calories after your workout. How much you should work out to lose weight depends on how much you eat. An aerobic workout burns body fat. Walking, jogging, aerobics or bicycling are examples of aerobic activities. So, before you grab a candy bar, think first. If you consume just one hundred (100) calories a day more than your body needs, you’ll gain approximately 10 pounds a year. Exercise and good eating habits are key to maintaining your proper weight.

You’ve heard about cholesterol, especially the dangers of high cholesterol. Is it good for you? Of course, cholesterol is very important to your good health. We need it because it forms cell membranes, some hormones and other tissues. Too much cholesterol can be a major risk factor in coronary disease. For the most part, cholesterol is produced in your body. You’ll also find it in foods that come from animals – meat, milk, cheese and oils. Moderate amounts of these types of foods are good for your diet. It’s when we eat too much of them, and a diet high in saturated fats, that can cause coronary problems. For some, exercise can help increase the levels of good cholesterol. It’s advisable to consult your physician and have your cholesterol level checked on a regular basis. If you have too much, you’ll want to reduce your intake, and keep your heart healthy.