Snfoilhat

If trialsracer was a part-time barista in a hip college town, trialsracer would know that none of their co-workers in the coffee shop are PhD students -- PhD students tend to make their money as research and teaching assistants. It's a different gig :)

@SATN-XC: you’re right! I should have said the comments under the articles

These two articles have really displayed how mismatched the internet mtb crowd's basic technical knowledge is from their self-confidence in same and obsession with numbers. No one (suspension manufacturers, frame manufacturers, mtb media) is saying to set sag at 30 plus or minus 0.5%. Put another way, no one is saying adjust your springs to achieve a sag to the nearest one percent. It's not a precise process. Most people's shock pumps aren't going to be accurate to 1 psi, even if the display makes you think it is. Most people's rulers may read to the nearest millimeter reasonably well but the way individuals use the ruler on any given occasion likely won't be accurate to the mm. All of y'all in the Well Actually crowd with two threads of blah blah blah you set up suspension better than the next rider, it's false precision. You're kidding yourself, and wtf cares if you sit down to set sag. It's a starting place the very next step is to adjust away from.

You’ll have to decide among yourselves who who’s more core, but bike companies are clearly listening to everyone in the wireless dropper thread who said they were willing to pay to remove a length of housing that isn’t in the rider’s field of view (are you looking at your front tire?) and mostly impacts the bike’s performance on instagram :)

“Where’s the M4X?” next? :D

@stunnanumma1: i think you’ve got an insight. Imagine another person or your old self with their traditional sports background and explain enduro to them during an event. Ok it’s a race, who is ahead right now? Who’s behind them? What’s the difference? Is that a lot? A little? Are they going to catch up? Ok who’s ahead now, and why?What are they doing differently? What should i be paying attention to? EWS never figured out how to make this a story a person can engage with until after the race is over. DH uses split times and play-by-play and it’s still pretty rough viewing sometimes. Enduro has challenging problems to solve to be a sport fans consume live. And if two days is going to be distilled into a 10 minute edit retrospectively based on who won, it raises questions about the business case for all those riders and all that sponsor signage and the huge percentage of the whole multiday thing that doesn’t make it into the recap people later see.

When the best way for fans to keep up with the race’s action is a powerpoint slide show, the race format may want some adjustment

If you love mtb racing, there's a high school mtb team near you that could use volunteers, or a high school near you without a team that could use heroes to get one started. There are collegiate races going on throughout the fall semester (XC, short track, DH, sometimes dual slalom) where the decision whether to run collegiate-only versus open categories w/ USAC sanction may come down to the host team having enough people power. Knowing nothing about enduro, I raced the first Santa Cruz Super Enduro that wasn't invitational and it looked like it took 5X as many people to run as an XC/DH (though maybe 10 years of development has replaced a some of those people with technology, which would shift what race promoters need toward $ for investment in equipment vs volunteers). If you want more racing, go to races. All year the comments section sounds like their favorite TV show is getting cancelled and they're gonna write a strongly worded letter :)

This bike looks nice. I rode a 100mm/100mm 4X bike with a dropper as my trail bike for years, back when, and had a good time. But this new marketing theme that enduro/all-mtn bikes rob the fun from trails is the dumbest push in an industry of perennial dumb messaging. Like these tiny technical details that make arbitrary category boundaries are the gatekeeper between you and taking the ‘fun’ line. If you’re sitting in your office chair thinking 30 mm of travel or 2 mm of stanchion diameter or a few percent change in the ratio of front-center to rear-center is the difference between partying all day on your back wheel and erasing every bump from the trail, you might have forgotten how bike suspension works. Plus, isn’t this the site that remembers freeride is a thing? :)

Pretty good! If my personal preference in mtb media is a scale anchored at the bottom by video of three bike reviewers pretending to include the viewer in a camp fire beer session, then this long-form mtb talk show really rates pretty high! :)