Originally Posted by
Barrettscv
I guess I should explain how the bike will be used a little more completely;
Off-road riding for me includes wider Forest Preserve Trails and gravel roads. I also like to ride for several hours at a time and I am considering this event:
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/...0/108749176339
The Almanzo is a 100 mile dirt road event in Minnesota. Nothing technical and no real hills to speak of, but the surface will punish a smaller tire with a 210 lbs cyclist like me to carry.
There are also some lengthy rail-to-trails paths that are cinder covered and less than ideal for a twitchy road bike.
I realize that my existing bike would cover these trails easily with almost any CX tire installed. However, a wider set of tires would improve the ride when covering trails shared with horses and the disc brakes will stay clean while the rim is being submerged. I'm a family man and I'm not going to do any riding that might put me in the ER. I do like Century rides and would like to do some long distance rural road tours.
The closest real MTB riding is in Brown county Indiana, but that is a 5 hour drive. If I do ever enjoy real MTB single track, I will get that 29er ;-).
Michael
FYI - for the Almanzo, you don't really need anything more than a standard CX setup. I rode it this past year w/ on a CX bike w/ 35c tires and was just fine (for size comparison, I'm about 185 lbs). There were some guys out there riding standard road bikes w/ 23c slicks. Whereas I wouldn't go that far, there pretty much was always a pretty clean, hard line through the road somewhere, so you didn't have to worry about riding anything to sandy, rocky, etc.
I also ride forest service roads out here in Colorado on my standard CX setup, and it works beautifully. For the riding you'll be doing, and what you're basically looking to do, I'd echo others' suggestions and suggest that you just beef up the tires as much as you can and see how you like it. You might find you don't even need to swap out any of the other stuff; unless, of course, you just want to change it up for the fun of it, and that's always a good reason, too.
