The Niner is cool, but standard road drops kind of suck off road. I speak from experience, having been riding cross bikes for all my off road stuff for the past year. You want to beable to tuck into the drops easily in descents and that isn't alkways easy when they're 10 inches below your seat. Thus the popularity of midge bars set in silly-looking high positions. Looks funny, but it seems to work.


What were we talking about again?

That Niner would make an awesome marathon bike though, especially if the course had a lot of ong bumpy fire roads and stuff.