A tasty pastry with pedal report filling

Races are becoming farther and fewer between, at least races that I consider within a reasonable driving distance. Thus, I was afforded a weekend to ride for pleasure and training. This was good considering I hadn't ridden during the previous weekend while at PSU. Friday night six of us rode from the Devil's Gear Bike shop in New Haven to some of the trails in East Rock Park and then through some man-made obstacles in the city. It was quite a sight to be with five others rolling around with our lights on. At one point, I was in the back of the group as we were riding around a fairly open, swooping right turn and it was practically like riding the trail in the daylight from my vantage point with the spacing between everyone and their lights.

Saturday morning was another mountain bike adventure. The trails are completely covered with leaves now, so finding them can be a slight challenge at times if they aren't well used or in our case, littered with rock gardens. We played some musical bikes as well since Taylor is now in the hunt for a new bike. So I ended up riding Lee's bike for a little while. This was great because I finally had the chance to try out some Crank Brothers pedals.

My review of them (keeping in mind I only spent about 20 minutes with them):
I had a little trouble finding the spot on the shoe to clip in, I feel this had more to do with cleat placement on the shoe than the pedal-cleat interface. The clipping in action had a certain, shall we say, fragile, feel to it. The actual engagement is defined, it just doesn't feel sturdy. So I was left wondering if it would hold me to the pedal very well. The pedal did perform well and kept me engaged without any premature unclipping. There is a significant amount of float, more than I was used to with the SPD style I was used to running. The disengagement was as defined as the engagement, however the large angle of float left me uneasy during some unclipping. All in all they seem like good pedals, but I prefer the more solid feel that I get from SPDs and now, the TIME pedals. I've got about 2 weeks worth of rides on the TIME ATAC Aliums and so far I'm quite impressed. I'll review them a little later, after a few bouts of cross racing to see how they handle the mud.

Sunday, was an entertaining training ride on the cross bike. Taylor and I met up at the Lulu's ride (a full on roadie ride) with intentions of splitting off from the group after the short climb out of town. It's funny, some of the roadies were puzzled by my knobby tires, A) knobby tires on a 'road' bike? B)they didn't know I wasn't really riding their ride. Just to cause distress I took off at a pretty high pace up the hill leading out of town, but eased off considerably after splitting from the group. Taylor and I ended up with almost 2 and half hours of ride time, catching steep banks, stair cases and other random obstacles as much as we could. It was a grand time.