Saturday, January 09, 2016

Minus Ten Review

Facing and chasing in the Lab a decade ago.
This blog has been around a while now. I did a whole series last year on my "Decade of Nonsense" where I looked back and touched upon the highlights on here and my life in general as that time wore on. I was thinking about that the other day, and I was reminded of how they do a "10 years ago today" kind of post in the old, small town newspapers. Well......sometimes it was more of a 50 years or 100 years ago today type of thing. I haven't been around that long yet here. So, all you get is the decade look back!

I figured I could do this on a weekly basis, as a trial run for now and see how it goes. This will be a review of what happened here ten years ago the first week of 2006.

Ten years ago I wrote a post about not doing what the Pro cyclists do for your bicycle set ups. I remember back in the 1990's, that's all we lived for! Get the slammed stem, skinny rims, and anodized chi-chi's for your bike. I think we've mostly shaken that idea these days!

I also wrote a post about post-holiday work outs, and specifically referred to all the Trans Iowa banter that was going on between riders about their getting to training for T.I.v2. It was all located on mtbr.com back in those days where there was a thread going on about Trans Iowa. It was pre-Facebook days for most folks, so social media wasn't really a thing yet. It was almost all blogs or online forums back then.

Speaking of blogs, the infamous Matt Chester shut his blog down at the beginning of 2006 and in response I wrote a post on Simplicity. I also spent a lot of time back then foraging for any news on 29"ers, as there weren't a lot of sites or blogs dedicated to big wheels. Here's an "Open Letter" I wrote asking if any companies would be interested in supporting 29"ers with specific components. I think people forget how reticent manufacturers were back then to change anything. We had 26"ers and we had 700c pavement bikes. That was it. No plus sized madness. No 29"ers to speak of Heck, Trek was about to pull the plug on the whole Fisher Bikes big wheeled experiment back about this time. In fact, the whole slow rise of the 29"er is why many manufacturers are jumping trends today. No one wants to "miss out" again, like they did on the 29"er deal.

Finally, to close out the week, I started detailing my On One Inbred build on the blog. It was the second 29"er I ever owned.

That's a wrap on this week's "Minus Ten Review".

No comments: