Turf Zone – LochrinBasin
It is a commonly known and disputably indisputable fact that the game of turf and bicycles go together, hand in hand, like coffee and four-fingered Kit-Kats in the morning. Or evil thoughts after another turfer takes that single FTT or TvT zone you’ve just cycled, bused or crawled 20-miles to take. And being a bloke, a human of the male persuasion, and none of this non-binary he/him, she/her, they/them weirdness, I cannot help but think of bicycles.
And while some people say that there’s something wrong with me to be thinking about bicycles, quote “all the b***** time”, it is not something I have any control over. In fact, I think it’s hard-wired into human male brains, part of our basic autonomous operating system, something that goes way back 2.8 million years to the earliest bloke known as Homo turfabilis. Even then blokes would think bicycle equivalents, such as how to improve their self-knapped flint knife, build a better sabre-toothed haggis trap or add another hunting spear to the collection. Even 2.8 million years ago, the correct number of hunting spears to have would have been N+1, where N represents the present number. Fact.
So, I’m thinking about bicycles again, and turfing as well, and how another bicycle will help me achieve my turfing goals. The more tricky and energetic ones, like the 50 or so zones in the Pentlands Hills I need towards completing my Midlothian zone collection. Or those 25 gnarly zones in Glentress Forest down by Peebles in the Scottish Borders. And then there’s the Eildon Hills south of Melrose, another 15 there, a challenging cycle indeed and one I’ve done before many years ago before Turf was discovered, cross-country from Selkirk and back. And not forgetting a small and isolated handful of zones in the Lammermuir Hills as well. And also another try at the Seven Hills of Edinburgh Challenge. Quite a lot to do then.
The position I’m in at the moment is that approval has been granted from the Ministry of Finance for the purchase and suitable funding has been secured, though that has yet to officially arrive in the bicycles-for-turfing-account. All well and good. One problem though, I cannot decide exactly what type or specification of bicycle to purchase. This is mainly down to a choice between full-suspension (suspension front and rear), hard-tail (front suspension only) and rigid (no suspension). In other words, a mountain bike of some form or other.
The trouble with choosing a mountain bike these days is the complexity of choice available with so many factors coming into play in addition to the three suspension formats above. For example, purchase cost, weight, maintenance, component specification, availability and no doubt many others, even colour and style come into the equation. Then there’s all the different so-called mountain bike variants, such as trail, downhill, cross country, all mountain, fat, down country and enduro.
The variations between them seems mostly down to different suspension travel, frame geometry, and of course price, which all has me wondering to what degree this is all a sales and marketing scam enticing you to buy a bike for every occasion, many of them with only a baw-hair’s worth of difference. Back in the 80’s I bought a Saracen ATB with Reynolds 501 tubing and 15 gears. Yes, just one bike and it did all those. You didn’t think about it, you just cycled whatever came along.
Then you need to take into account what type of terrain will you be riding, how will you actually be riding the bike, what are the abilities of the rider, their age and fitness levels. You can see how complicated it can become. Add to that all the many, varied, contradictory and sometimes utterly crap opinions you receive when you ask anyone what their thoughts are. And I’ve not even considered e-bikes, and won’t be, for now anyway. All so mind-bogglingly confusing.
I’ve looked at tons of videos about purchasing mountain bikes, about what setup is best and so on. However, what I will say is that they all seem biased firstly towards getting more hits/likes for their content and secondly, towards young people riding hell-for-leather downhills, jumping across massive canyons, dropping off boulders the size of houses and essentially trying to go as fast and humanly possible while not killing themselves at the same time, well, mostly not killing themselves.
Let’s be honest, that’s not me. Not in a millions years will I ride a bicycle off a cliff. A road kerb is about my limit, usually by mistake, and only a low kerb at that. I want a bike for turfing, for going up and down hills safely and as easily as possible. So, where am I at the moment?
Strangely, I’m of two minds and kind if at extremes at the same time. On the one hand I’m thinking to hell with too much thinking, just go full-suspension and be done with it. Don’t think, just do. The bike, the full-suspension Sonder Cortex XT. No weights listed for the Sonder Cortex XT but I suspect somewhere around 15kg. Love the colour but is the bike really me?
Sonder Cortex
At the other end I’m thinking the nice neat simplicity of rigid. The bike, the Sonder Broken Road XT with the weight saving rigid carbon fork option (you can add stuff in the notes as Sonder built bikes to order) bringing the bike under 10kg weight. I find weight is an important aspect for me as you always find yourself carrying or pushing the bike, and probably even more so in the hills. And the frame is titanium. Decisions, decisions.
Sonder Broken Road
And to finish, the answers to the quiz on the previous Turf blog.
- Photograph No.1 – BattleAbbey
- Photograph No 2 – ByEskWeir
- Photograph No 3 – KirkCockpen
That’s all folks.
Copyright ©2024 Gary Buckham. All rights reserved.
