Well, I have a post in here for my road bike, so I thought I should put one up here of my mountain bike as well. Here it is:
The date of this post and the actual date are not the same. I am posting this on August 6, 2011, three days after I got the leather saddle you see on the bike. I’m setting this post to a date before the post of my road bike so that this post doesn’t show up first. See my road bike first, then see this one.
I bought this seven years ago before I knew anything about cycling or bikes. I didn’t really know what a road bike was and didn’t know that mountain bikes are not for riding on the road. My life as a cyclist, therefore, started on this bike. I rode this exclusively from when I really started cycling in the fall of 2005 until the end of 2006 when I got my first road bike. Since then this has been regulated to being a second bike, something that gets ridden once in a blue moon. For example, in 2009 I did 56 rides, and 52 of them were on my road bike. In 2010 those numbers were 57 and 56 respectively. (September 22, 2011 update: due to my road bike being mothballed, I have now ridden this bike more this year than I have my road bike. Overall, however, I still only ride this bike 14% of the time.)
In case you are wondering, yes, I did change the tires. I run thinner slick tires on this, not the fat, knobbly things that come standard on mountain bikes.
Update: September 2, 2011
Thanks to the donation from a cycling buddy of a steel rigid fork, I swapped out the heavy and pointless (for riding on the road, at least) suspension fork that came with this bike. Notice the difference in colour between the fork and the frame. As I write this, I’m also looking at getting better -- and better-looking -- bar ends. It’s time to give this bike a little bit of love, as I really, really should ride this more often.
Update: October 22, 2011
I’ve put drop handlebars on this bike meaning that I don’t think I should call this a mountain bike anymore. The details of this change can be found here, here, and here. An updated version -- complete with more pictures -- of this bike can be found here.
This is how this bike has looked through the years and the changes, even though most of the changes are very recent.
