Night ride trouble

Night riding is fun, but as always when riding with friends; unexpected stuff can happen:

Night Ride Trouble from Christoffer Larsen on Vimeo.

Fork service - and a visual reminder of neglect.

Just drained the oil from my forks. The fluid dripping from the right leg looks nice and clean, but the stuff coming out of the right leg:?

Clean and not so clean oil drained from the forks

Luckily both the stanchions and the bushings are alright, but something needs a little attention.

MTB on Elba, riding in Lacona bay

I've been so lucky to be able to spend the entire month in Italy. A month where the only job, was to be together with my wife and our son. And of course to see what the riding was like in the area. The first week was spent on the island of Elba, off the Tuscan coast in the Mediterranean. The remaining part of the month was spent in the small medieval village of Cardoso on the edge of the Alpi Apuane. More about Cardoso later, here comes the first video from the Lacona area of Elba.

MTB Elba - Lacona from Christoffer Larsen on Vimeo.

Summers End

The past weekend marked the end of daylight savings time for this year. The weather was pretty nice Saturday and Sunday, but yesterday definitely brought an end to that feeling, with the arrival of the first big storm (some say it rivals the legendary storm of 1999, the roads this morning surely witnessed that some damage occurred to buildings, threes and scaffolding etc.).
So I thought it was fitting to call the short movie I made while playing around with the new Garmin Virb action cam (more on that later) for Summers End.

Summers end from Christoffer Larsen on Vimeo.

Kongesporet 2013 and Narrow/Wide chainring follow up.

Today is Tuesday. My bottom only hurts a little now.
Sunday evening it was a bit worse. Crossing the finish line Sunday afternoon it didn't really feel that bad. The pain came creeping in after I'd relaxed for a couple of hours.

Sunday morning 9 a.m. I was ready on the start line of the inaugural version of Kongesporet (Kings trail) 2013.
For the last two months I've been training to start racing again, planning to debut in the Slushcup in November. Despite that plan I was ready on the start line of Kongesporet this Sunday. Thinking it might be a good opportunity to test my fitness and finally do some racing again. I'd signed up for the marathon distance of 105 km, as the shorter distances of 42 and 21 km are for kids and rookies.
I've ridden marathon races before, but it's been a couple of years, so I didn't really know what pace to set. But I had a plan.

2nd or 3rd loop in Boserup.

Photo: Mikkel M Beisner, Grip Grap

Race Face Single Ring Narrow/Wide - initial impressions

Are the XX1 style narrow/wide chainrings worth the money?
The answer pretty much comes down to their ability to keep the chain from falling off, when running without a chainguide.
I thought it might be interesting to isolate the narrow/wide effect, too see what it really does.

 Narrow/wide and standard version of the Race Face Single Ring.

I've been riding a standard Race Face 34T Single Ring since spring, and have so far put 1400 km on it.
Today I changed to the 34T Narrow/Wide version of the Race Face Single Ring.

What to do when you loose half your chainring bolts?

Ever tried spreading your chainring bolts all over the trail?
I tried it today. When I discovered something was wrong, to bolts and nuts were missing completely, and the other two had loosened so much, they only had a couple of threads keeping them together with the nuts.
A 15 min search only revealed one bolt. Two nuts and a bolt had been abducted by the numerous very large ants that were all over the trail today.
So how to continue?
Search in your pockets (saddlebag in this case) and see what you can find.
In addition to my tools and spare tube, I found a couple of meters of 3mm cord.
Tighten to two remaining bolts and tie the cord through the two empty holes.

Two bolts and cord for the rest.

It holds up pretty well. Enough to both ride home and to get some icecream to celebrate the arrival of summer.