This morning I woke up at 5am as normal but my stomach was feeling off so I decided to get up and build up the NS Metropolis Jump bike frame that I swapped back for my Blue Octane Zircus One frame with my friend who bought the NS off of be last year when I bought the Zircus Frame. I have always liked the NS but it was not able to get a gearing that worked out of the gate well due to lack of spacing on the frame. I have decided that this will be fine for me to train on and for my son to ride as he isn’t bothered about riding gates really anyway.
I measured the difference in top tube between the NS (which I like) and the Airdrop (which feels too big for me) and there is an inch and 1/4 difference in the top tube length so the that explains why the Airdrop feels so big compared to the NS. It is also about an inch longer than the Octane One so that explains why I preferred the NS and the Octane more than the
I am going to clean my Son’s Airdrop Fade frame at the weekend and get it on the internet to sell as it is too big for us anyway and he is going to use mine if I want to ride the NS anyway so there is no point keeping it.
After riding the pump tracks last weekend I knew that the Airdrop fade was too big for me so I have been looking around for a Steel Framed Dirt Jump bike to swap out the Airdrop for to have a Jump bike that feels and rides like my Curtis Race Cruiser when arrives later this year. Yesterday I spoke with someone from Standard Bykes and they were super helpful and ship to the UK so I think I will put an order in with them. They also have options of 21.5′, 22′ and 23″ top tubes so I am just mulling over the top tube length and I will put the order in! At the moment I am leaning towards a 22″ top tube as my Curtis will have a 21.75″ top tube so it makes sense to have a slightly loner top tube on the Jump bike but I have asked the guy at Standard what he thinks and I am waiting for him to get back to me.
This weekend I also need to get my bikes sorted as I feel like I am drowning in bikes again which is not fun and gets really annoying and stressful really quickly! Although today I should get the Yess finished and sold and the NS is going to the container at lunch time so that will help a lot. I will also get the Vitus off of the wall and into the Garage too so I can get my Airdrop cleaned and on the wall where the Vitus is at the moment then I will have no bikes on the floor getting in the way!
From next week I plan to use the Vitus to ride to the office on as I have started putting on weight due to riding the ebike so much then I can just use the ebike to go to the track at lunchtimes which is what I bought it for anyway!
I am going to try and ride some gates tomorrow to see how my shoulder holds up out of the gate! Obviously if it hurts I will stop but I am hoping that I can start to slowly start getting back to some race specific training as I slowly get back into race shape ready to start racing next season. I am definitely taking this season off other than racing Bath’s regional and maybe Bristol’s and Andover’s regionals too as they are both really close so don’t cost too much to get there and race.
Other than that I am going to take this year to get healthy and try and drop as much weight as possible and save as much as possible too.
When I get the Curtis I am going to swap over all the parts from the Inspyre onto it and ride it like that so that I keep my Onxy wheels and DX cranks and Chris King Ceramic bottom shinny and new and ready for racing next year. This means that I will not be used to the top class parts so when I build up the Curtis for racing it will feel way faster than it does in training mode and hopefully give me a psychological boost too 🙂
Also the Cheaper parts from the Inspyre are more hard wearing than the Onyx parts so will not wear out so fast and should hold up better to the British weather than the Onyx hubs which are notorious for not liking cold wet weather 🙁
I am planning to ride the Jump bike more this year still than the BMX and when the Curtis is built up it will live at home not at the track in the container so my container bike will continue to be the NS jump bike as it was built up specifically to be left in the container anyway 🙂 This means that during the week I plan to ride the NS at lunch times and then if I go up after work or at weekends I can bring the Standard or the Curtis in the car depending on which one I want to ride and leave the NS in the container!
Took the NS to the track at lunchtime and it feels much better than the Airdrop for me to ride! I am able to manual way better on it than on the Airdrop so I am happy that I built it back up. I can’t wait to get the Standard 26″ frame ordered and built up as I think I will really like riding that too.
