2016/02/10 – The Skinny on Fatties in JeffCo, Facebook issue, Pavlov’s dog

This is the second winter that I’m riding a fat bike living in Jefferson County, Colorado. Truth is Jefferson County is not the mecca for fat biking and never will be, mainly because of the weather. Although JeffCo is a place where cycling is king and riders ride all year long, good conditions for riding fat bikes on snow are few and far between. When it’s good, it’s great, but not really worth investing in one unless 4-5 good rides a year is all you need.

My recommendation is that if you don’t live in the high country, you should just drive to the high country and rent. The conditions are usually good, or perfect on groomed trails, and you can get a chance to ride a lot of different high-end fatties.

That said, I love my fattie and since I try to ride every day in JeffCo, it’s the ONLY bike I can ride safely through the streets and bike paths on some icy and snowy winter days.

Another option is to buy the best fat bike you can afford and make it your year round bike. Some predict that fatties will become the standard year-round mountain bike of the future.  I doubt that, but one thing for sure is that although slower than other bikes, they will make you strong. I have a good friend, let’s call him Mike Via, who rides his Salsa fat bike all year long and as a result has become as strong as a country ox.

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Another issue I have with Facebook is the image I’m projecting of Steve. I know my passion for cycling, hiking, tropical fish, chess, etc is sometimes overwhelming for most of my FB friends so I hold back on the stats, the trip reports, pictures of my toys, my fish, my chess games, etc, but after a while I look at what’s left and I realize it’s not me!

And yes I want to show people that I’m still very much alive and kicking and Colorado is a wonderful place to live, but there’s a fine line between sharing and bragging.

So I find myself sharing things that get the most “likes”, and basically that’s pictures of my family and pets. Most people don’t “like” any pure text that I share, but that’s probably because it doesn’t get people’s attention like the pictures and posters.

So in summary, The Steve you see on Facebook is the Steve you want to see and the Steve you see here is more like the real Steve.
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For a couple of weeks now I’ve been setting an iPhone jingle alarm at Trixie’s feeding times to see if she would react to the jingle as a conditional response. So far all she does is lay there, no reaction.

I just told her “You are lucky that you are my dog, because you’d never cut it as Pavlov’s dog!”
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For those of you who haven’t heard Bernie’s New Hampshire primary speech, here’s a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UmAG3cxpNs

Later,

Steve