Today was pretty interesting to say the least. The original plan was to do some Santa Cruz riding before the product launch started at 1pm. Instead we drove down to Monterey to pick up Guitar Ted’s bag that didn’t make it to San Francisco with him.

So we got back, ate some lunch, then headed to the hotel meeting room for the product stuff. There was about 25 people in the room… somewhere around 10-12 were media people. I was the only person in the room with a computer out and posting stuff on the sites as it was happening. In fact I got more than one weird look since I was tapping on a keyboard instead of just taking notes.

After we heard about the new stuff from each company and we were just standing around talking I mentioned to a couple people that I had posted stuff already and their jaws about hit the floor. They couldn’t believe it.

To me this is common sense stuff, especially from my tech background. Post stuff as real time as possible… people don’t care if it’s slick or edited… they just want to know!

Anyway, once this was done we all had a choice of hanging out and talking about the bikes and taking pictures or going for a ride. I was the only one that opted to go for a ride. I figure I got into this so I could ride bikes so that’s what I’m gonna do.

I headed out for a ride with the new Brand Manager for Trek Mountain Bikes, Michael Browne and a guy named Dillan from the the Advanced Technology department of Trek/Fisher. I think that’s the name of the department…

I got to spend some time riding the new Trek 69er which was a lot of fun. Since it was a singlespeed, it got tiresome on the climb, but it was pretty slick on the downhill.

And the downhill was the crazy part. I’ve never ridden anything like this! Extremely fast, lots of little jumps all over the place and a lot of balls-to-the-wall racing down the hill. Two jumps in a row I landed on my front wheel and road it out for about 6 or 10 feet before I sat the bike back down. I still wonder how I didn’t end up over the handlebars.

Then the very last piece of the trail is a pretty gnarly, steep descent for about 20 feet. I cleared the top part (the hard part) and then did a beautiful endo right at the end. Rock on. I also bent up the brake lever as well. Good thing it’s not my bike

Once the ride was done and we got cleaned up, we loaded up the van and headed over to Keith Bontrager’s house for some dinner. Spent the evening hanging with several of the Trek people, other media types, Gary Fisher, Keith, etc and ate some great food.

So all and all a pretty great day. Tomorrow is lots of riding on the bikes… stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 1:51 am and is filed under Crooked. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.