Today I rode my E bike, based on an aging Trek Fuel EX8, to my local hill, Healey Nab. It’s quite clear when you reach the hill that it doesn’t get the use it used to get and for several years has had no official trail maintenance. Vegetation is growing too close to the trail surface and in some places is overhanging. It makes me wonder if mountain biking itself is less popular than it was a few short years ago. In the Covid year of 2020 bike sales peaked and you saw mountain bikes everywhere. Today, meanwhile, I saw no one. It could be that riders are choosing different locations but I certainly feel that the riding of more natural trails has diminished.
I, for one, will not be deterred. I hope to have my faulty heart valve repaired in the autumn to be back on the non assisted bikes soon. In the mean time I’m regularly riding the E bike and enjoying it but don’t feel that the heavier bike is quite as much fun.
A distinct difference between the 2 types of bike is the way they grip the surface. I estimate that the E bike is around 12 kg heavier than it was before I converted it and most of this additional weight is biased towards the front of the bike. I chose a front wheel motor to retain my wide range 10 speed transmission so that’s about 8 kg of extra weight pushing the front tyre into the surface. On the best section of trail on the hill, which has a series of slightly banked corners, which these days are a bit gravelly, the front wheel refuses to let go. The rear was starting to shimmy and slide first, which in some ways is preferable since a front wheel slide would be far harder to control. Back on a conventional bike I’ll have to be careful to make sure that I keep my body weight further forwards, pushing down on the handlebars to increase the pressure on the front tyre.
I covered just over 8 miles today and was a couple of mph faster than I’d expect to be without assistance at an average of 10 mph. In 2020 the larch trees were cut down on Healey Nab due to an infection, Phytophthora Ramorum. The photograph above shown lots of larch saplings which have started to grow, refusing to be defeated.
Mountainbiker 