The finer details

I'm still playing around with some hand issues. My left hand tends to go numb pretty quickly these days. I've used Ergon products before but never been completely thrilled. This year I went back to them and am using the model without barends. About a week ago, I made a very slight adjustment to the left grip and felt an instant difference. I still have to shake things out frequently but it made a huge difference. These are not grips you can simply throw on and forget about. Now mine are marked to the bar so that once I do the final build I can get them right back to the magical spot.

Another big breakthrough I had this week was with my Reba fork. I have never liked how this fork felt. In fact, in the beginning, I used to leave it locked while riding trails. I did ton's of research on it and changed air pressures (positive and negative) but never was able to get it dialed in. When you throw on all the gear needed for bikepacking it changes everything again. I always bottom out the travel and there's been times I've done a nose stand when coming down off something big enough and that's no good since I ride extremely cautiously when I'm bikepacking. I don't know if maybe I'm not really a suspension kinda guy anymore or what but I put damn near 140psi in the positive chamber the other day and the same for the negative and thought it felt better. For yesterday's ride, I put in another 5psi and road it again and it felt awesome (much more stable in the technical stuff for me).

Tour Divide officially starts tomorrow and I can't friggin' wait to watch the blue dots move along. There is one racer (Rob Culliver) that left yesterday morning at 0800. You can follow the race over at www.tourdivide.org

The features over there just get better and better. Scott and Dave have added some things that are going to make it more fun for us at home. Once you go to the leaderboard this year, you'll see some tabs on the right side of the map and if you play around with them you can overlay radar maps onto the leaderboard and see what Mother Nature is throwing at the racers. You can also overlay a snowpack map on top of the racers and get an idea if they're postholing through any snowfields or not.

Good luck to all of you and be safe.