Today was the first day on the bikes at our 2009 test camp. We’ve been in Tucson since Saturday getting ready for a week of riding nearly 50 road and mountain bikes. Things started a bit rough when I smashed part of a gate at our Santa Fe offices while slipping around a corner of our snow-covered parking lot in a 16-foot moving truck loaded with bikes and supplies. Sorry, boss.
Nine hours later, I was in 72-degree Tucson, unloading all the bikes into a suite at the Loews Ventana Canyon resort, which will be our headquarters this week. As you can see in the photos, it’s about as nice a bike workshop as one could hope for. I’m here with Marc Peruzzi, a frequent contributor to Outside, and we’ve been leaning heavily on Tucson’s Fairwheel Bikes to organize a crew of local riders and mechanics to help us get through all the bikes. Sunday was an eight-hour build day, but we got through nearly every bike, thanks largely to Dane Higgins and Patrick Fogel from Fairwheel. Not sure how we would have gotten through all this without them.
So pretty much all that’s left to do now is ride, which we did for four hours today. Emelio Jordan, a pro racer and one of our testers, was the first casualty. He touched wheels with another bike on the first ride of the day and went down hard on a descent. No damage to the bike whatsoever. (Kudos to the Mavic Ksyrium Equipe wheels. Emilio got completely sideways before he went down, which must have put a lot of lateral stress on the rims, but they didn’t so much as go out of true.)
Emilio didn’t hold up so well. That's him bleeding in the photo (don’t enlarge it if your squeamish). He vowed to be back tomorrow to test some mountain bikes. But he said that before what is sure to be some nasty bruising and swelling had set in. I wouldn’t blame him if he decided to trade the riding tomorrow for an afternoon with some painkillers and a DVD player.
—John Bradley
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