MountainBikingHolidays.net

I started mountain biking this summer and until recently was going out in a pair of sport shorts and a normal t-shirt.

Most of the guys I ride with have all the gear, and in comparison I felt a little like a kid that forgot his gym kit and was being made to do sport in clothes from the lost property box.

So is MTB clothing just about fitting in and looking cool? or does the correct gear improve your ride?

To test this, I went crazy on the Halfords website taking advantage of the ‘buy one, get one half price’ on all cycle clothing. I kitted myself up without breaking the bank and my thoughts are below:

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Back in May, I decided to replace my barely road worthy ‘mountain’ bike with a bike that can handle proper off-road riding. I hadn’t ridden off-road since I was a kid, which was well before mountain bikes had disk brakes or suspension so I went into this very green.  These are the main things I considered:

Budget

Everyone has a different amount to spend; my magic number was £400 max. I knew the bike would get plenty of riding on the road to cycle to work, but having not ventured into the rough stuff for nearly 2 decades, I couldn’t justify spending more in case the off road riding never happened.

Suspension

When I last rode bumpy trails, suspension consisted of standing up to avoid a sore bottom! Now with the choice of full-suspension (front and rear), hard tail (just front suspension) or no suspension, I could choose to avoid the sore bottom but had a sore head trying to decide what to go for.

In the end, it came down to what I could afford: I wanted some suspension, but I could only afford a bottom of the range full-suspension bike, which would be very heavy – so as I would be doing plenty of hill climbing, I went for a hard tail.

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It is not often that I keep an eye out for the postman, however when the SunnyCam video glasses were expected I was camped out on the doorstep in anticipation. The excitement was thanks to a piece of gadgetry that puts a 3MP 30 frames per second video camera into a pair of sunglasses! Perfect if you have James Bond fantasies, but much more fun if you want to record madcap adventure sports videos!

Many good products fail on their looks – not something SunnyCam was going to let happen. Even from the Apple-like quality packaging, they’d clearly put the effort in, and yes I’m keeping the box!

The glasses look good, and although not the coolest sunglasses you have ever seen, the fact that they discretely contain the video camera, battery, 4GB internal memory, space for a microSD card, a USB slot, and controls all in a pair of glasses is pure genius. Most of the clever stuff is in the arms of the specs, with a 3-hour battery on one side, and the memory and controls on the other. It makes them a little bulky, but considering what they contain I feel they have done a great job.

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