When A Man Is Tired Of Bike...

As Dr Johnson once said, if one of your bikes never gets ridden, you should probably think about why you own it in the first place. Somewhere in the depths of the bike cave lurks my Pace RC405 providing a handy adventure playground for spiders and doing, well, not very much really.

The Pace in happier times with added Spanish mountains.

It's a nice bike. It used, in fact, to be my favourite ride. It has very capable Pushed Pikes, a Reverb no less, a choice of shocks - RP23 with Push and volume adjuster or original DT Swiss - proper good wheels, grippy tyres and a 2˚ slack-set.

And I never ride it. Instead I career around on the Ragley spitting stones outta the rear wheel and climbing and descending like a fiery-eyed twat or ride the road bike or drag the Soma out for a bit of something in between. Even the daft 69er mutant gets more miles.

Not sure why. Some of it is the weight, it's up around 32lb, but to be brutal, it doesn't descend like a 32lb bike should and the extra weight irks me on the ups. Also, after riding Rags it strikes pedals on rocks like a desperate survivalist trying to light a fire. Uncomfortable when most of your local trails are made of boulders and rubble.

But mostly, I guess, it seems woefully short of 'thing' - 'thing' being the hard-to-define spark of bright-eyed madness that makes you just want to hammer a bike. It's what the Ragley oozes from every titanium pore and, oddly, my road bike too. But the Pace, if it ever had it, doesn't have it any more.

Or maybe it's just that I no longer 'get' full suspension. I don't mind being slightly slower on a hardtail as long as it's more fun and more of a challenge and, to be honest, Rags ain't that much slower anyway.

So, in a selfless bid to work it all out, tomorrow I'm taking 18 Bikes demo Bandit out for a few hours around Hope. The plan isn't necessarily to buy a Bandit, though it might end up that way, more to work out if I've fallen out of love with full suspension generally or just the Pace in particular.

Watch this space I guess...