Cycle the Sunshine Coast, BC

Its a pretty simple goal and a bit of cop-out.  Everyone needs goals to strive or reach for.  They make us better riders in skills or in fitness.  Over the last couple of years, I've chosen Granfondo's, races and other self imposed events to help me keep motivated to do better.  At the end of season, I get burnt out and it takes all winter to get back the motivation to ride.  This year will be different for me.  Cycling is passion for me and to fuel that passion is to ride - ride with friends, ride different areas and trails and ride for life.  This goal keeps me motivated like you cannot imagine and I feel that it will help me enjoy cycling. Over the last couple of months, I've in touch with old friends and met new ones.  I've been to areas like Squamish and thoroughly enjoyed those trails giving me a whole new set of skills and knowledge.  For me, this year is to ride smart (not dumb and get hurt) and to ride for me.  Plus I have other goals like losing weight that

So I'm in the middle of winter with no motivation to ride, getting fat, tired and...unmotivated. The weather in winter typically gets me down - too much rain to ride, too cold to ride, too snowy to ride, too dark to ride, feeling sick,  blah blah blah.... Is this a mild form of depression like Seasonal Affective Disorder.  Some can say that. I think that weather affects me more than most and its easy for me to blame the weather to not go out.  When I force myself to ride, afterwards I think why was it such a struggle to get going in the first place.    During the winter, motivation is fairly elusive for me, and is such a frame of mind for me to overcome.  I understand it may be easy for some people to ride - suns out, lets ride.  For me, thoughts like - you should ride cause your fat; if you don't ride you'll get dropped by your friends; if you don't train, those Strava goals will remain elusive; and you're not getting any younger.  But also on the other side, it

Last year in January 2013, I reviewed a Lynskey Pro29 FS- 120 with 650B wheels -  At the time, Cove Bikes evaluating a new design for a 650B bike and a full suspension frame from Lynskey was sent out for review.  The bike - a FS Pro 29 frameset was built up.  The issue Cove had was that with the new thinking of low bottom bracket heights and slack geometry, the FS was modified to fit this thinking.  The bottom bracket height of the FS was close to 15" unweighted.  and Cove decided to put on a 140mm fork and 650B wheels - lowering the bike's overall center of gravity and slacking the angles.  The ride that was produced was a stable but require more steering input into the steering either by leaning or steering into the corners.  I didn't mind the ride but felt uncomfortable when speed started to pick up.  Check out my first review of the bike Testing out cove lynskey 650b-ti Cove ended up sticking with their tried and true hardtail model ( Cove Hummer 650Bj ) and from the