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The price is right ($23.00), and the product is awesome.

The USA Cycling National Trials Championships at Mount Snow Vermont are over and I’ve been reminiscing a little….  This year there were four total entrants in the competition, but the crowds and excitement level were unlike anything I’ve seen in the USA for a LONG time. 

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The fellas at Meta have a few tricks up their sleeve for 2009…. To make way for the next line of bikes they’ve drastically slashed their prices…

Shipped to your door — Meta 26″ complete for 1100.00!

Shipped to your door — Meta 20″ 360cc for 978.00!

We’ve gotten some complaints that we’re too expensive, and after checking our competition a little more closely I tend to agree!  (By the way, everyone behind the scenes at Trialsin.com has some sort of other full time ‘day’  job — we are a truly rider owned company)

FROM NOW ON — We will match any competitors price on a product that we have in stock, and they have in stock.  Provided that they’ve been in business longer than 1 year.   Just send us a message on the ‘contact us’ page with a link to the other site’s pricing page and we’ll update our pricing that day. 

By this point the UCI World Championships are old news…  Two weeks have passed since Spain dominated and France slid in for the amazing Elite Men’s 26″ victory.   I’ve never witnessed riding of this caliber first hand….it’s almost surreal.  Almost as amazing as the riding was the crowd.  It seemed like the entire town came out to watch everyone compete and ride trials, and they were excited to be there watching!  If a rider was having trouble getting up an obstacle the crowd would start clapping in unison to get him psyched for one last shot!  

After attending, competing, and receiving all 5’s at the World championships I sat and had a think while I was eating my sizeable piece of humble pie.  Oddly enough, I’ve never been one to jump on the latest fad of frame geometry or bar/stem setup, or even wide rims until recently.   Now I’m less stuborn, most all of the advances in trials technology have been to make the bikes more versatile in trials competition.  I see that now.  All these years I was stoked to have a very rideable trials bike, but that is a severely limiting factor when the sections are built such that you’ve got 1 maybe 2 choices on how to attack a given problem.  The sections in the US have much more choice and the ups are generally about 5 inches smaller over here! 

Aside from bike setup there’s a sizeable amount of physical conditioning needed to compete on the world stage at altitude.  I kept wondering why my muscles felt powerless, I thought I was just nervous but it consciously didn’t feel much different than doing a demo in the USA.  Practicing after the comp I noticed that I was sucking wind after like 10 seconds of riding….hello altitude, goodbye sea level. 

Ot Pi (the legend) came up to me on a bridge and shook my hand, he gave me a rye smile and in a sinister voice said, “Welcome to Europe”.   This was about a half hour after Kenny Belaey helped me up after I somehow managed to fall 7.5 feet to my back on a cobble stone street…apparently I forgot how to hop off of things sideways for split second. 

 It was an amazing week, the food was awesome, the riders and locals were super nice, and the scenery was unbelievable.  The first day back in Baltimore was a harsh reality…the shower stunk of chlorine, the scenery was of pavement and cars, there wasn’t a spare 5 minutes that my ears weren’t bombarded with some sort of urban noise…..  Italy reminded me of my home town about 16 or 17 years ago, before all the farmers finally gave up on ever making a profit and cashed out to make way for chain restaurants and housing developments.   I miss those days…and I miss Italy. 

Some pictures are >>here<<

As usual the event was held together by a thin thread. As of the Wednesday before the event we didn’t have a way of transporting the man made obstacles for the dual trials and center-stage section to the event and our insurance hadn’t come through yet! Everything worked out in the end and we ended up having an amazing (although quite hot) weekend. I’m not sure how, but I convinced myself that I could wire in trailer lights to my truck, load all the obstacles and camping gear, and pack my cloths, tools, and bikes for the weekend in 2 hours Thursday evening after work…..HA. Gary, Kelly and I didn’t get on the road until 11:30, to make matters worse the mattress we had tied to the roof kept blowing off and we didn’t have enough tongue weight on the trailer so we couldn’t go over 55mph on the drive into the thick of WV. 4 a.m. Friday morning we arrived to a leery eyed gate watchman and a star filled sky providing just enough light to pitch the tent.

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It’s like I blinked and it’s the beginning of June!  This weekend is the Trialsin @ The 24 hours of Big Bear competition!  We’ll be camping out, competing, and racing dual trials all weekend in West Virginia..garanteed to be full of laughs and fun!    Please do not register online after NOON eastern time on Thursady (we will be leaving for WV and will not have access to the interweb).    Look for some new lines and BIG spectator crowds this year…Laird from GrannyGear is hooking us up big time!

To register click on the ‘Competitions’ link on the left navigation bar.

Here’s the deal –

 Your frame is old, or your just sick of it.

 You should be on a ZHI like some of the top riders in the world.

All you gotta do is order your brand new ZHI Stock or Mod bike frame >>here<< and then send us your old frame.

Sounds lame until you hear that we’ll only charge you 220.00 for the frame plus 12.00 shipping!

>>Check out this page for the rest of the details<<

We’re blowing the VIZ BikeTrial shoes out at our cost!  We ordered way too many so these puppies gotta go.