As we all know after reading my previous post, sleep is important, but there are things that are preventing sleep. Mainly technology. I admit to reading my emails before I get out of bed in the morning. Which are you guilty of?
Archives For Sharing
2013 Zee
Pros:
- Inexpensive
- Good power
- Able to use finned Shimano Pads
- Good Adjustability
- Easy Bleeding
Cons:
- Inconsistent “biting point”
- Need allen key to adjust lever position
- If you like your brake lever close to the handlebar, you’ll have to take the break off and pump it a few times because the lever seems to gradually move itself in in the close position.
2013 Saint M820
Pros:
- Great power
- Full and tool free lever adjustability
- Easy bleeding
- More consistent power and “biting point”
Cons:
- Expensive
- Can’t buy individual parts (i.e. bladder, seal kit)
Bottom Line
Both the Zee’s and Saint brakes work great. Bleeding is quick and easy, and they both come with Shimano’s new finned brake pads that distribute heat better than the standard pads. If you are an average rider who gets out to the park on weekends or even hard-core riders who race over the summer months, Shimano Zee brakes are an excellent choice. They are very adjustably and offer good stopping power. If you are racing every single weekend and are serious about it, then maybe spending the extra money to get the Saint M820’s might be worth it because of the increased consistency in power and strength.
In Depth Review
After opening the package from TBS Bike Parts, I was instantly excited to put my new Shimano Zee brakes on my bike. After riding a week or so with my old Avid Elixers, I realized that they weren’t giving me the stopping power that I needed. I had never really cared much about my brakes until this past year. As long as they worked moderately well, I was fine with it. Racing changed that though. As odd as it might seem to non-bikers, good brakes actually make you faster. It allows you to slow down quicker in turns and also makes it easier to drift in the steep corners. I wasn’t getting that luxury with the Elixers.
Zee First Impression: I put the Zee’s on my Demo 8 and they looked great. I couldn’t wait to hop on my bike and try them out. After riding around in the parking garage, I noticed that compared to the Elixers, they seemed to feel like they needed to be bled, but once you pulled the levers, they stopped quite quickly. My brother who had been using Shimano Saint since the beginning of the year assured me that it was just the way that Shimano brakes felt. I was quite annoyed that they didn’t feel like I Imagined or wanted them to feel, but I was still excited to actually use them on the trails.
Saint M820 First Impressions: I wouldn’t have gone with Shimano Saint brakes if they didn’t come on the bike that I’ve been riding for almost a month now. They felt quite similar to the Zee brakes, but they seemed to catch and lock quicker and easier than the Zee’s. I also didn’t have to take the brake off and pump the calipers together every day. For the most part, the levers stay where you leave them.
First Days With Zee’s: Unfortunately, we had a sudden down pour at Silverstar and my first day on these breaks were in muddy, cold, and wet conditions. After getting the first couple “adjustment runs” as I call them, I was ready to see what they could really do. My brother and I decided to go down one of the steeper trails on Silverstar called Downtown. The brakes worked great compared to the Elixers. They weren’t squeaky or loud in the rain, and my previous issues about them being soft and not being able to stop was put to rest. Compared to the Elixers, the bike stopped much quicker and there wasn’t as much of the tires slowing down before they started to skid. As the park dried out, the brakes continued to feel better and better as I got used to them.
First Days With Saints: The same was true with testing the Saint brakes at Whistler. It was muddy, really cold, and wet. I found that I couldn’t bring the levers in as much on the Saint’s as I could with the Zee’s, but It was far enough for me, plus didn’t need an Alen Key to do it. I found that the second adjustment, the free stroke, on the Saint that the Zee didn’t have didn’t actually do much. The Saint’s seemed to grab and stop quicker than the Zee’s and had equal if not more power.
Dislikes Zee: Over time, I noticed that every day I had to take the brake off the rotor and pump the lever to bring the lever out. Now I like the lever pretty close to the handlebars unlike most people. If you like your brakes close, you’ll have this problem. Even after multiple bleeds, the calipers seem to push themselves back into the brake housing if you like your brakes close to the handlebars. If you keep the levers out, they work great and you don’t need to do this.
Dislikes Saint: Unlike the Zee’s, taking the brake off the rotor and pumping the lever to bring the calipers closer together didn’t work. I read on a forum that you had to bleed them without the bleed block and the calipers pushed slightly together or shave down your bleed block. I tried doing this and it worked. The brakes were perfectly set up how I wanted them. I have also just recently broke (ie: hitting a tree at high speed) my rear brake lever and unfortunately, I have to buy a whole new brake. Nobody sells the individual lever assembly.
In conclusion, both the Zee’s and Saint brakes work great. Bleeding is quick and easy and isn’t required as often as Avid brakes. I will have a video showing you how to bleed Saint brakes, but the procedure is exactly the same on the Zee’s. Both Zee’s and Saint M820’s come with Shimano’s new finned brake pads that distribute heat better than the standard ones, but they are quite a bit more expensive. I have also been experimenting with Brake Authority brake pads and I will soon be comparing those to the standard Shimano pads in a future post. If you are just a normal rider who gets out to the park on weekends or even hard-core riders who race over the summer months, Shimano Zee brakes are an excellent choice. They have great power, good adjustably, and they have good stopping power. If you are racing every single weekend and are serious about it, then maybe spending the extra money to get the Saint M820’s might be worth it because of the increased consistency in power and strength.
Yesterday, a few friends and I and took the forty minute drive to Squamish to do some shuttling. They had been there before, but my brother and I never have. We met up with some other people from Whistler and started driving up the road past Quest University.
It was about 10 minutes to the top of the our warm up run called Cake Walk. It was a nice easy technical run with a couple drops and jumps. Some parts of the trail didn’t drain well and there was quite a lot of water, but for the most part, the conditions were good.
After dumping out of Cake Walk, we made the 8-10 minute hike to Full Nelson, a trail used in the film Strength In Numbers. That was probably my favorite overall run of the day, even though we only did it once. It was smooth and had lots of good berms and jumps. I did find that you really had to keep your speed up or you’d have to pedal to keep a good flow, which didn’t happen because there were four people ahead of me and only one of them had ever ridden that trail. Full Nelson dumped right into Half Nelson which was pretty much just a smaller version of Full Nelson, hence the name. That dumped us out onto a parking lot about a third up the mountain.
We shuttled the bumpy road all the way to the top to get to a trail called Grin and Holler. About 500 Meters from the trailhead, we hit snow. I had never ridden in the snow on my DH bike so I was kind of excited. We pushed up to the trail and found that it had been ridden a little bit so at least we could see where we were suppose to go. It was quite steep and technical and me being new to clipless shoes didn’t help much. The trail had two mandatory high skinnies that you couldn’t ride around, one of which I fell off (walking it). After that, the trail seemed to get easier and less steep.
Right at the end of the trail was the best part of my day. Big manmade jumps. There were four wooden lipped gaps that I couldn’t wait to put my tires on them. After walking down and looking at all of them, the only one I was really worried about was the first one because it had a wood landing which was almost as high as the take off. First jump was about 15-18 feet, second was about 22′ third was at least 27′ and the last one, depending where you landed was 35+. I dropped in, hitting all of them the first go, which I didn’t think I’d do, but the jumps were built perfectly and judging the speed was easy. I overshot the last one by quite a bit, but It wasn’t a big deal because the landing was so long. Only three out of the six of us did them and we pushed back up three more times because they were so much fun.
The last trail of the day we decided to do all of Half Nelson because we had only done half of it when we did Full Nelson. The top half of the trail is pretty much the same as the bottom. The top was a little more technical, but it turned into smooth flowy goodness real fast. Again, I was behind two people, so I couldn’t go as fast and keep a good flow going. You’d think I would have learned by now, eh? Everybody was too tired to do another run, so we rode down the road back to Squamish. It wasn’t as steep as we had thought so we actually did a lot of pedaling (oops).
The thing I learned about riding Squamish is that you’re going to have to hike up no matter what trail you do, so if you’re used to riding park, you’re not gonna like it. It is DEFINITELY worth the hike, though. Just make sure to bring lots of water.
Last jump on Grin And Holler. It’s a biggie!
A little while ago, I ran across a post on a website that had a height-to-size chart of the 2012 Demo 8 and I saw that the size of bike that I was riding was way too small. A medium frame is suppose to work for a rider who was up to 5’11” and not me who’s around 6’2″. I thought about this for a while and realized that a longer bike would help with stability at high speeds and help me not be so “over the bars”. I sort of started looking for a larger bike on the Buy and Sell page of Pinkbike. My brother actually sent me a link to a Commencal race bike which I had researched a little bit. I messaged the owner asking about sizes and when I could possibly take a look at the bike.
Kyle Sangers
On Friday, I went to look at it. A Commencal Supreme DH World Cup. Pretty long name, eh? The person selling it and he told me he was the owner/manager of Perform X Racing. Little did I know that the bike that I would be looking at would be used by Kyle Sanger on two UCI Downhill World Cup races.
I went to parking lot 4 here in Whistler on a rainy and cold friday and connected with Todd Schumlick, who I had previously read about in an article on Pinkbike. I didn’t recognize him at first and only did because he talked about that article. He pulled the beautiful looking bike out of his van and proceeded to tell me pretty much EVERYTHING about it, which was good. I asked some questions about the bike and about his team and I told him I’d talk to my dad about the bike when he came up from Vancouver that night. Surprisingly when I talked with my Dad, he said we should go for it (which made me very happy and unable to sleep that night). We stopped by the bank on the way to Pemberton early Saturday morning to go and meet Todd at his house. After a couple hours of very helpful advise and conversation (enough to fill an entire blog post), we walked away with the bike, as well as extra parts.
We made the drive back to Whistler and started to move all of the parts off of my brother’s bike to my Demo which he is now using. The process, I thought, would only take a couple of hours. We ended up being in the underground parking garage for over 6 hours swapping parts, bleeding brakes, and setting up the bikes. We had a small collection of tools in our apartment that we used, but my Dad had to make around 7 or 8 trips to the trailer on the other side of the village for parts and tools that we needed. Luckily, he saw this as exercise and didn’t mind it. After bleeding the new Saint Brakes and changing out the expensive and super tacky Schwalbe race tires with Maxxis Minions, the new bike was finished.
We went to Vedder Mountain to ride a couple of trails that we heard of. The two trails that we did were really good! I’ll go into more detail about the trails later when I get some good GoPro footage, but here are the directions and some pictures on how to find the place. Because we found it a little bit tricky…
From Trans-Canada Highway 1 Westbound, take Vedder Rd exit and go south on Vedder Rd. Go all the way down on Vedder Rd and cross the Vedder River Bridge, and turn left towards Cultus Lake on Columbia Valley Highway (Rd.) Go down on the road until you see the Vedder Mountain FSR (Forestry Service Road), called Parmenter Rdand turn right onto it. Go up Parmenter until you see the 1st gate (past the gravel pit about 500m) and turn right on the road before the gate. Depending if you are leaving your truck at the gate or taking it up and hiking to get it. Go up the gravel road until you see the Dilemma trailhead (sign posted) and start from there. Then enjoy the trail.
After the BC cup race in Golden which I was unable to do because my head wasn’t feeling up to it, we went to Whistler for the week before Crankworx. It was really dry and dusty and the trails were pretty blown out, but we still had a good time. We also got to do the Air Dome twice and I landed my first backflip! I think it’s always a kids dream as a mountain biker to do a backflip and I had a pretty cool feeling after I landed it first try. If someone told me last year that I would be able to do a backflip, I probably wouldn’t believe them!
Watership Down and the Displaced People in Our World.
Levi Harapnuik
Tree of Life
June 30, 2012
Watership Down, written by Richard Adams, is an adventurous story of some very brave and inquisitive rabbits that are outcasts from their own warren. They chose to leave and to find a new place to live. Hunted by predators and other rabbits they have to learn to survive in the wilderness while looking for a new, safe home. Facing harsh weather, predator attacks, and trying to get along, they embark on the journey of their lives. Watership Down is an example of the plight of displaced people in our world in that the characters in the story, when in search for a new home, experience danger in the hopes of finding freedom.
A displaced person is a person who has been forced to leave his or her native place. The rabbits in this story knew they needed to leave because one of them envisioned something very bad was going to happen. Fiver had a feeling, “but it’s not exactly danger that I seem to feel about the place. It’s–oh, I don’t know–something oppressive, like thunder: I can’t tell you what; but it worries me.” From a reader’s perspective, we know that they were going to be displaced by a housing development.
An example in history would be the Jews during WWII. Some knew something was going to happen to them because they saw it in their cities and towns so they decided to leave. The rabbits from Hazel’s home warren died from being gassed in their burrows and the Jews that stayed were caught and gassed in chambers. Their own warren wouldn’t listen to Fiver and Hazel’s warnings so they had to take whoever would come and escape to face other problems along the way.
They met up with another warren with strong, healthy rabbits. These rabbits were nice at first and showed them their interesting way of life. The warren filled with big healthy rabbits was confusing to Fiver and Hazel. It seemed that somebody put food for them in a field not too far away. “Sometimes there is nothing at all, especially in good summer weather. But in hard weather, in winter, there’s nearly always something.” They sometimes carried food back to the burrows for easier feeding and in case there was bad weather. Hazel and his companions found this weird at first but eventually came to see that it was a good idea.
Fiver had a feeling that something was wrong. Once in awhile, a farmer would trap one of them. He put the food out as bait and he was careful only to trap one every so often as not to scare the other ones away. The healthy rabbits were complacent. As long as it wasn’t their turn to be snared, they didn’t care. Hazel didn’t understand Fiver’s feelings and tried to convince him to stay. “No, said Fiver very quickly. You are closer to death than I.” Hazel decided to trust Fiver because he had been right in the past.
They also were in danger of the Efrafan rabbits. Many other rabbits tried and failed at escaping and it was very dangerous. The Efrafan warren had plenty of rabbits, lots of land and they were very organized, but the bad things outweigh the good. The leadership was very authoritarian. Once you were in, you could not get out. When Bigwig realized that, “they thought of us as their prisoners,” it shook him awake for him to realize what was happening.
If a person was taken away from everything they’ve known and are looking for a place to feel comfortable, Efrafa would seem like a good place to stay. If the person was welcomed and lead to feel like they were needed, they would want to stay. They would be willing to give up their freedom to gain food, shelter, and security. If there are strict rules, it would give a sense of security to a person if they were in danger. But, as in Burma, “many in opposition are either imprisoned or killed. In most of the country there is a false peace due to the dictators’ ability to control dissent”. This would lead to a false feeling of home.
The rabbits also faced danger from man. The rabbits from the home warren were killed by men just because they were in the way of the housing development. In the big healthy warren, the men tried to catch and snare the rabbits a few at a time. Hazel also rescued four rabbits hutch rabbits that belonged to humans and almost got caught and killed for trying to help them escape.
Displaced people face many predators. Women and children are especially vulnerable. “Around 58% of the displaced population are women. In welfare centres, women have been subject to sexual harassment, abuse and rape by the security forces and paramilitary groups as well as by other men. Women are also affected by domestic violence. ” “Children displaced by both natural disasters and conflicts are often more susceptible to recruitment by armed forces.” Human predators are the most dangerous.
The group of rabbits had some problems overcoming obstacles while traveling. They had to do things that rabbits don’t usually do like swim across a river. “Like all wild animals, rabbits can swim if they have to: And some even swim when it suits them. …But most rabbits avoid swimming.” They had to endure rain, lack of food and rest. “There is nothing like bad weather to reveal the shortcomings of a dwelling, particularly if it is too small.” They didn’t always get along or a agree on everything. “Cold and damp, Hazel felt impatient. He had always been accustomed to rely on Fiver and now, when he really needed him, he was letting them down… they had an anxious time and were all weary.” It was also hard finding shelter sometimes.
Displaced Rwandans had a similar problem. “There were thousands of makeshift shelters along rural roads. Many have walls of leaves and soil and roofs of plastic sheeting giving very limited protection against rain and temperatures which can drop to 10C.” Displaced Somalis found help from the U.N, supplying emergency shelter items, to these people they can be life-saving: plastic sheets so they can put a roof over their head, blankets and sleeping mats so they can sleep and put their children down, jerry cans for water and kitchen sets, pots, pans, plates and cutlery.” This gives the displaced people more hope for a new home.
As displaced rabbits, once Hazel and his companions got to Watership Down, they thought everything would be ok. Watership Down was easily defensible, had good food, a good burrow, and was far away from Efrafa and other warrens so that they wouldn’t have to worry about getting attacked. They brought more rabbits from Efrafa back with them so that they could have a bigger warren. Any displaced person would want the same thing. A safe place to live, food and water, and far enough away from enemies. They also would want companionship; someone else who was going through the same thing to go with them on their journey.
Watership Down is a novel about displaced rabbits and can be compared to displaced people in our world and what they might go through. Displaced people can face danger from anywhere at any time, whether prepared or unprepared, displacement is hard no matter what. Nothing can prevent it from happening, but it’s a thing that nobody should go through. Never let the hope to live in freedom die.
Bibliography
Adams, Richard George. Watership Down. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc, 1972.
“Burma Overview.” 2007 Free Burma Rangers Online.
http://www.freeburmarangers.org/Features/burma_overview.html
“Displacement, Natural Disasters, and Human Rights.” October 17, 2008. Online. http://www.brookings.edu/research/speeches/2008/10/17-natural-disasters-ferris
Ensuring durable solutions for Rwanda’s displaced people: a chapter closed too early
www.internal-displacement.org/…/Rwanda_indepth_report_July_05
“The Refugee Council”, September 2003, p.26
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displaced_person
Levi Harapnuik
June 24 2012
The Development of a Young Man in The Cay
God sometimes wants to teach us things that we wouldn’t know if he didn’t give us that little push. We need to be pushed to do some things that we don’t necessarily want to do at the time. It might turn out well and you end up enjoying it and being glad that you tried something new. Sometimes he pushes us to take risks and guides us in directions that we don’t know where they lead, but there is always a reason. Just like Philip in The Cay, written by Theodore Taylor, God sometimes drags us kicking and screaming toward change in our lives to learn about other people, to learn new things and to learn about ourselves.
Philip thought that the black people in his town were weird and he didn’t want to be around them that much. It was sad that Philip had to be stranded on an island fighting to survive and lose a close friend, Timothy, who was a black, for him to realize that the blacks weren’t weird or strange at all. After what happened on the island, when he came back home he started to befriend the black people and hang around them more. He considered them friends. They were really good people. He learned about other people and the sacrifices of which they were capable.
Philip was taken out of his normal environment onto an island with a person he knew nothing about and was forced to learn to adapt to his surroundings. He learned how to fish, survive on his own in the wilderness, how to tell when bad storms were coming, and tell what the weather was like. Timothy left behind some useful tools so that Philip could go on living without him like the rope he put up for Philip to move around the camp and to fish. He also learned a lot about himself and what he could physically and mentally endure on the island.
Philip changed over the time he spent on the island. At first he was just a curious kid that got into trouble quite a bit and didn’t listen to his parents that much. He went from his comfortable life in the city to being blind on a raft with somebody he didn’t even know. He was really scared and disorientated. He also was angry about losing his eyesight and not being able to see a single thing he was doing, but eventually he got over the anger. It was hard enough being on that island, without many supplies, but with his injuries and disabilities, it took a lot of strength and courage from both Philip and Timothy. After Timothy died, Philip had a lot of determination, the skills, and the courage to live on his own until he was rescued.
God sometimes brings tragedies to our lives to learn about other people, to learn new things and to learn about ourselves. Philip experienced these tough times and it changed him into a better, more mature young man. When we’re going through tough times is usually when we can learn the most about ourselves and other people. So when tough times are ahead, we should think of what we could learn.