My commute to work today made me think about a recent Old Coot article we published a few issues ago. The idea of the article was that you don’t need to ride new and different trails all the time. Sometimes it’s fun and challenging to ride trails closer to home that you’ve ridden several times in the past.

My ride today took a slightly different twist on this, but the idea is similar. It started off much like any other day that I ride to work, except that I wasn’t riding my normal commuter bike, a Surly Cross-Check. I was on a full suspension Foes Racing 2:1 XCT-4. Most people would think that riding on mostly roads for a 13 mile one-way commute on a full suspension mountain bike with some pretty aggressive knobby tires is just plain stupid. It was actually one of the most fun days I’ve had commuting to work.

I ride from downtown Pittsburgh out into the suburbs to Dirt Rag HQ, and on the way pass by lots of stairways, curbs, walls and other obstacles that I usually try to avoid on my regular commuter bike. Today was different. I hopped ramped curbs, flew down stairways and basically launched off of just about anything I could find. It was so much fun I almost didn’t make it to the office.

To be sure, it wasn’t my fastest commute and I wouldn’t want to ride a full suspension bike every day. But riding a different bike made a great new adventure out of a ride I’ve made literally hundreds of times. I’m looking forward to doing it again.

Look for more on the Foes 2:1 XCT-4 test in an upcoming issue of Dirt Rag.