Picked up a pair of the Sam Hill shoes because I was having a ton of foot pain. I started looking for a stiffer shoe and the Sam Hill's fit the bill. Normally I ride the FiveTen's Freerides and love them but my feet have been taking a pounding riding DH every weekend. After the 3 day and 86 mile Bike n Brew I was wrecked from top to bottom. After a week of recovery my feet were stilled killing me.
So after one ride at Killington I can say no increase (not none) foot pain. The shoes are wide which makes pedal placement difficult, which should not be a thing a few more rides in. The stiffness kills sensitivity which is pretty important to me but not at the cost of crazy sore feet all the time.
I love the protection of the toe box, feels like steel toes boots. I will be saving these for days at the DH Park as they are heavy and really designed as a gravity shoe.
Ill UPDATE in the future after I get some more rides in.
I have added the Rylo to my arsenal of cameras. Really hoping it will be a valuable tool and provide my channel with something unique. I have only played with it very briefly and I think it will take some time to get it dialed in and learn how best to use it.
So far it seems like there are lots of small drawbacks, short record times, no external battery charger, the need for High Capacity and High Speed ($) SD cards. Time will tell.
Update:
So I have the Rylo for a couple weeks. I have purchased the Adventure case and 2 128 GB SD cards and 2 more batteries (4 total now). With the 128 SD I get 233 minutes of record time which is really enough for a day of riding. The battery situation is not great but not terrible either. 2 Batteries lasted most of a day at Killington and some download time on the ride home. Two more and I should be good. Charging is still an issue as I will have to swap them all in and out. :(
We did some follow cam and it is awesome!! Really really good at getting the rider behind. I did some more hip shots but it was not placed well so ended with a bunch of footage of my elbow. I am going to work on getting it mounted on my upper thigh and hopes that will work better.
Editing is a Pain and Awesome. So the process is you really have to do an edit on the phone. So you watch the video, do some edits, save the video to the phone, air drop it the mac, add to video folder, import to mac editor. Took me days to get through the footage from a day at the park. The phone editor is really good though, just a time consuming process.
Been having a blast ripping the DH parks so far this season. With 6 days already spent DHing my progress has been awesome. Picked up where I left off last year and have made some significant improvements in my jumping skill. I have been putting in a few "shorter" days at Killington just due to life being busy. Its been an awesome start and as long as I can avoid injury it will be a sick season.
The YT Tues has been a big game changer and probably the most beneficial aspect to riding a Big Bike is that its a lot more forgiving to my body. Its also super fun due to the higher speeds achievable. It ups the ante for the crash factor but its been a fair trade off. The bike is mostly dialed in but I need to continue to tweak settings to hopefully get it perfect.
I have a Rylo cam on order that should be here mid week. I'm hoping it adds an element to my videos that will help elevate them to the next level. The footage I have seen looks great but I am not seeing that many MTB folks using them in new or creative ways and the reviews as a MTB POV has not been that positive. Fingers Crossed on the Rylo.
I am hoping that when Jennifer heals up we can get some time at Kingdom and I would love to get back to Vietnam and Beebe Hill. I am also really hoping she's cool with the new bike that I bought. I blame 90% of her injury on the bike she was riding. So with a new ride that is capable of the trails we ride I am really hoping she can mentally get past the injury and continue on the path she started this season on. She had been making major skills and confidence improvements.
Jennifer has been killing it this spring. She road her first teeter at North Bethlehem and first log skinny at Lippman. She was excited to do more and push herself to improve. We headed up to Placid's Lussi & Loggers where there are a lot of skinnies and one big teeter. On the way up I was thinking with the bad weather (raining on and off) we should check out Hardy Rd for something new. We did a 5 loop at Hardy before heading to Lussi. We got to Lussi about 2 and I headed straight for the teeter. She easily rode the teeter with no hesitation and continued on to the following log skinny. It's complicated to get up on and be pointed down the log. As soon as she was up, she was down. Collarbone Broken!
We are over a week in and she had surgery yesterday. Hopefully she can be back on the bike in about 6 weeks. At this point I am 100% convinced that if she had been on a different bike it would not have happened. So I think a new bike is in the near future.