Tu-be or not tu-be

Coming back to mountain biking after nearly 20 years off meant I had to get up to speed with a few changes. First was the sheer number of types of bike available! Once you've been riding, reading and learning about it for a few months it's not so bad, but wanting to buy a brand new bike with no run-up was pretty overwhelming. Of course nobody agrees on what sort of bike you should get, and working it out from your riding style or local terrain is tricky when you really don't know what either of those things are yet.

Tyre pressures have also become much more important than they once were. Knowing your "ideal" type pressure, and checking it every ride is now essential. There are plenty of online sources that will tell you how to find a good starting point from which to experiment, and the right experiments to run from that point.

This trail is great fun and easy to ride as long as you don't look down

Coupled to that is the introduction of tubeless tyres, and at least here almost everyone seems to be in agreement: tubeless good, tubes bad. So being the curmudgeon I am I naturally decided to run tubes until I found them unbearable. Why? Well, tubeless costs money to set up (tape, sealant, valves, new pump), money to maintain (new sealant every now and then), requires maintenance and seems to in some cases be pretty awkward to get to work. You still have to carry a tube with you in case of tyre failure, and I don't like the idea of spraying sealant all over the woods either. Also most of the commonly mentioned advantages don't (yet?) apply to me. 

I've settled on 22psi in the front tyre and 24psi in the back which has given me more grip than I believed possible. I've been riding a tubed setup since February and am yet to have a puncture. Some of you are probably thinking that I need to ride faster, and I can only say that I'm trying - I'm a lot faster now than I was 6 months ago and still getting better. So although I probably will experiment with a tubeless setup in the future, for the moment I'm sticking with my tubes and I don't think they are holding me back.