Geometry for starters.
I know about geometry now because I've done a whole lot of reading on the subject of 'things you need to know before buying a bike' that I didn't get around to doing before I bought the Mongoose. If I had done all of that reading then, I might have been a bit wary of the really quite forward body position demanded of the rider by the Mongoose Hilltopper.
It's an excellent body position for climbing hills apparently on account of it keeping your weight over the front wheel which stops it lifting off the ground and presumably flipping you over backwards as you grind up whatever hill you are 'topping'. Which is good and all, but I don't spend all of my time grinding up hills (in fact I try to spend as little time as possible grinding up anything) and when you're just rolling along the flat, or even more noticeably, riding down a steep and rocky trail, you tend to get a fair old workout on your wrists and forearms.
I've made a few alterations over the years in an effort to ameliorate this tendency, new handle bars being the chief one, without much success. All in all, it's something I might have paid more attention to when I was riding it around the Dee Why Cyclery's back carpark in '97 thinking - 'This is pretty cool but I wonder if my wrists are supposed to hurt after 3 minutes of this'.
To show I have fully learnt my lesson from this I am building my NEW bike without the benefit of any kind of test ride at all.
Um.
Regardless of that minor quibble I have had the Mongoose now for nearly 20 years and it continues to serve with distinction. And like the man who deliberately does all of his training for the big race with a 20kg pack on his back just so he'll go so much faster when he takes it off, I reckon the limited selection of gears (compared to modern bikes) and not exactly featherlight weight of the Mongoose will serve me in good stead when I hop on my new bike....whatever that ends up looking like.
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