 Hey what's up everyone welcome to another video my name is Dylan and I'm a cycling coach at CTS and pro mountain bike racer and I just got a shipment of new bikes from Niner that I'll be building up in this video and I'll talk a little bit about how I set each one up for training versus racing and what other modifications I make to it like bar and stem combo where I try to save weight where I don't try to save weight what my gearing choices are and what power meters I use and recommend for each bike. If you're new to this channel I make weekly training topic and gear related videos like this one going over tips and tricks that I've learned in my 12 years of racing experience that have gotten me to the top of the ultra endurance mountain bike game in the US and as a cycling coach at CTS. If you want to see more training or gear related videos be sure to subscribe to this channel and hit the bell notification so you don't miss anything and if you have a training question or a question about how I set up my bike be sure to leave it in the comments section down below I do my best to get to all the questions in the comments. The three new bikes that I'll be unboxing today are the 2019 Niner Jet9 RDO which is their mid-travel trail bike, the RLT9 RDO which is their carbon gravel bike, and the RKT9 RDO which is their XC race bike. Let's go ahead and jump into the first one which is the Jet9 RDO. I made a whole review video for the Jet9 so if you want to check that out I'll leave the link for it in the description down below. The Jet9 acts as my day in day out training bike. The bike takes a ton of abuse and is put through many miles of riding so reliability and all-day comfort is key. This bike has 130 millimeters of travel up front and 120 in the rear and the reason for choosing a longer travel bike for training is because I live just outside of the Piscot National Forest where I do most of my off-road riding and it's not an XC bike friendly place. In fact most of the locals here would laugh in your face if you showed up to the trailhead on an XC race bike if they weren't also nice. Bro are you seeing this guy? He's about to ride far low on a rigid post and I think those are 2.0 tires. Man I think we should call the ambulance now. This is with good reason though as Piscot has some extremely rugged trails and long rocky rooty blown out descents are the norm here. This is why for my training bike I opt for something with a little bit more travel but I still take this bike on some epic pedals sometimes covering 50 to 70 miles in a single training ride so I don't want something with too much travel that'll be a dog on the climbs. This is the only bike out of the three that I'll run close to stock. It comes with Fox Factory suspension front and rear a SRAM X01 Eagle drivetrain stands flow wheels with Maxis Recon and high roller tires and a race face bar and stem combo. I even stick to the stock nine or saddle and grips which is rare for me because I usually switch the saddle to something that I've spent a ton of time on that I know is comfortable. I'll probably cut the bars to match the width of my XC bike which is 780 millimeters which is pretty wide by XC standards but I've gotten really used to the wider bars and I've come to really like them. The SDG dropper post is new to me this year so I'm eager to try it out and see how it works. If you aren't in the dropper seat post camp yet then I suggest that you get with the times because it'll change the way you ride. I even run a dropper on my XC race bike for racing but I'll get to that later in the video. The only significant modification I'll make to this bike is I'll throw my SRAM XX1 Eagle Quark power meter on there to collect power data. Here's an interesting tidbit. The crank I have is a BB-30 and the new bike comes with the SRAM dub bottom bracket and crank and it turns out that you can fit a right side BB-30 crank onto a left side dub crank and this is what I plan to do with this bike. I have to make a disclaimer though I haven't thoroughly tested this setup and I don't know if doing this will void any warranties so use caution before throwing your BB-30 power meter on your dub crank. I'll probably check back in a future video to let you guys know how the setup is working. Let's move on to the RLT9 RDO. This is Niners Carbon Gravel Bike and is the bike I raced at Dirty Conza last year amongst other endurance gravel races. For the most part though I use this bike as a road slash training rig. The majority of my intervals are done on this bike as well as hard road group rides and the occasional race. The bike comes set up with a Shimano 105 group set and a Stan's No Tubes Grail wheel set with Schwawe G1 gravel tires. On this bike I'll make quite a few modifications to set it up for me. For example the bike comes with wide flared out gravel handlebars and I'll switch this out for narrower more traditional road style handlebars along with a 100 millimeter negative 17 degree stem. This puts the bars where I like them to be on a road bike and if I do any gravel racing it puts my body in a more aerodynamic position. I'll also switch out the seat post and saddle. The saddle I run is an old specialized phenom and it looks absolutely awful at this point but it's just too comfortable to get rid of. Being that I do most of my intervals on this bike a power meter on this bike is definitely a necessity and the one I go with is the Quark D0 Aluminum. Quark is usually what I recommend when people ask me what power meter they should get. It's extremely reliable and more accurate than some of the one-sided power meters out there. Yeah it's not the cheapest option but in my opinion it's well worth the money. I actually use standard road gearing on this bike so a 53 tooth big chain ring and a 39 tooth small chain ring because I do most of my riding on this bike on the road and even in gravel races I like having the bigger chain rings. At Dirty Conza for example there were multiple times when I was either going downhill or had a tailwind when I was in that 5311 and the 53 tooth was part of what helped me win a sprint finish at the end of the race to seal a top 10 on the day. Now if you know me you know I have no business winning any sort of sprint ever unless maybe that sprint is at the end of a 200 mile gravel race and I have a 53 tooth chain ring and the guy I'm sprinting against has a 44 tooth single ring. The rear cassette is an 11 to 32 tooth and I find that this gives me plenty of range even for gravel racing. I do love my single chain ring setups on my mountain bikes but for gravel racing I really have a hard time giving up that top end gear. For tires I run the Schwabbi G1s for gravel or if I'm doing some more chunky gravel like in Pisca I have run wider like the specialized 1.8 renegades. The vast majority of the time though I just have road tires on like the 25 millimeter Conti Gator skins just because they're reliable and I never flat with them. So what modifications do I make on race day? Well by far the biggest one is the wheels. For racing I'll run a deep section carbon wheel like these Boyd Pinnacles for improved aerodynamics and weight savings. I also may switch out the pedals depending on the course. I usually run a cheap pair of Shimano road pedals for day to day training but for racing I may switch that out for something lighter like the Crank Brothers Eggbeater. The seatpost I use is also a KCNC which is quite a bit lighter than the stock seatpost. If I was more of a gravel racer I would certainly invest more into some of the other components on the bike like the bar and stem or the drivetrain or maybe get some carbon cranks to lighten it up but seeing as I only do two or three gravel races a year it's really not worth it to me to deck out my gravel bike especially since this thing is mainly a training rig and reliable parts are more important to me on this bike than lightweight ones. I almost forgot the most important modification that I make to my gravel bike on race day and that is these guys right here. Now arrow bars for gravel have been stirring up a lot of controversy and I can see why but in case you aren't aware of how much faster they are let's jump over to bikecalculator.com. Let's take the most popular gravel race in the world which is the Dirty Kansa which by the way arrow bars have won there in the men's field for the past two years and let's say that you can only actually ride in the arrow bars for a fourth of that race because the rest of the time you'll either be drafting or climbing or descending and you'll need your hands in either the drops or the hoods. So that's 50 miles and according to a quick calculation on bikecalculator.com that would save you 22 minutes. This is not an insignificant amount of time at all. At a race like Dirty Kansa 20 minutes could be 20 places or more. Now obviously these are super rough calculations but the point is we're talking about tens of minutes here. Dude what are those things on your bars man? You totally botched your bike. I didn't know we were about to race triathlon. You plan on going sockless as well? Yeah arrow bars may not look cool but you want to know what's cooler than looking cool? Going faster period. I plan on making a whole video to crush this notion that arrow bars are somehow uncool for gravel and mountain bike racing so stay tuned for that. The arrow bars that I use are just some cheap no-name carbon ones but they've actually worked really well and they're surprisingly light at around 300 grams. I'll leave the link for those in the description below if you want to try them out. And finally we have the Niner RKT9 RDO. This bike is my main race bike and as such I probably spend the least amount of time on it. I use it for racing obviously and then race specific training days like intervals on trails or race starts and that's it. The majority of the time when I'm headed out the door for a mountain bike ride I'll take the Jet 9. That being said I do set this bike up differently for training and racing. The bike comes with a 120 millimeter Fox 34 step cast and I run this in training but for the majority of races I'll run the lighter Fox 32 step cast. There are exceptions to this however like when I'm racing in Piska I'll stick with the 34. I run a KS Lev dropper post all the time even in racing. On rare occasions I'll run a straight post but that's not typical at all. For training I stick with the stock stance arch aluminum wheels but for racing I'll switch this out for a carbon wheel set like the stance crest CV7s. I try to train and race on the same tires on this bike so that I'm used to them for race day. That's usually some sort of maxis tire like the recon race or the icon or the aspen. This is one area where I do not try to save weight. I always go with tires that have sidewall protection regardless of the course especially since the races that I do are really long and a lot can go wrong in 50 to 100 miles. Saving 50 grams in your tires won't be faster when you're stuck on the side of the trail putting a tube in. For pedals I run a cheap pair of Shimano's for training and then for racing I'll switch that out to either a pair of Shimano XTRs or if I'm trying to be a real weight weenie Crank Brothers Eggbeater 11s. Having a power meter on this bike is a must. Using a power meter for ultra endurance racing is super helpful for pacing yourself on climbs and it can let you know when things are about to go horribly wrong from a blowing up or a bonking standpoint. I go with the same power meter I mentioned earlier, the Quirk XX1 Eagle. In fact I swapped the same crank between the Jet and the RKT. I usually run a 34 tooth chainring with a 10 to 50 tooth Eagle cassette in the back. The bars and stem are the Niner Carbon RDO with 100 millimeter stem length and 780 millimeter bar width. The weight of the bike can vary a lot depending on how I have it built up but if I go full weight weenie mode in its lightest configuration it can be just under 22 pounds and then in full training mode it's around 26 pounds. Thanks for watching and I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Let me know down in the comments section what modifications you make to your bike for training versus racing and if you like this video be sure to give it a like share with a friend and subscribe for more training and gear related videos. If you're looking for more coaching and racing related content be sure to follow me on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and if you want to follow my training leading into this upcoming season be sure to check me out on Strava. Finally, if you're looking for a coach shoot me an email at djonsonatrainright.com