Canyon Nerve AL 9.9

Point taken but it was like a red rag to a bull, and we signed up pretty much on the spot. My beloved road bike was relegated to the back of the shed whilst I duly set about researching and then preparing for the Cristalp, my main issue being what bike to ride for an event like this.

When you are looking at 6 hours of climbing, if you’re quick about it, with an average gradient of 10 percent, over a mixture of fire road, Alpine meadow and single track, one starts to lust after the lightest and skinniest carbon hardtail 29er money can buy. But how then to contend with the 3 hours of rocky, bone shaking white knuckle downhill that makes up the rest of the Cristalp experience? Surely some nice, fat, full suspension is called for if you want to avoid at best long-term osteoporosis or at worst a long painful stay in an expensive, gleaming Swiss medical clinic.

Canyon Nerve AL 9.9

Queue a lot of research into the relative merits of various bikes, and endless conversations with bike nerds far and wide about what compromise to make. I even went so far as to record times and heart rate on both a carbon hardtail 29er and a full suspension 26″ bike, up and down the best and worst I could find around Leith Hill and the surrounding area. The results were inconclusive; what goes up fast tends to come down slower, and vice versa. It was around this time that I started thinking that I needed to combine the two and the proposed solution, courtesy of Canyon, arrived the day before I was due to leave for a holiday in France… The Nerve AL 9.9.

Nerve AL 9.9’s fourlink rear suspension and Fox Float CTD Performance Boost Valve rear shock

Here we have a bike that definitely offers the promise of the best of both worlds. A full suspension bike that is light (well, at 12kg relatively light compared to the competition), well equipped and most importantly a 29er. By that I mean that the wheels are, well, pretty damn big.

Canyon Nerve has a XT drivetrain with 2 x 10

The Nerve has a modern hydroform aluminium frame, known as Hydro14, as its produced in 14 reforming stages to optimise the stiffness-to-weight ratio and reduce the number of welded seams and gussets to further save weight. For extra stiffness it has a tapered head tube to 1 1/2 inch with Cane Creek headset and thru-axles front and rear.