Enjoying my Honda CRF450X

Torn between small and agile and big and brutal, just as the sportsbike riding world is split between 600cc's and 1000cc's, so the enduro rider has a simple choice of 250cc or 450cc. The perceived wisdom is comparable too: 600cc sportsbike pilots, like off-road 250cc riders, talk of supreme agility, the 'Ëœright' amount of power and of listen, secretly admit the little guys may have a point, but feel vindicated every time they put the throttle on the stop.

I bought a Honda CRF450X a few months back and apparently it's a classic mistake: road-rider, new to the dirt, buys a nuclear 450 and spends his time pulling hedge and shattered bones from his riding gear.

Certainly looking around the other semi-off-road riders in Thailand, the numbers seemed stacked against me. I couldn't move like a four-stroke 250, the 250's seem hardly touching the ground, as I seem to dig deeper and deeper. But last Sunday I wouldn't have traded my bike for any other. The during the raining season so slippery dirt roads are now much better, changing the rural road in dusty fire tracks, the CRF450 was in its element. In three months of mud based practice and riding bike what was best compared by swimming a river I hadn't found the space or the balls to hold the Honda flat out.

It is a pleasure to find out why humans invented enduro bikes... loving it..