(Business 2.0) – You don't want to hear about my bike ride. I'm willing to guess you don't want to hear about anybody's bike ride, unless it involves a chimp. Or one of those antique bikes with a really big wheel. So I'm going to tell you not about the ride but about the bike. Partially this is out of karmic interference; Power Toys has been reviewing a lot of SUVs of late. And partially this is because the bike in question, a wonder called the Santa Cruz Blur, is a breakthrough not seen since, well, bikes with one really big wheel.

Even if it were not the toast of the mountain-biking world, the Santa Cruz Blur would be worthy of a long look for a number of reasons. The base-model Blur costs $2,280; loaded with top-of-the-line brakes, derailleurs, shifters, and so on, it can set you back $4,495. Admittedly, this is some $32,000 less than the vehicle we reviewed last month, but nonetheless it is, for a bike, a fair amount of change. Luckily, the Blur is worth the investment--it's arguably the best all-around mountain bike ever made.

A little background: When people began taking their wheels off the sidewalk and onto rutted dirt, the bikes thunked around a bit too much. So bikemakers added front suspension--shock absorbers on the bike's front fork--to smooth the ride. Well, you know people. As soon as the ride was a partial glide, they wanted a full glide. So the manufacturers added a second shock, this time to blunt the thumpery of the back wheel. All of this worked just fine, if you could overlook the sag and shudder, which often felt something like that swayback mare that Cletus rode: The pivot point on a full-suspension frame guaranteed that the bike would mush when dropping into gullies and bob when pedaling out of them.

Problem was, the pivot point--the effective critical center of the bike--was fixed, and too often worked against the power of the rider. After all, you don't want those shocks sucking up your pedal strokes when you're climbing a hill. What was needed was a floating pivot point, one that "knew" when to change as the situation dictated. When the rider bore down hard on the pedals, for instance, the bike would respond by effectively changing its center, lengthening its chain, and allowing power to be translated directly to the climb. And vice versa. Or, as explained in U.S. Patent 6,206,397, "at those points in the wheel travel path where there is a chainstay lengthening effect, the chain tension which results from the pedal inputs exerts a downward force on the rear wheel, preventing unwanted compression of the suspension." Uh-huh. Suffice it to say the Blur floats, and then leaps--just when needed.

In the grand Gatesian tradition of tech innovation, Santa Cruz didn't invent the virtual pivot point, but rather appropriated it from a small startup, Outland Designs, which had gone belly-up. The company did invest mightily in refining things--experimenting with hundreds of different pivot placements before finding the choicest one. If you're a tech geek, you'll surely appreciate the sheer algebraic effort in all this. And if you're a mere mountain-bike geek, watch out. Dropping the Blur onto a seam of single track is a shimmery slide, like ... well, I'd describe it, but you don't really want to hear about my bike ride. Do you?

John Tayman is a contributing writer for Business 2.0.