After a few 80k rides on the beautiful trails and roads in and around Davidson, North Carolina I’ve realized that I actually really don’t like a lot of vibration coming through the bike into my body when I ride. I’m an endurance rider, a roadie explorer who occasionally has to deal with dirt, mud, gravel, and grassy shoulders. I always have been. Since the day my dad talked me into trying out mountain biking in Moab, Utah on my first White Rim trail ride (which is a perfect gravel ride) I’ve been okay with mountain biking for the sake of getting off road, but I’ve never, ever liked the pounding that mountain biking does to my body when doing what I love most, going long and hard from the saddle.
Sure there is an exhilaration when mountain biking single-track, that fear of never knowing if you are going to make it out alive, to get better air on that next jump, and that constant paranoia about not having phone reception riding solo on dangerous trails. But that is a temporary fun, not something I live for as a daily practice. In fact, splitting lanes in an urban environment with cars on either side gives me just as much adrenaline rush, but in a much safer way. If I go over the handlebars because someone opens a door there are throngs of people there and a hospital nearby to ensure I recover if and when the unthinkable happens. Plus, urban cycling is generally in lower-speed traffic where motorists are less likely to run my carcass over if I catch a edge and tip over, something that is extremely unlikely on city streets compared to wilderness single-track.
I realize now that I actually have the perfect bike for people who just want to stay healthy and explore. My Marrakesh can go anywhere in the world and be reasonably repairable.
Keshy is heavy. Without her racks she comes in at 12 kilos (which is a lot compared to “heavy” 8 kilo carbon bikes). But my orange beauty cost me 1200 dollars, not 6000. Hell, my Garmin Rally power meter pedals will have cost more than my bike by the time I save up another 600 dollars for the right foot.
The triple chain ring and 170 mm crank arms are designed to help me get a very loaded bike to the top of a huge hill (if I so choose) is very convenient on long, endurance rides on the rolling hills of North Carolina where a 13% grade can come out of nowhere. Climb centuries like Assault on Mt. Mitchel should be much easier with this gearing.
People might raise an eyebrow at my bar-end shifters, but they are way lighter than even the best brifters and don’t require I move my hand from the lower drops when climbing and out of the saddle. Brifters require the cyclist to climb from the hoods to do the same thing. All that old-school external cabling is ugly and not very aero, but it makes fixing bad shifters trivial, not so with the SRAM stuff (which I’ve really soured on a lot lately, especially after learning the wattage given up by using a SRAM chain). After I dropped my racks and fenders (which were literally whistling at high speed) my speed immediately improved. I lost almost two full kilos and all the aero annoyances.
I could add a ton of speed just changing to road tires, which brings me to another reason gravel/adventure/touring/endurance road bikes are for me: you never know what you are going to have to ride on. The comfort of knowing that I can ride in the gutter with all the crap in it, or even entirely on the grass and dirt two meters from the actual road make me feel a lot safer. Yesterday I made a poor road choice with very high-speed traffic and no shoulder and road the entire thing in grass that had not been mowed in a month. Having gravel tires also means that on those long, connecting farm roads that are often not marked on Strava I can forge a new route once discovered and no that nothing can stop me, not even thick mud. The Marrakesh has a good 30 centimeters of clearance even with 40 mm tires already on it. I could put full mountain bike tires on it if I wanted. And the disk brakes make it so that I could put any tire in the world on that bike so long as they can build a wheel set that has my disk brake on it, which is also a reason to stop complaining about the mechanical disk brakes versus hydraulic, which would be impossible to get repaired in certain parts of the world. My Marrakesh can take me anywhere I want to go with as much (or as little) gear that I could ever want.
Then there’s my riding style. I’m more likely to sit all the way up and raise my arms to the sky and yell “weeeeee” on a downhill to soak in every bit of that nice downhill breeze than to go all aero and waste the moment. After all, I’ll be climbing and getting sweaty again in just a moment given how rolly the landscape is around here. As the French say, fuck aerodynamics (okay maybe not modern French cyclists, they learned from Laurent Fignon losing the TdF to Greg LeMond because he refused to tuck his pony tail during that final TT).
Okay, maybe I’ve overstated my aversion to casual aerodynamics. Truth is all those super spendy ways to save on aero are simply silly when I’m not putting the energy into the simple — but huge — aero savings opportunities:
I could shave my beard and get three watts or so, but fuck that. By the way, a super aero TT frame and handlebar setup only gets you 3 watts total. It’s the position the body is in that buys the rest. Consider that 75% of aero benefits come from the body of the rider and not anything on the bike.
And let’s face it, the longest I ever want to be in the saddle without having a shower in between is about eight hours. I’m a Fondo guy, not really a touring guy. I love a challenge. Challenges are great, but I would rather be cozy, warm, clean, and snuggling up to a soft pillow than struggling to sleep in some remote area only to not recover in time for the next day. At one point I thought I liked going very long over several days, with lots of gear, but no, just no. If and when I do a long trip I want someone to support me (that I will usually pay) so I can have fun on the bike for that day, and have all home comforts available to me later.
So no, I’m not a “gravel” biker and probably never will be even though I ride on plenty of stuff that would qualify as gravel. The idea of caking my bike with mud and carrying it up a 10% grade by foot in shitty gravel shoes just does not sound like fun at any level. I can challenge myself in much healthier and more fun ways, that always end with that amazing rush of dopamine and endorphins that comes to any endurance athlete. Maybe I’m just old, or maybe I’m just wiser. The fact is, you don’t have to suffer to have fun.