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I've now been deep into bicycling as a hobby for 3 years. It's not the first time I've been very into being on two wheels by any means. As a kid, I was blessed with an extremely hilly course in my "residential golfing community" that had light enough traffic to allow me to often knock out two laps of the 18 holes in the dead of summer. In college, I used a bike to finish my nightly classroom IT maintenance routes twice as fast as my walking coworkers. I credit it with first getting a promotion, then the ability to watch movies in the huge amphitheater projectors on the clock and still finish on time.
But after my transfer to another school, my ride got stolen. It broke my heart a little bit. I got into cars and didn't have a bike again for the next 7 years. In hindsight, one of my bigger regrets.
The past couple of weeks have fascinated me with the real limits and consequences of equipment selection. When re-entering the hobby as an adult with disposable income, the first thing that struck me is how obsessed the sport is with hyper-specialization and gear fetishism. My first few rides were in a T-shirt and shorts, with a crappy water bottle on an incorrectly sized machine. I swore to myself I would never stoop to certain levels of nerd-dom and then caved on every item, sequentially:
The list goes on. Anyway, Bike #1 was (is?) a "Dual Sport". It tried to sit in the very middle of what a bike can do, with unopinionated tires, a crappy and gruesomely heavy front fork, no rear suspension, and flat bars. I appreciated its ability to roll on pavement and still hop a curb without complaining, but it definitely felt like a compromise everywhere.
I then purchased a carbon fiber gravel bike. This is a controversial product segment - as the definition of what it means happens to be very squirrely and marketer-driven. To me, it's a suspension-free road bike with room for bigger tires and, ideally, a generous gearing range (with an emphasis on the low end). Effectively, this destroyed Bike 1's utility on pavement, urban exploration, and gravel.
Therefore, I started shifting Bike 1 to be more of a mountain bike. The crappy stock wheels that broke spokes under my fat ass were replaced with superior ones and wrapped in beefier, knobby tires. I added racks and attachment points to create a hideous bikepacking rig that's gone through multiple sub-evolutions, and tacked on a trailer hitch to tug my kids around town.
Then, a few weeks ago, I got an itch to try and see how much my handling capabilities had evolved. The irony of the gravel bike is that there's also a school of thought suggesting they should be able to do what modern MTBs do - if only you're good enough! I happen to live closely to some excellent trails, so I dropped the pressure on my tubeless tires and hopped over some singletrack.
In my second lap, I was rewarded with a catastrophic blowout on fresh tires. I rolled down a gulley with rocks at the bottom and the thinner rubber folded under the pressure of ~200 pounds of meat without any fork to back it up.
My initial reaction was to be pissed off. This machine was mostly made of space-age carbon fiber, from the frame to the wheels. It cost plenty of money, and I'd gotten top-tier rubber and was still only on a Blue trail segment. This bike was still supposed to be for adventuring into the unknown, and it's survived multiple 100-mile trips over ugly gravel and fire roads. What gives?
I started reflecting on this year journey of gradually specializing, tweaking, and making parts of my equipment suite more purpose-driven. There have been real benefits that I can track statistically, thanks to Strava, not to mention how much joy I get out of this type of locomotion. Maybe I'm not so much a victim of marketing jargon - instead, I need to have more realistic expectations when taking my sleek and stiff rocket into the mountains and expecting it to perform.
Anyway, another reason I took the thing out there at all was that I was getting an upgraded fork for Bike 1. I took it out this week, and holy shit was it different. Even with such an upgrade counting as lipstick on a pig, it felt like I was floating over everything. I'll be heading out to the nearby trails a ton more than I did before.
But under no circumstances will I ever get a dedicated Road bike.
I also got into bicycling around 3 years ago, it was the middle of Covid and I was looking for a versatile outdoor hobby and bicycling fit the bill very well. I was occasionally riding an old steel-frame road bike I had since college, but the bicycles you can get these days with some disposable income blew it completely out of the water. I ended up getting a gravel bike (aluminum frame, carbon fork) and it feels like going from your parents' old hatchback to a sports car. It makes a lot of sense for those of us who only have the space for one or two bikes and aren't that interested in going on rougher terrain. I carry around a compact hand pump, so I can ride on pavement to the trailhead, drop the pressure, ride on the trails, and pump back up when I want to ride home. I also have a set of Crankbrothers doubleshot pedals, which has clips on one side and flat on the other, so I can wear whichever pair of shoes makes sense for where I'm going.
At some point, I would like to own and use a proper mountain bike with suspension, but that will have to be a future endeavor.
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