Back when I still had time to do stuff like spend the whole weekend driving just to ride my bike for 45 minutes I used to partake in cyclocross. While I was really bad at it, I also really enjoyed it: the races are short and intense, they test your bike-handling skills (or lack thereof), and when you’re done you get to hang around and watch the better riders show you how it’s done. Also, the bikes themselves are great, and many are versatile enough to see you through the rest of the winter with just a few minor modifications:
For all these reasons, plus frugality, I never had a fancy cyclocross bike. Serious racers used tubular tires so they could run super-low pressures, and they used different wheels and tires for different conditions, and they even had spare bikes to keep in the pit. I was never nearly good or ambitious enough for any of that stuff to matter, and gas was expensive enough. So I used the same pair of clincher tires all season long whether it was dry or muddy, and I rode inexpensive cyclocross bikes that were easy to winterize, like the one above. Yet my cyclocross bike was a very important one, since not only did I have few bikes at the time, but the concept of the “gravel bike” hadn’t even been invented yet, and so it filled in the wide gap between my road bike and my mountain bike. It was even the bike I took on my first book tour:
[Via here.]
But then I stopped racing, and I went on to accrue many different types of bicycles, and so for the last however-many years I haven’t even owned a proper cyclocross bike, since I haven’t really needed one. Sure, every now and then I’d jump into a race to humiliate myself, but on those occasions I’d just ride something else instead:
[@shatterkiss]
So when Paul at Classic Cycle asked me if I wanted to ride this one for awhile I was like, “Yeah, why not?”
Its arrival turned out to be rather timely, as it showed up just prior to Thanksgiving, and its sporting nature compelled me to spend most of the long weekend using it as a turkey-burning aid.
As I mentioned last week, this was the team bike of one Zach McDonald, and you can read more about him here:
[Photo: Paul Johnson]
Some things in cyclocross never change. For example, carrying your bike is carrying your bike:
[Photo courtesy of the Classic Cycle collection]
But other things are quite different, and while the cyclocrossers of yesteryear once observed decorum to the point that they wore neckies…
[Photo courtesy of the Classic Cycle collection]
…today that decorum is nowhere to be found:
As for the bikes, as in every other discipline, they’ve gone from steel to aluminum to crabon, and from rim brakes to discs. This particular bike is nearly a decade old, and as such it represents the last gasp of the rim brake, but it’s recent enough to be crabon through and through, right down to the wheels:
While I wouldn’t necessarily seek out such a bike, especially now that my racing days are far behind me, I still get a kick out of riding one. It’s light to the point of feeling insubstantial, and it’s almost like riding nothing at all:
And yet it feels surprisingly stable offroad, to the point where it almost seems self-righting compared to what I’m used to from a cyclocross bike, that being basically a road bike with canti bosses, slightly slacker angles, and a higher bottom bracket. (As I understand it, high bottom brackets on cyclocross bikes were basically a vestigial feature from when riders still needed adequate clearance for toe clips.) Meanwhile, according to my post-ride research, this bike has a comparatively low bottom bracket and a particularly slack headtube angle, which could account for my impressions, though the tubular tires you don’t have to worry about pinch-flatting could also be a big part of it:
In fact the bike was confidence-inspiring enough that I kept trying to take the bike further and further offroad, and ultimately it was the lack of sufficient tire volume for the really rocky sections that kept me from getting too carried away.
The brakes are also very good, though mini-vs are not without their quirks:
While these are the high-end TRP models, functionally they’re no different from the inexpensive Tektro version you see on my old bike at the top of the page. What’s great about mini-vs is they’re very powerful, they’re extremely easy to set up, they’re largely immune to chatter and some of the other side-effects that can sometimes plague cantilever brakes, and they eliminate the need for cable hangers on the frame, fork, or steerer tube. What’s not so great is that you have to run the pad pretty close to the rim if you don’t want your levers to bottom out, which isn’t great for mud or wheel out-of-trueness or ease of disconnecting the cable for speedy wheel changes. Also, the stopping power comes on quick, so if you’re ham-handed with the levers it’s easy to lock up your wheels–not only do you get one-finger braking, but you sort of have to brake with only one finger to avoid overpowering the wheel. For mountain biker types who like lots of stopping power on tap that might be a plus, but if you’re an old fuddy-duddy looking to replicate the predictable feel of your rim brake road bike you’ll ultimately be happier with a pair of good cantilevers. But we’ve all experienced frame-and-canti combinations we can’t get to work no matter what we’ve tried (when the 18th person suggests toeing in your pads you seriously contemplate killing them) and in such cases mini-vs represent nothing less than deliverance from perdition. (Please note that for the purposes of this discussion we’re pretending disc brakes on cyclocross bikes don’t exist.)
Gearing on this bike is a 46/36 in the front:
And an 11-28 in the back:
People accustomed to wide-range gravel drivetrains might find the absence of truly low gears surprising, but there are no long climbs in cyclocross, and if you can’t ride up something in your 28 then odds are it’d be faster to run it.
When it comes to integrated shifting, the single-lever SRAM approach has never been my favorite, but I do get why people like it:
The Red levers also have a nice robust click to them. Ironically, racer-types used to praise a lever if it had a solid feel that required a little extra effort to engage the gear–people would spend hundreds more for Dura Ace just to avoid the “light action” of the lesser shifters, an attribute they saw as amateurish. Then electronic came along, and suddenly everything’s supposed to be easy again, go figure.
Of course as a traditionalist who prefers bikes of metal I find the fork almost comically bulbous:
It looks like a bodybuilder flexing:
I’m also deeply frightened of the BB30 technology:
But this is not a bike for middle-aged retrogrouches. It’s a racing bike for professional bike racers, and while you may not care to own one, if you can’t enjoy riding one you might be a little bit dead inside:
It looks fast standing still, and it makes me feel fast just sitting in front of it:
I feel fast riding it too, but objectively I know this not to be the case. Good thing the season’s ending. The last thing I need is to sign up for a race and spoil the illusion.