Well, once again it’s that glorious time in Canada’s pendulous saddle bag when we all come together to bicker with each other…well, most of us, anyway. Here and there do you still find someone who’s managed to transcend all the divisiveness and rancor:
You can’t really bicker with that.
You know what else is forever? Classic road bikes:
Which is why I spent the past weekend riding one:
It was like my own personal L’Eroica, and I missed nary a shift:
Though when you have so few gears to begin with you don’t really change between them all that much anyway, which reduces the odds of a mis-shift considerably.
Nevertheless, everyone else seems to want to not only keep adding gears to their bikes, but also categories:
Hairsplitting? We’re way beyond hairsplitting here. What people are doing at this point makes hairsplitting look like splitting a log. We’re not even splitting pubic hairs here. This is sub-microscopic, meta-atomic level quark splittery. It wasn’t too long ago that I couldn’t even believe they managed to squeeze a new type of bike in between a road bike and a cyclocross bike. How naive I was! Do we really need a special category for a bike that should never not never never not not be ridden not on the road…and a “Tuning Chip” to change the geometry, because even that’s not specific enough?
If you want to change the geometry of your bike, wear a thicker or a thinner chamois that day as applicable. Also, as I’ve mentioned before, I remember “tuning chips” when they were called “horizontal dropouts:”
Between that Rimjob thing Friday and the gazzillionth derivative flared-bar all-road gravel drop-bar mountain-whatever with four thousand braze-ons and routing so you can use a dropper post for your dropper post’s dropper post, and my delightful weekend spent pedaling a 42 year-old Nishiki Viner with absolutely none of this stuff, I’d like to formally announce that as far as trying to stay current with the world of bikes I’m DONE. FINISHED. FINITO. I’m checking out. I’m punching the clock. I’m sitting up, and I’m rolling right off the back. That’s it! I mean I’ll keep riding bikes, and I may even keep blogging about them, but as far as understanding what the hell everyone else is doing with their Party Pace and their PNS jerseys and their telescoping mountain bikes and all the rest of it I just don’t have it in me anymore, sorry:
Ahhh, that feels better.
Speaking of splitting logs (or not, as the case may be), I may be giving up on staying current with bikes, but I will always stay current with Best Made Co.:
Not only are they back, but they’ve announced their first product, and it’s…a vest:
BO-ring. I mean it’s expensive, but it’s not nearly pretentious enough.
I’m tremendously disappointed that they didn’t enter the gravel market.