As you may recall, I was having some issues with the frontal shiftitude of my new testcycle:
My initial diagnosis was insufficient cable housing length. However, it turns out this is merely a secondary issue, and further testing has revealed the primary culprit to be the rear shock, which is leaking air:
While I generally repair my own testcycles whenever possible, I draw the line at suspension service, and so I have now removed the unit and returned it to mission control for service:
In the meantime, I have installed this custom-fabricated ultralight hardtail conversion kit:
And sought refuge in the simplicity of the singlespeed:
Though already my commitment to a single gear ratio is beginning to waver, because the Roaduno is designed to accept an optional front derailleur and a chain tensioner, and I now find myself tempted to re-install the climbing gear I already installed and subsequently removed:
That way I’d be able to ride everything I normally do, whereas now I do have to walk the odd section of trail, such as this one:
Though one could argue that you should be forced to dismount your bike once in awhile, because it forces you to take notice of the world around you. For example, shortly after taking the above photo, a canine figure trotted across the trail. I lost sight of it when it entered the woods, but it soon reappeared, striking a noble pose atop a rock:
Had I simply scampered up the trail as I usually do I might not have been treated to this wildlife sighting…though I suppose having more gears would give me greater chance of escape in case that thing turned out to be rabid.
Sure, I’d miss the purity of the singlespeed, but even with a derailleur and a chain tensioner I’d have a ways to go before I reached the sheer grotesquery of the Argon 18 Anti Matter:
Here’s how much work it takes to design a bike this ugly:
Argon 18 tells us the gravel race bike was refined over more than 800 hours of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) simulation and 45 hours of wind-tunnel testing.
It claims the result is a 14.5W advantage over the Dark Matter (+/– 15° yaw, wind-averaged drag at 45 km/h).
I wonder if, in between the 800 hours of sitting in front of a computer and the 35 hours of blowing air at the bike, anybody found the time to actually ride it.
Probably not.
Of course, in order to realize all those theoretical performance gains, you’ll need to use the proprietary integrated luggage set:
Yes, welcome to the age of the $6,499 entry-level bike:
Hey, it’s a bargain compared to the high-end model!
And if you’re lucky you may even get a whole season out of it before BikeRadar declares it obsolete and says only a moron would buy a gravel bike without 32-inch wheels.
A wise investment indeed.