Hard To Endure

Further to yesterday’s post, in which I mentioned the Continental Divide rider who had to abandon the race due to a borken crabon bicycle, a reader noted he could have been back on the trail in minutes if only he’d been carrying a simple repair kit:

That’s pretty cool.

How is every single ultra-endurance vacationer on a crabon bicycle not carrying one of those?

I guess in his case he simply enjoys the risk:

Moving on, as a semi-retired former semi-professional bike blogger, I do my utmost to stay informed when it comes to the latest trends in cycling so I can either ridicule them or simply dismiss them out of hand, so I was fascinated to learn that the endurance category is officially obsolete:

“Good, it’s about time!,” I thought. “For far too long cyclists have been plagued by these goddamn ‘endurance bikes,'” I explained to the cat. “Kill them! Smash them! Burn them!”

However, shortly after the cat finished licking its anus and slowly wandered away, it occurred to me I don’t even really know what an endurance bike is. So I looked it up:

So, a road bike, basically.

Well that didn’t sound all that bad, but I still didn’t know what one looked like. So I looked that up too:

Wait, those bikes are obsolete? How can that be? As I understand it, the criteria for obsolescence is three-fold, and in order to qualify a road bike must:

Have rim brakes
Have a mechanical drivetrain
Be attractive

But apparently they are in fact obsolete, and the reason is that some guy won a criterium on a gravel bike:

What he proved is exactly what the buying public is largely aware of. If you believe the aggressive geometry of a pure race bike doesn’t make sense and the promised benefits don’t actually matter, you aren’t alone. The solution isn’t an endurance bike, though. Instead, the solution is a gravel bike.

The only thing the bicycle industry loves more than pumping up some new make-believe category of bicycle is dancing on the grave of some make-believe category of bicycle that’s only a few years old. I still didn’t know why any of this means the endurance bike is obsolete, since he could have just as easily won the crit on one of those endurance bikes if that’s what he had, but instead of explaining any of this the story then goes on about the origin of gravel bikes:

Of course, this makes perfect sense if you know the history of gravel bikes. They didn’t emerge from the minds of designers fully formed as the modern gravel bike. Instead, they came from people taking what they had, putting the biggest tires possible on, and riding gravel roads. For some people, that was cyclocross bikes, but for a whole lot of people, it was an endurance bike.

The gravel bike is sort of like that spill in the living room: ask each kid in the house how it got there and they’ll each give you a completely different story, every single one of which is a complete fabrication. The gravel bike began when people started putting larger tires on endurance bikes, really? Specialized likes to pretend it invented the concept of what people now seem to be calling the “endurance bike” in 2004:

Obviously that’s ridiculous for a whole bunch of reasons, but let’s pretend it’s true, in which case the gravel bike was invented in 2004 or later. So how then do we account for the RockCombo, which is obviously a gravel bike by today’s standards, and which the very same company was selling way back in 1989?

Now that’s just spooky.

Plus, it wasn’t just the RockCombo, and in fact what we now call a “gravel bike” was already an entire category of bicycle, though at the time everyone just called them “hybrids:”

Regardless, I then read this, which made me even more confused:

The reason those people started doing that was all about making use of roads without cars. Now, things are simply coming full circle. Instead of taking a road bike and putting bigger tires on it, most people like to take a gravel bike and put smaller tires on it. If you decide to do a gravel ride, you just swap tires or wheels.

Wait. Most people like to put smaller tires on gravel bikes? I thought they were putting mountain bike tires on them! What the hell happened to 60mm being the new 50mm?

WHY DO BIKES HAVE TO BE SO CONFUSING?!?

And if all that weren’t baffling enough, after saying endurance bikes are dead because gravel bikes have the same geometry as endurance bikes but can fit the fatter tires that…nobody’s using anymore, do I have that right?…, the story then moves on to how great road racing bikes are, which have none of the attributes of endurance bikes or gravel bikes:

Alternatively, if aero isn’t your primary metric, an ultralight bike is a joy to ride. I recently knocked out a fast century on the Scott Addict RC Pro. The math says it won’t be as fast as an aero bike, but a lot of people don’t care about saving 5 watts when a frame feels incredible to ride. A lightweight frame feels snappy, and moving it back and forth under you as you climb feels like dancing. You don’t get that on any other kind of bike.

Psst: actually you can get that on any bike with relatively narrow and relatively high-pressure tires that puts you over the front wheel while climbing. But it doesn’t matter, because nobody’s buying endurance bikes anymore:

So if you need a gravel bike for versatility or a race bike for speed, where does that leave the endurance category? Mostly obsolete, and even if you don’t agree, the market does. Endurance bikes do not sell well because buyers understand it’s a compromise.

And yet Warren is still very excited about them, go figure: