Since at least 2022, I have espoused a lifestyle and philosophy I generally refer to as “Dirtbag Road Riding,” and its precepts are as follows:
- The idea that road cycling is elitist is a fallacy, because proximity to gravel roads and dirt trails (or the time and expense required to travel to them) is reserved for the lucky few, whereas pretty much everybody is surrounded by roads
- Thanks to the Gravel Inversion (by which gravel bikes have supplanted road bikes as the jumping-off point for novice cyclists), coupled with the rise of “alt cycling” (itself a fallacy in that it is perhaps the most conformist form of cycling), rim brake road bikes with skinny tires are now shockingly cheap on the used market
- While Lycra and clipless pedals and shoes do work well for riding road bikes, you can wear whatever you want, and you’ll have just as much fun riding a road bike in a t-shirt, sneakers, and jorts
- While they may be “obsolete,” the supply of used parts for rim brake road bikes will not be exhausted within any of our lifetimes, and in many cases you can mix and match frames and components from the 1970s through the early 2000s with abandon
- Old road bikes are only impractical to the extent that a highly efficient bicycle that is cheap and easy to maintain and is easy to store and carry up stairs in an urban environment is impractical
- You can easily ride a bicycle with 23mm tires on an unpaved surface and not die, and plenty of bikes with short-reach brakes will even take 28s, which until recently was considered positively decadent
For this reason I will always advance the cause of these bicycles, because if nothing else cyclists tend to immediately throw the baby out with the bathwater when The New Thing comes along, and so it’s important to remember you can embrace stuff like wide tires and disc brakes while still acknowledging and even enjoying the virtues of these highly accessible machines.
And perhaps more important than any of the above is that, while people obsess about stuff like titanium frames and supple tires and how they contribute to ride quality, the undeniable fact is that nothing rides as nicely as a good bargain. NOTHING. By way of example, consider this thing:
Yesterday I mentioned GPS computers. Here’s a GPS computer:
This bike cost me less than the sale price of that GPS computer, and that’s including the obscure Campy spare parts I had to obtain to fix the hubs. Okay, granted I already had the other spare parts I needed on hand to get it running smoothly, but even if I’d had to buy them I still would have spent no more than the price of the second-cheapest GPS computer:
Not that I’m giving myself too much credit for my own resourcefulness and frugality, mind you–I mean I was as I was typing all that, but then YouTube served me this video of a guy fixing a car with fewer tools than I carry in my saddlebag:
Also, while this bike may have cost less than six (6) rear main seal replacements in Africa, I also have a whole bunch of other bikes, some of which are highly exotic:
Wait, wrong picture:
Still, the fact remains that if I had anything resembling self-control I could be perfectly happy with just that cheap Craigslist bike. Well, I could be happy, anyway. Okay, I wouldn’t be despondent, let’s just leave it there.
Plus, even if it weren’t a huge bargain it rides very nicely, which it really shouldn’t what with those ancient “25mm” Gatorskin tires, which if you know anything about Gatorskins are barely even 23s. And what’s more decadent than a 10-speed triple? Sure, a compact has basically the same range, but the triple is like your old racing drivetrain with a whole other Rivendell drivetrain attached to it, and it’s worth all those redundant gears to still have access to a 42-tooth front chainring.
Of course another way to look at this is that this bike isn’t a bargain at all, since it feeds off of several decades’ worth of spare parts, not to mention all the things I had to ruin in order to learn how to fix stuff, and in a way this is yet another in an endless series of road bikes I’ve been serially acquiring and divesting myself of since the late 1900s. In fact, if you simply bought yourself a new top-of-the-line Pinarello every couple of years and sold the old one I wouldn’t be surprised if, financially, you came out ahead of the ostensibly “frugal” retrogrouchical serial bike tinkerer over the long term. So the only scenario that could possibly warrant congratulating myself would be if I was still riding the same Cannondale from the 1990s.
Guess it’s time to start shopping for a 1990s Cannondale. I bet if I look hard enough and spend enough time and money I can find a real bargain!