ride joe ride

A long and somewhat frenetic tale ended in me not getting one of those, but one of these instead(!). But the manifesto is still more or less blown.
Uh, yeah. I just bought one of these. So much for the manifesto.

So I bought a frame, which means I am now sort of committed to building a cross bike. I’m the sort of person who works best when I have an esthetic roadmap to direct me when building stuff. This doesn’t mean I’m working on a cross bike which will be a thing of beauty, but it does mean that I need some guiding principles so I don’t do component selection on the basis of color (which I was already starting to head toward). So here are some guiding principles for this project:

Versatility: Given that I am likely to royally suck at cross, the bike should be usable as my sorely needed city bike. So the tubulars I was contemplating are probably out, for instance.

Low impact: With the exception of consumables (i.e. tires), I am going to go through both of my excellent local resources for used parts before buying anything new. I’m also going to try to use lots of the spare parts I have lying around.

Parsimony: The bike will be singlespeed. When the pain starts, I have a tendency to react in one of two ways: changing gears or pushing harder. Single speed will improve my performance by reducing the time delay of making that decision. Given the previously mentioned likelyhood of sucking, gears aren’t going to make much of a difference anyway. Besides, I probably need to focus on not running into barriers.

Black: The frame will be flat black in the ages old tradition of flat blacking things which are cobbled together. When faced with decisions about parts, I will pick the black ones, though that won’t cause me to buy new over used (probably).

Pics to follow when it’s done.

I am learning that one of the ways to deal with the end of summer looming in the cycling world is to look forward to cyclocross. If you want to be inspired by the nuttiness that is cross, take a look at this and this.

In the Chicagoland area, cross is a big deal and the season extends all the way until the beginning of December. If all goes well, this means the dark days of bitter winter training are reduced to the months between December and February. March isn’t warm by any means, but at least at that point the suffering begins to look like it has an end in sight.

So I have been thinking that I’d like to race cross this year, but I have a small problem. I don’t have a cross bike. Not only do I not have a cross bike, this summer has been a simultaneous kit and bike build up period for us. We have spent a whole lot of money on cycling in the last few months. So going out an plunking down a grand on an acceptable cross bike is not a live possibility at this point.

But I think I have just hatched an idea which may solve this problem. Cyclocross bikes are basically regular road bikes with the addition of slightly larger, knobby tires and cantilever brakes. One would think you could just use a mountain bike, and in fact the races do allow it as long as you don’t try to sport bar ends. But who wants to ride a mountain bike? Converting a regular road frame is also not really an option as most don’t have the clearance for bigger tires nor do they usually sport cantilever brakes.

Here’s where the genius comes in. What is currently the most ubiquitous type of bike — the ones that you almost don’t even see at used bike place? Hybrids. And what do hybrids have? That’s right: cantilever brakes and clearance for bigger tires.  Given the fact that I am not really going to be competitive this may actually work.

So here’s the plan: a hybrid frame, Mavic GP4 tubular wheelset and 32c cross tubulars, drivetrain sourced from the parts bins at Blackstone Bikes, friction shifting bar ends, no front derailleur, and the remaining junk pulled from my parts bins. At this point, I think the biggest decision will be what type of frame to go with. Lots of hybrids are aluminum, and the fragility may be worth dealing with to avoid a lead-pipe bike. Updates will follow.

This morning the signs that the summer is wearing on ratcheted up a notch: it was finally too dark to wear sunglasses even on the way home. It was a cloudy morning with rain threatening, but the signs are unmistakeable: the summer is coming to a close. Back in my running days, this change of seasons would have been something I would greet happily. Running in the morning twilight in the early fall is pure joy after a summer of trying to make it out before the heat started to set in. This would be the time when I’d start thinking about breaking out the headlamps and long fingered gloves for long mornings on the trails.

With biking, though, this seems to be the time where you begin to think about paying up for the luxury of a cool summer sport. The cooling effect of a spirited ride begins to look like the adversary which will continue to grow as the temps dip. Running has the summer heat and biking has the winter cold. The situation isn’t made easier by the fact that unlike running, it seems pretty common for cyclists to simply take the winter off, or resort to weeks of training indoors. That doesn’t sound like a good idea to me

So we’ve hit all the last-year winter clothes sales before the new winter stuff begins to make it’s way out to the racks, and we’ve built our winter kit. I’m planning out winterizing the fixed gear and trying to devise a plan which will allow actual winter training as opposed to simply enduring. And, of course, cyclocross season is looming — something to look forward to despite the cold. Even so, no planning will allow morning coffee rides or all-dayers with stops for food and beer on a fortuitous patio. I’ve always loved this time of year for the way the fullness of the summer is mixed a bit with the sadness of it’s impending end. It’s good to find the late-summer vibe in cycling as well.