on riding the bike you love

 

This post has been percolating for a while.

Twice over the past few weeks, I’ve talked to people who had bikes they loved to ride… but weren’t riding. In one case, the rider didn’t like the downtube shifters on his older bike, but love the way the bike rode and the way it fit him. He didn’t know that a new groupset could be fitted to this older bike.

In the other case, the rider had a big-name custom steel-frame bike hanging in the garage, that he said he loved to ride… but he’d gotten a lighter, carbon-fiber bike, and now rode that most of the time. He didn’t like it as much, and was thinking of updating the groupset on the custom steel-frame bike so he could ride it more.

This second rider, especially, makes me stop to think. I wonder how many have bikes we love, that we don’t ride, because we’ve bought a new bike with the latest-and-greatest. Sometimes, I think, riders feel they “have” to ride the new bike to justify the cash outlay.

There are people who have the financial situation and the space to have a stable of bikes. That’s great, for those who can do it. But many of us only have two or three bikes, and if that’s the case, then I think we should make sure the ones we love most are the ones we ride most.

Bicycles are modular. Parts and groupsets can be swapped out, and parts are available to make newer standards work on older bikes. If you’ve got an older bike you love, and would like to ride it more, talk to someone who knows something about the mechanicals; it’s likely that it’s possible to upgrade the bike with newer parts to improve (and modernize) your riding experience.

I have two bikes: a road bike with a titanium frame, and a monstercross bike with a steel frame. I like the steel frame bike well enough… but I love the titanium bike; I ride it twenty times for every time I take out the other bike. I’ve been thinking about why I like the titanium bike so much, and a few things come to mind:

• It fits me really well. I’ve been riding it for more than a decade, and I’ve fooled around with saddle height, saddle setback, bar height, stem length, crank length, and anything else I can think of; when I go on my solo rides, I have the wrenches with me to make adjustments, and I do (well, not often anymore, because it mostly dialed-in). It’s not the lightest bike (especially since I usually carry six pounds of water and seatbag gear), but I can ride for hours because of the fit. I’m not the fastest rider you’ve ever seen, but I can go up a hill pretty well.

• It’s a neutral color. The frame is unpainted titanium; the other appointments are black and silver. Do I want to try some bar wrap in a screaming green? Can I get a good deal on a reddish-purplish saddle? Do I want to hang colored bandannas from the saddle? There’s no color on the bike to clash. (It helps, of course, that I have a lousy color sense; a more sensitive rider might be horrified!)

• I change something on it fairly regularly, so it often feels like a new bike. I’m currently experimenting with the Sensah Empire 11-speed indexed groupset (at 400-or-so miles, it’s behaving very well indeed). That’s the fourth shifter setup I’ve had on it, and I expect in another 100 miles or so, I’ll go back to my Gevenalle 10-speed group, because I can set that up with friction shifting, which I like better than indexed shifting*. I recently changed the handlebar to an 80’s-era Cinelli Campione del Mondo (its third set of bars), after the no-longer-available Velo-Orange bar I had kept slipping in the stem. I’ve changed wheels, cranks, pedals, saddles.

(*Don't conflate friction shifting with downtube shifters. Friction shifters can also be on the bar ends, or, as on y Gevenalle set, on the brake levers.)

I can understand the folks who have a classic bike, and want to keep it all-original. But I can’t understand the people who have a bike they love… and ride something else most of the time.