Sweet bike, even if track ends and disk brakes are not my cup of tea. And of course we all know that cowbells are to cyclocross racing what rockin’ is to Dokken.
Bike Geek Stuff
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March 2, 2011
Just When I Was Wondering Whether the NAHBS Featured Enough Cowbell . . .
Posted by Paleo Velo under Bike Geek StuffLeave a Comment
February 28, 2011
With all of the nastiness I’ve encountered on commutes to and from work by bike, I sometimes wonder.
In the same way people say things online they’d never say face to face, some drivers behave towards cyclists in ways you’d never see if they met while walking or in an office.
Something about being behind the wheel of a 3000 pound machine–cut off from one’s environment in a climatically controlled sound bubble–seems to make some people feel invulnerable and disconnected from the consequences of their actions.
Or maybe some people are just bat-shit crazy, as with this Critical Mass ride? Watch at :54
Thanks, drivers, for not killing me!
February 28, 2011
Calories in, Miles Out
Posted by Paleo Velo under Bike Geek Stuff, Paleo Diet & Fitness[3] Comments
81 miles and 7600 feet of climbing yesterday, entirely fueled by Allen Lim’s sushi bars. Here’s six hours of real food goodness, all wrapped up and ready for the ride:
I calculate these were probably around 225 calories each, and about 60% carb calories. I did pretty well on the mix, but I’m going to continue to experiment. Next time, I’ll I’ll probably up the rice, and slightly reduce the bacon and egg, shooting for bars that are about 70% carb content. I’ll also do bigger slices so I end up with around 250 calories per bar, a solid hour’s worth of distance fuel.
The other option is to do what I did for a long ride a few weeks ago and alternate one of these bars the first hour, with all its yummy fat and protein, and the next hour eat potato covered in olive oil and Parmesan cheese.
Most important of all: the last one tasted as good as the first, and I had none of the slightly nauseated feeling I get at the end of a long ride fueled by commercial sports products.
February 26, 2011
North American Handmade Bicycle Show: Can We Get Some More Cowbell?
Posted by Paleo Velo under Bike Geek Stuff[4] Comments
Like many bike geeks out there, I love custom bikes made by small builders. The number of such builders seems to have mushroomed in recent years, and they periodically gather to show their wares at different custom bike shows around the country. We have our very own custom bike show in San Diego coming up this April, and I’m looking forward to attending.
In many ways, the premier show is the North American Handmade Bicycle Show (NAHBS), being held this year in Austin. As usual, a lot of stuff on display is to bikes what concept cars are to cars: cool eye candy, and some neat experimentation there, but much of it not the stuff any of us will actually be using any time soon.
Maybe it’s the increased competition between builders and the publicity bump that shows like NAHBS can bring, but the over-the-top gaudiness of the show bikes seems to increase every year, with fewer and fewer builders content with putting on display the types of bikes they typically produce and their customers actually buy.
The spectacle is understandable. You don’t go to an auto show to look at a Ford Taurus. Then again, you don’t go to look at a clown car either. So I’m just going to say it:
Builders: yes, you CAN have too much cowbell!
After checking out this year’s pictures, I felt like I needed to clean my eyes out by looking at the relatively simple and classic lines of my friend Esteban’s new Ebisu Randonneur bike, pictured here with its designer, Hiroshi Imura of Jitensha Studio in Berkeley:
Pretty much everything Hiroshi touches just exudes class.
Oh, and get this: Esteban actually uses his Ebisu randonneur bike for randonneuring, including this cold and snotty 300K Brevet. Get outta town, man!
February 25, 2011
One of the problems with having a restless, tinkering spirit is that I constantly find the need to fiddle with my bikes, even though there is nothing wrong with any of them, and I’m darn lucky to have every one of them.
As an example, for no especially compelling reason, I decided to borrow a friend’s 650B wheels with Grand Bois Hetre tires just to see if they would fit on my Kirk. Here’s a side-by-side comparison:
I actually think it looks pretty balanced with the 650B tires, ironically because it’s a 700C frame, so there is extra height in the fork rather than having the too-tall-jones headtube you’d otherwise need on a frame of this size designed for 650B. I’m sure the Hetre tires ride great on dirt roads, soaking up bumps like nobody’s business.
In the end though, I don’t think it’s a good candidate for conversion because the bottom bracket is just too low. It looks great in the photo–kind of long, low, and planted. But after re-measuring it, it’s only about 255mm high, which seems like an invitation to pedal strike, even with 170mm cranks. This makes sense, since the bike has 80mm of bottom bracket drop. Sounds like the best candidates for conversion have 70mm or less. Despite all this, I might even be tempted to spring for a new set of wheels and try it out if doing so would not involve moving the canti-studs and an expensive re-paint.
So not only am I now spared an expensive remodeling project, but I stuck the 700C wheels back on the Kirk last night and it turns out that it’s an awesome riding bike just the way it was. The 700×35 tires are plenty marshmallowy if run at the right pressure.
My only lingering beef with the bike is that canti-brakes are hopelessly silly and there is a bit of toe overlap, especially if I mount fenders. I think a v-brake conversion may be in the works, and possibly even a low-trail fork with a randonneur rack at some point.
February 21, 2011
From about 1982 to 1989, I pretty much lived and breathed BMX racing. Even into adulthood, I’ve occasionally sought to relive my Cru Jones fantasies, though I’ve found pretty quickly that jumping and wreaking hurts a lot worse than it used to, and that my main “skill” on any bike seems to be pedaling in a straight line and staying upright.
But even though I’ve since become more of a road and mountain biker than a BMX racer, I think the approach I had to BMX riding and racing as a kid has a lot of relevance to the riding I want to do today. What I mean by that is that whether a ride is short or long, if I don’t have a smile on my face at the end of the ride, then I need to be doing something different.
If you are getting bored on the road, buy a mountain bike, or visa versa. Or better yet, get yourself a bike that allows you to mix it up, combining both road and dirt. Whether it’s fixed gear, cyclocross, or back country exploring, I want all the cycling I do to be a form of play, much like it was when I raced BMX as a kid.
That doesn’t mean I don’t take satisfaction in long and challenging rides from time to time where I’m pretty wiped out at the end, and any smile I might have might be confused with a whimper. But the days when I would take a more industrial and regimented approach to training are long gone.
So to salute the old BMX spirit and the power of biking as whimsical play, here are a some retro BMX builds I did a few years back:
(First generation OM flyer from around 1979. The parts are not period correct, but it sure was cool anyway. 26″ wheels)
(JMC tribute bike using modern parts. 24″ wheels)
(SE Quadangle tribute bike, made to look like an old school Quad, but with modern BMX geometry. 24″ Wheels)
And, yes, I know the saddle is too high in all those pics! I wasn’t exactly using them to catch big air, though I did often take the JMC tribute bike to the local BMX track and do laps.
Sadly, I sold them off before moving to Burkina Faso a few years back so that we wouldn’t have to put as much in storage during the time we were over there. Doh! Wish I had them back now.
February 18, 2011
Ultimate Paleo Cycling Challenge?
Posted by Paleo Velo under Bike Geek Stuff, Paleo Diet & Fitness[2] Comments
Cyclist fends off leopard attack with mountain bike
A South African cyclist attacked by a leopard on his way to work was able to fend off the animal with his mountain bike.
February 17, 2011
Since 2002 when I bought my first cyclocross bike, a Gunnar Crosshairs, I’ve racked up a lot of singletrack miles using skinny tires and “road” bars. I still love doing mixed surface riding involving pavement and smoothish dirt roads with these types of bikes:
Lately, however, I’m just not enjoying the rougher stuff with the drop bars as it beats the hell out of my hands. As I’ve discussed before, to truly optimize a bike for off-road drop bar riding, you really need to get the drops up so that they are only just below the saddle.
Unfortunately, this means the the other positions on the drop bar tend to be sky high and make you feel like you are pushing a shopping cart. In effect, you take a multi-position bar and reduce it to only one or two good positions. Granted, the positions you are left with are good ones, but it still seems to defeat part of the purpose of drop bars.
Back in 2007, I had James at Blacksheep bikes make me a monster cross drop bar rig for multi-surface adventure bike exploring. It’s a great bike, but for the last year or so, I’ve hardly ridden in the way it should be ridden, in part for the reasons discussed above: The drops were too low for real rough dirt riding and therefore beat the crap out of my hands, but I didn’t like a higher setup with midge bars either as the limited good hand positions tended to make my hands go numb on long rides
Well, after “only” four years of experimentation, I think I’ve found the optimal setup for this bike and the kind of riding I want to do with it using the newest version of the Jones H-bars:
So far, I’ve taken it out for an 8-hour pure dirt and single track ride, and a 6-hour multi-surface adventure bike ride. In both cases, it performed superbly. My hands did get a bit beat up on the 8-hour ride, but not bad for 8 hours of rigid riding off road. Both on road and off, the multiple hand positions really make for a comfortable set-up.
Jeff designs his own bikes around a relatively high bar position and short top-tubes. This helps get weight off the hands for off road riding riding, but you can still lean forward on the extensions to recruit a wider range of muscle groups for the climbs.
By essentially flattening out an off-road drop bar like the WTB or Midge, you get a multi-position bar where all of the positions are actually usable. They work especially well with the Shimano integrated brake/shift levers as your hands really have free range on the bars.
Here’s the bike’s original incarnation with a Rohloff hub:
Later on, I ditched the Rohloff, and converted the bike to regular gears, before finally making my way to the geared h-bar setup pictured above.
February 15, 2011
Biking is a lot more fun when you’re not limited to strict notions of what a bike can or can’t do: “road bikes for road” and “mountain bikes for dirt.” For the past couple of years, members of SoCal Rivendell Riders and Friends have hosted a variety of on-and-off road rambles, ranging from dandyesque tweed ride excursions, to semi-epic mixed-surface marathons.
Recently, it was my turn to host, and I organized a course in East Country San Diego linking up three main sections of trail and fireroad with some very scenic stretches of pavement. At 55 miles and 5100 feet of climbing, this was adventure biking at its best.
Folks did the ride on everything from a Hampsten road bike with 28mm tires and short reach caliper brakes to my Blacksheep monstercross bike shod with Nanoraptor 29er tiers. Given that the route involved substantial stretches of both pavement and dirt, just about any bike and any tire was something of a “compromise,” but the kind of compromise that adds spice and challenge to the ride.
(Map by SD Yoshi)
(Conga line up one of the first singletrack climbs)
(Some sections involved hike-a-bike, especially if you were brave enough to ride the course on 28s and with road shoes! Photo by SD Yoshi)
(David hitting one of the early steep pitches)
(The long and winding road. Photo by SD Yoshi)
(Riding through deep sand gets challenging with 35s, and claimed one victim named “Rapha.” Photo by Protorio)
(With my Nanoraptor 29er tires, I easily had the fattest tires on the ride. I was pleased as punch with them for most of the ride. They roll surprisingly fast on pavement, even if they are a bit of a dog on steep paved climbs. Photo by Senor Mikey)
(One of my favorite bikes of the ride: Esteban’s “Klunker.” Photo by Protorio)
February 13, 2011
Real Food For Endurance Riding
Posted by Paleo Velo under Bike Geek Stuff, Paleo Diet & Fitness[2] Comments
Companies like Hammer Nutrition make some of the best sports nutrition products out there, and when convenience is paramount, there is no doubt that they work well when doing long-distance riding. Unfortunately, when I spend a really long ride “fueling” this way, I end up feeling like crap towards the end of the ride, and feel really strung out afterwords.
Just speculating, but I think when your body is used to eating real food all the time, and low to moderate carb at that, it’s a bit of a shock to the system to spend a day eating sugary sports products. I’m also not a big fan of sweet things, and 6-7 hours of nothing but sweet just gets disgusting.
People have been eating real food on bike rides for a lot longer than they’ve been sucking down sports products, of course, even if ideas about what kind of real food we should be eating have changed. I recall reading one racer’s report from an early 20th century stage of the the Tour de France where he set out with 12 pork chops in his saddlebag!
Still, many of the staples of real-food fueling (P&B sandwiches, tortillas, etc), don’t work so well if you are trying to avoid gluten. Luckily, Dr. Allen Lim of Team Garmin has a couple of recipes that avoid gluten, are not sickly sweet, and work really well:
Allen Lim’s Sushi Bars:
Potato and Parmesan cheese:
Yesterday I did a mixed-surface group ride, linking up 55 miles of dirt and pavement. About 5100 feet of climbing. I took in the same number of calories per hour as I usually do, about 250, but using the recipes above, my calories came from from rice, potato, egg, prosciutto, Parmesan cheese, and olive oil.
These recipes were hands down tastier and left me better feeling after the ride than any sports product or “endurance fuel” I have ever tried. They were a big hit with others on the ride who tried them as well. Granted, this wasn’t exactly a true endurance ride, but I see no reason that I could not have keep eating these to continue on for much longer mileage.
Making them takes a bit of time, of course. The other downside is that they are not as compact as an equivalent number of calories of sports product. Carrying enough for a long brevet or the like would get pretty bulky. Doing a long day in high heat would also make things challenging since they aren’t exactly shelf stable.
Still, with Camelbacks for mountain biking and handlebar bags for randonneuring, it’s possible to set out with quite a few real-food calories. Throw a few Larabars and other convenience foods into the mix, and you’ve got many hours of self-supported real-food fuel.
