BikeSnobNYC's Blog, page 14

Stick Around Long Enough And The Trends Will Come Back Around And Thwack You In The Back Of The Head

In my most recent Outside column I pointed out that you can make your road bike safer by raising your bars and reducing your reach, and in response a commenter had this to say:

Anonymous said...

"You don’t have to drop the drops, but you should bring them higher up and farther back. Not only will this improve your stability, but it will also keep you from pulling a Superman should you manage to go down anyway."
WTF? What bike expert other than you and "self-proclaimed guru" Grant Petersen would make this claim? I hate to break this to you O'Mighty Snob, but putting more of the rider's weight on the rear wheel by moving the handlebars higher up and farther back simply does NOT improve stability.

January 10, 2019 at 10:38 AM

Really?

Get on your road bike, head to the nearest section of rough road (cobblestones if you have them), and tell me where you put your hands and how shift your body weight.

Yeah, I thought so.

By the way (and I shouldn't have to point this out) I'm not saying everyone should ride a Petersen-esque road bike, I'm just saying that there are plenty of people who might be better off on one and don't realize it and/or are in denial.

In other news, you are probably familiar with Speedvagen, but in case you're not here you go:



Look closely: every curve and line of the Speedvagen frame is designed to look and work perfectly together. The headtube, for example, is shaped perfectly to pair with the lines of the Enve Composites fork, smoothly transitioning from frame to headset to fork crown. The tubing of the frame is robust at the front of the frame and is smaller toward the seatmast, to smooth out any roughness from the road that's transmitted up to the saddle and the rider. The seat stays hug the wheel tapering flat and wide for a smooth ride and creating a beautiful silhouette from behind. Frame-to-component interfaces are mated with stainless reinforcement in high-wear areas—their curvatures smoothly blending between the tubes they attach.

If you're the type to wear Rapha you just soiled yours after reading that.

Anyway, when it comes to the zeitgeist, Speedvagen are very much in touch with it.  For example, they've been selling designer pit boots since at least 2010, and look at cyclocross now:


So basically, if Speedvagen gets involved, you know it's going to be a "thing."

Given this, it's pretty safe to say that at this point skating is going to be the new gravel, because now there's a Speedvagen skateboard deck:


Surprise! For some reason there’s a natural progression from skateboarding into bikes. Our shop is no exception to that, with a few of us spending a majority of formative years skating. While most of us now use bikes to chase those moments of feeling truly free, we figured it would be fun to honor that past life and get out there a little bit more on these. 

It's called the "Surprise Me" deck, and I was indeed surprised since it's only $50.  After all, this is the same company that sells a $3,500 coaster brake bike:


So, having recently sprained my foot while playing on a board with wheels, it's simultaneously embarrassing and comforting to know that I'm following the middle-aged bike dork script to the letter.  It's also safe to say you can expect the masters fields in 2019 to be quite thin since everyone's going to be sidelined with skateboarding injuries.

Actually, maybe that's Speedvagen's plan.  And if tricking cyclists into hurting themselves is what they're trying to do then I take full credit for giving them the idea.

Finally, speaking of doing tricks on stuff with wheels, I found myself wondering if fixed-gear freestyling is still a thing and apparently it is:


As far as I can tell the only new trick they've added in the past 10 years is bunnyhopping the homeless:


Otherwise it's still mostly just spinning around on your back wheel:


You're now completely caught up.

And now if you'll excuse me I'm going to convert my skateboard into a fixie by putting some Krazy Glue in the bearings.

On The Outside Looking In

Here in Canada's barnacle-ridden hull, many of our problems seem to stem from the fact that we're afraid of the wrong things.  Our obsession with guns, walls, and gigantic cars are all by-products of our abiding paranoia.  Meanwhile, we're deathly afraid of doing something as benign as riding a bike:


Cycling's pretty safe to begin with, and by approaching it with common sense we can make it even safer, but instead we poke it with a stick from a distance and never get beyond "WEAR A HELMET OR YOU'RE GONNA DIE."

Speaking of getting comfortable with things, you've probably seen Jeff Jacoby's recent column by now:

Boston Globe dipshit Jeff Jacoby with an early entry for Dumbest Bike Op-Ed of 2019. This one's gonna be hard to top!https://t.co/yN4sGofn9u— Bike Snob NYC (@bikesnobnyc) January 8, 2019

I'd never heard of Jacoby before his last anti-bike rant, and it wasn't until now that I dipped into his archives, which revealed that if you're uncomfortable with bikes you're probably uncomfortable with a whole bunch of other stuff too:

Evidently Jacoby is deathly afraid his own "unruly sexuality," and he clearly feels that if not bound by heterosexual wedlock he'd veer off into some lurid pan-sexual fuckfest:
And yes, now you cannot unsee the ghastly image of Jeff Jacoby engaging in a lurid pan-sexual fuckfest:


Now that's something to be afraid of.

This Post Has No Name Because I Converted To Tubeless Titles And Couldn't Get It Seated

As I touched upon in that Banjo Brothers thing, I still enjoy riding in the city, even when I'm riding purely "recreationally" and can go wherever I want:


Oh sure, urban riding comes with its fair share of frustrations:


But it also has a lot going for it, especially at this time of year.  See, if you leave the city in the fall you've got all that foliage to gawk at:


And in the springtime everything's all lush and verdant:


But in the winter it's just a bunch of dead trees and shit and the urban backdrop can be considerably more inspiring:


Also, sometimes I'll even take a skateboard with me and mess around if there's nobody else in the skatepark to see how stupid I look.

Of course, when it comes to recreational city riding, some times are better than others.  At this point in my life I no longer derive pleasure from doing battle with automobile traffic, so my very most favoritest time to ride for pleasure inside the city limits is early on a Sunday morning.  If I string together the parks and greenways just right I can get a nice rolling ride in with minimal unclipping and motor-vehicular interference whilst still drawing inspiration from the charged atmosphere of this mighty and vibrant metropolis.

Another interesting aspect of an early Sunday intracity ride is the perspective it gives you on your fellow cyclists.  See, by the time I reach Central Park I'm already well into my ride, while all the other Freds are just rolling out for theirs, and its simultaneously amusing and intimidating to watch the Forces of Fred-dom amassing in preparation for their weekly assault on the roads of suburbia.  The pointed chatter, the matchy-matchy clothes, the double pace line formation...  It's like watching the Huns ready themselves for their attack, only there's no Attila to lead them, just the Garmins and Wahoos that dictate their efforts and record their every pedal stroke.

Then there's me on my wooden bicycle, getting passed like a fibrous meal after a laxative.  I can generally count on at least one person per ride asking me about the Renovo, and this past Sunday it was the rider in shiny head-to-toe Rapha who rolled up on me from behind and demanded more than asked, "Is that bike wood."

"Yep!," I replied, ready to entertain further inquiry.

He then spat in a desultory fashion and spun away towards the GWB without further utterance: no "Cool," no "wow," no "huh," no nothing.  Even a skeptical, "Why?" would have been better than a loogie.  From this sort of behavior its easy to see why the cycle-curious find the whole thing so off-putting.  If I weren't already a world-famous bike blogger with decades of riding experience stuffed down my chamois I might even have been discouraged.  Contrast that to the skateboarder who stuck out his hand and introduced himself to me with a big smile on his face when he entered the park where I was awkwardly attempting to find my footing again (to the extent that I ever had it) after my most recent sprain.  I mean sure, I was embarrassed and left anyway, but the day a seasoned roadie greets an awkward cyclist with such an endearing lack of guile is the day I lace up my ice skates and do double axels in Hell.

I mean it probably helps that the skater was most likely baked out of his mind whereas the typical roadie is full of caffeine and some quasi-legal supplement, but the point still stands.

Speaking of doping, the big news is of course a 90 year-old masters racer has failed a drug test, and I have only one thing to say about that:

Sorry, but at 90 years old you should be able to take whatever the fuck you want.https://t.co/euHPz3mNTH— Bike Snob NYC (@bikesnobnyc) January 8, 2019

I mean come on.

Hey, It's Friday! Don't Even Read This Post, Just Drop What You're Doing And Go For A Ride!

I'm willing to bet an artisan wooden bicycle that when you woke up this morning the very last thing on your mind was wanting to learn more about me.  Nevertheless, the good people at Banjo Brothers, apparently desperate for content, have just published this interview with me:


I think it's wonderful that, thanks to the Internet, you can now fill your brain up with utterly useless information such as what I like to make for dinner.

My false modesty notwithstanding (the truth is I'm fascinated with myself and the minutiae of my existence and expect others to be too), I was surprised to find myself described as a "cyclist" (not to mention "notable," but that's something else):

FIVE THINGS is a feature on the Banjo Brothers Blog. It’s a short interview about life and bicycles with a notable person. This week's notable person is cyclist Eben Weiss.

At first blush this seemed wildly inaccurate, as there are generally two situations in which I think it's appropriate to describe someone as a cyclist:

If they're like a professional racer or something;If they've just been creamed by a bus (e.g. "The cyclist, whose pelvis was flattened like a crêpe, was not wearing a helmet.")At the very least, you'd think a "cyclist" would be someone who rides a bike in an interesting way, which I emphatically do not.  I'm a Cat 3 club putz, a middling mountain biker, and my idea of "bikepacking" is hitting the Trails Behind The Mall for an hour and then spending $25 on lunch at the Whole Foods.
If anything, "writer" seems more appropriate than cyclist, as there are actually people who are foolish enough to pay me to do that, though "blogger" is probably even more fitting since writer implies you can do more than bloviate about bikes on the Internet.  (Self-absorbed douchebag would be even better though I suppose there are matters of search engine optimization at play that preclude the use of such descriptors.)
However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized maybe it is fair to call me a cyclist, since it's only by churning the cranks that I end up generating anything worth reading, to the extent that I even do.  (More false modesty: my writing is fantastic.)  Also, I spend like 10 hours a week or something on a bike, and while most amateur racers I know ride a hell of a lot more than that it's still a depressing amount of time to fritter away on something that's not remunerative.  So really I'd better start to consider myself a cyclist or else I'm just a guy who wastes most of the work week and who might as well spend weekday afternoons doing bong hits and playing video games.
Anyway, I've now not only linked to an interview with myself but also written far too much about myself in the process of linking to said interview, so I think I'd better fuck off and go for a ride now.
Hey, I am a cyclist after all.

Resolve This

As promised, here is a thorough accounting of my New Year's resolution of Twenty-Eighteen:


Perhaps the results might have been different if I'd resolved to ride only that sweet, sweet fixie in the photo.  Regardless, success is how you define it, and by that metric I'm the very embodiment of it.

For 2019 I hereby resolve to revel in my vast and ever-increasing stable of velocipedes.

Flippantly,


--Tan Tenovo

New Year, New Outside Column!

Welcome to 2019!  I promise this is going to be the best 2019 ever!*  And to start things off right, here's a brand new Outside column!**


I hereby warrant that every word contained in this column is true and all your arguments as to why I'm wrong about bike speakers are null and void.

As for my New Year's resolution of 2018 to only ride one bicycle, rest assured I'll be providing a full and accurate accounting very soon.

Now go forth and show this new calendar year who's boss.***

Your's Truely,


--Tan Tenovo

*Specifically refers to AD years.  Void where prohibited.  Hebrew, Chinese, and other non-Gregorian calendars excluded.

**I see this was actually published in 2018, so technically I'm starting things off wrong.

***It's me.  I'm boss.

Out With The Old...

Well, this is it, we're now passing under the flamme rouge on the final run-in to the holidays:


(Team Santa's leadout train looks a little ragged.)
As for my wooden sleigh, with my foot on the mend I've been riding it regularly, and I think maybe the creaking's coming back:


(Boy those wheels ruin the bike's already questionable aesthetics.)
This has only strengthened my resolve to transition the Renovo from pampered bike to all-season workhorse, which I find deliciously decadent given that the retail price for this bicycle was a bladed spoke's width shy of $10,000.  Perhaps one day it will be as scuffed, worn, and familiar as the surface of the local bar, who knows?  Either that or it will collapse underneath me like a game of Jenga.  
Regardless, as a member of the highly rarefied $10K Club--albeit one who snuck in the back door as Renovo sent me the bike to review and then conveniently (for me) went out of business--I read this recent review of the Moots Routt RSL with interest:

$10,000 is undoubtedly a lot of money for a bike. But when it's amortized over a lifetime, and when it's as good as the @MOOTSCYCLES Routt RSL, the numbers suddenly make a lot more sense. https://t.co/J03OjqbI8l pic.twitter.com/ZLrDOCKESl— CyclingTips (@cyclingtips) December 17, 2018

Now, I've ridden a Moots--two in fact.  (What is the plural of Moots?  Is it "Mootses?"  Or is the plural the same as the singular, just like its phonic cousin, "moose?")  This was of course during my trip to the IMBA World Summit in Steamboat Springs in Two Thousand Aught Fourteen:


On the way to which I checked in at LaGuardia behind someone traveling with a rat who has nearly the same name as me:


Anyway, during my visit the people at Moots were kind enough to hook me up with two (2) Mootsusses, those being this 27.5" YBB mountain bicycling-style bicycle:


And this road bicycling-style bicycle, which with its rim brakes and limited tire clearance and non-gravel specificity is of course now totally "obsolete," sarcasm intented:


Which is precisely my point.  See, I know firsthand that Moots make nice bikes.  Really nice bikes.  Like, I really wanted a Moots road bike after that ride, even though I got dropped immediately and spent the whole time lagging like 10 bike lengths behind the people with whom I was riding.  Therefore, I'll readily buy every word of James Huang's praise in his review of the Routt--except for this:

The Moots Routt RSL is anything but cheap, but I’d argue that it’s far from a bad value. It’s among the best-riding and performing gravel bikes I’ve ridden, it should be laughably durable, and it’s impeccably constructed. Everything on it — from the bottom bracket threads to the rear brake tabs to the dropout alignment — is utterly perfect. It’s a forever bike in the truest sense, and amortized over that kind of time, even this bike’s asking price suddenly seems almost reasonable.

People have been justifying titanium bikes as "the last bike you'll ever own" for as long as companies have been making bikes out of it.  However, in a delightful bit of irony, the sorts of people who buy titanium bikes are exactly the sorts of people who are unable to commit to a bicycle for more than a few years , since bicycles become "obsolete" (sarcasm intended) so quickly.  Freds used to lust after Litespeeds and Merlins whilst justifying the price because the weapons-grade titanium would survive the nuclear apocalypse, but how many of these babies do you still see rolling around?


And forget about mountain bikes:


And yes, even that Dura Ace-equipped Moots I rode a mere four years ago is already sadly outmoded by the standards of anyone shopping for such a high-end bicycle.  So while the Routt has all the de rigeur features it won't be long before it seems as quaint as that Litespeed with its threaded fork and chunky old-timey downtube cable stops and clearances optimized for 23mm tires.

Again, to be clear, I have no doubt every single bit of praise is warranted.  All I'm saying is that, whether it's made from titanium or crabon or steel or wood, an expensive high-end performance bicycle is always a terrible value, even if it's completely indestructible.  That's not to say I have anything against people who buy them--far from it.  Indeed, as a middle-aged Fred I'm long past resenting people who spend lots of money on bikes, and I'm using a goddamn Renovo as my winter trainer for chrissakes.  I just think it's important to be honest with yourself: you're gonna want some shit in a few years.  And as long as you're comfortable with that, by all means go for it.

Bikes are a funny thing: people obsess over tensile strength and fatigue life and all that sort of stuff, but by far the most destructive force is a tiny tweak in standards.  A few millimeters' change in spacing standards here and there will destroy thousands of bikes instantly.  You have been warned.

Not One But *Two* New Outside Columns! It's a Festivus Miracle!!!

Yep, that's right, here's a column about how the rest of the world is kicking New York City's ass when it comes to breaking the stranglehold of the Automotive Industrial Complex:


And here's the gift guide you've been waiting for in order to commence holiday shopping:


Hey, if nothing else, you gotta admit I put the "pro" in prolific.

Beats working, anyway.

Somebody Stop Me

This past Saturday I headed out for a short ride on the good ship Renovo:


Ordinarily I don't ride the Renovo in the rain, mostly because all my other bikes are filthy, so it's nice to have at least one bike with fancy parts that's nice and clean.  As such, I've never had the opportunity to test the braking on the crabon rims in wet conditions.  Well, on this particular ride I ended up getting rained on rather steadily, and guess what?

When it's raining them shits don't stop.

I mean seriously, it was really disconcerting.  Indeed, it's clear to see why road bikes are moving to disc brakes.  (Though of course it's less clear to see why amateurs insist on using the crabon wheels that necessitate disc brakes in the first place.)  Anyway, the upshot of all this was that today I swapped whee's, because I'd like to keep riding the bike through the winter and I'd also like to be able to stop.  So here's my modest little winter beater now:


It's worth noting that these cheap out-of-the-box Shimano wheels cost like a tenth of what the crabon wheels do.  The difference in ride quality is minor enough that I'm not even sure I feel it, yet the braking is orders of magnitude better, which means on balance the cheap wheels are an upgrade.  (I came to more or less the same conclusion last time I switched wheels too, by the way.)  Also, the bike is considerably quieter, and I'm pleased to report that on this morning's ride I didn't hear any of the pirate ship sounds that have been plaguing the Renovo as of late.

This could mean that the creaking was coming from the fancy crabon wheels--or it could just be that I'm still kind of soft-pedaling as I continue to recover from my hurty foot and am simply not producing enough POWER to make the thing complain.

Either way, I'm taking a perverse amount of pleasure from the fact that I'm using an artisanal wooden bicycle as my winter bike, and I may have to move upstate and purchase multiple axes now:


Former city people might find themselves chopping wood (even owning multiple axes), growing some of their own food, heating their homes with wood stoves or learning to spot signs of wildlife, like the marks a buck makes when it rubs its antlers against a tree. At parties, they say, people talk about swimming holes and nature hikes rather than what they do for a living, and gathering around a firepit is as commonplace as a Manhattan power lunch.

On second thought, I don't think I could move upstate, because if some former Park Sloper cornered me at a party and started talking to me about swimming holes and deer markings I'd interject with "I'm gonna go ahead and stop you right there" and then split their head open with an axe.

Plus, I'd probably end up burning the Renovo for warmth.

But hey, maybe I just need to loosen up and take a love-letter writing class:

Upstairs from Lite Brite Neon, he and his wife opened Cygnets Way, a studio that offers community yoga and classes in mindfulness practices, like sound healing. Ms. deVries also teaches bead-making and love-letter writing there.

Dear Ms. deVries,

It's horrible up here.  Please kill me.

Love,


--Tan Tenovo

Back In The Saddle, Kinda

Between my sprained flipper and my sick child I've been a shut-in for much of this week, but this morning I finally got out for a ride and it was glorious:


Sure, my foot was tender, and yes I came up a half-mile short of a mere 20 miles (that was due to time constraints, not physical ones), but given that I began the week with an injury I'm damned lucky to be finishing it with a bicycle ride.

Indeed, there's even a bit of a silver lining in all of this; not only do I get to waggle my cane admonishingly at drivers now, but I also can't quite push the pedals hard enough to get the Renovo to start creaking:


It truly is a Festivus miracle.

Speaking of mishaps, Bicycling magazine was delighted by this Steve Carell appearance on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," but I found it deeply annoying:


First Carell shares that he rides a road bike, which is great and all, to which DeGeneres replies, "You're one of those guys?"


This of course elicits laughter from the audience, which, you know, fine, whatever.  But then Carell explains how he was hit by a driver after he "made a turn and didn't see the car behind me:"


From which we can infer of course that it was totally the motorist's fault, because how does that even happen?

Anyway, he's fine, and he gets a funny story out of it, but then DeGeneres puts him in this humiliating getup, much to everybody's delight:


Look, I know it's just a talk show, and everybody's keeping it light, but the heart wants what it wants, and mine wanted to see someone of Carell's stature stand up, point at the audience, and shout, "You know what?  You fuckers aren't paying attention out there!"  Then he'd turn to the camera and continue, "That goes for the rest of you at home, you lazy, careless slobs.  You're all a bunch of dupes who have been brainwashed by the Automotive Industrial Complex!"  And finally, to DeGeneres: "You think perpetuating this bullshit victim-blaming narrative is funny?  Fuck that!"

Then instead of tearing off that stupid outfit he'd ride off in a recumbent, because it kinda works with that look.

But yeah, figures Bicycling would like it.