REAL PEOPLE BUY TOURING BIKES

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1 CYCLESENSE REAL PEOPLE BUY TOURING BIKES Or, what you can learn along with Lew and Tom and Rachel and Kathy by John Schubert Confession time, folks: it s been fifteen years since I bought a touring bike. So what happens when real people, with their own questions and concerns, go to buy touring bikes? Truth be told, I wasn t sure. So I asked four of you that question. Actually, four of you asked me. You wrote seeking advice, and I called you to find out what you were finding out. For all four people, this wasn t just about buying something. This was a purchase with a purpose, a bike that would lead to a dream. When I was in graduate school in Virginia, I would see riders on the TransAmerica trail, recounted Lewis Privon, forty-seven, a Washington, DC, area software engineer. I remember talking to sixty-yearold guys riding the trail and thinking I want to do that someday. Today, Privon has his heart set on Adventure Cycling s Northern Tier, plus a tour around France. To ride the Northern Tier, he ll have to be between jobs, and while he s arranging for that, he s also arranging to buy a new bike. Privon s current ride is a light-touring Waterford Road Sport. He loves it, but he also loves the thought of camping and meeting people. He wants a really nice, full-on loaded touring bike. I ve ridden Cannondale and Trek touring bikes, and they re really good, but I wanted something just for me, he said. And I would rather err on the side of something too beefy. He quickly developed a list of four excellent candidates: another Waterford, a Co-Motion Americano, a Rivendell, and a Bruce Gordon Rock n Road. And he found himself at one of my favorite shops, College Park Bicycles in College Park, Maryland. The fine folks at College Park Bicycles narrowed down his search for him. If he wanted a really stiff touring bike, why not get the Co-Motion? It s built like the front half of one of Co- Motion s tandems, so stiffness is never a problem. Like all of Privon s candidates, it has exquisite workmanship. The components and gearing are just right. If Privon were hard to fit (which he isn t), Co- Motion s custom-fitting abilities are legendary. This is a custom order, which means no test ride, no try-before-you-buy. But Privon is confident, and with good reason. He knows his stuff, and he has an excellent manufacturer and an excellent retailer. Privon is ordering his bike with S&S Couplers, to make it easier to take on his France tour. (S&S Couplers allow you to take the frame apart so you can fit the disassembled frame and components in an airline-approved suitcase.) Says Privon, The Co-Motion is three or four pounds heavier than some other bikes, but that doesn t make a difference. That s a healthy attitude. Depending on options, Privon s Americano (Co-Motion calls the coupled version the Co-Pilot) with a suitcase is around $3,900. I have ridden major chunks of the Northern Tier Route, and also have ridden an Americano Co-Pilot. In my opinion, Privon is assembling the pieces of an excellent dream. Skipping to New Hampshire, I found Rachel Rainey, a cross-country skiing aficionado who has discovered one of my favorite truths: a touring bike can do things no other bike can do. CHUCK HANEY 32 ADVENTURE CYCLIST MARCH 2006 ADVENTURECYCLING. ORG

2 GREG SIPLE Rainey has outgrown the hybrid that she bought eight years ago when she was new to cycling, but the go-fast bike she later bought a Trek 2000 WSD road bike is too limiting for all of New Hampshire s beauty. We have a lot of dirt roads, and roads that go pavement to dirt to pavement to dirt. I wanted a bike with dropped handlebars that would allow me to continue that kind of riding, Rainey said. I looked at the touring bikes in Adventure Cyclist, and I thought, Those are better quality bikes. Then I thought, Maybe I could do some limited touring. No cross-country trips. (Note to Rachel: that s how it starts. The hook is set. And did you know that the Northern Tier Route goes right through New Hampshire?) That s how I got to thinking about touring bikes. I wasn t going to go cross country, so I had to focus on the less expensive ones: Cannondale, Jamis, Bianchi. Rainey s price ceiling is somewhere around a thousand bucks. Rainey was also hoping for a bike that fit a little better than the Trek. Rainey shouldn t be all that difficult to fit; she s 5 4 with a 29-inch inseam, and Trek wisely equipped her WSD bike with slightly-smaller 650B tires, in order to scale down the top tube length. Still, she had to buy a shorter, more upright handlebar stem, and she also had to put rubber shims in the brake levers so she could reach them. Question is, can Rainey find a touring bike that fits better and test it? Ah, there s the rub. Southeastern New Hampshire is crawling with bike shops that know how to serve touring cyclists Rainey has found four of them. But knowing about touring and having touring bikes in stock are two different things, and she has yet to actually test-ride a touring bike. I can t imagine buying a bike without a test ride, she said. I want to base my decision on what bike fits the best, and on its riding qualities. This may be a tough nut to crack. Most shops don t sell enough touring bikes to keep them in stock. A bike company typically sells several hundred touring bikes per year, and has several hundred retailers. (Major brands like Cannondale and Trek have about 2,000 retailers.) The math is self-explanatory: the odds of one of those retailers having a touring bike in stock, in Rainey s size, are crummy. Many shops only get touring bikes when a customer orders one. So Rainey may find she has to get measured and then order a bike. (Hey, Lew s doing it, and it works for him!) Rainey wanted to know what gearing she should look for, and I referred her to my March 2002 CycleSense article, Gearing 101. She dutifully charted the gearing on her existing bikes and decided that she wanted a low gear about the same as the 23-inch low gear on her hybrid. She reported the low gears on some bikes whose specs she d gotten: 21 inches on the Cannondale T800, 24 inches on the Bianchi Volpe, 25 inches on the Jamis Aurora. She also got some bike shops to assure her that they would swap out a chainwheel to lower the gearing if she bought a bike from them. Rainey s research shows signs of progress. A few years ago, many otherwise-good touring bikes came with too-tall low gears of 31 inches, thanks to some poor component offerings by Shimano. We nagged. The product managers listened. The process worked. Rainey also asked me about the difference between steel and aluminum. Apparently, she d been on the receiving end of a technically inept sales pitch, to the effect that steel doesn t flex under touring loads as much as aluminum does. Today, most aluminum bikes are stiffer than most steel bikes and the Cannondale, the only aluminum bike on her shopping list, is extremely stiff. However, some bike companies stick with steel for their touring bikes, in the belief that touring cyclists are traditionalists who prefer steel. We ve all heard the story about having a welder in Nepal repair your frame on your roundthe-world tour, and how you couldn t do that with an aluminum frame. My own opinion is mostly indifferent. Both steel and aluminum are good materials. Rainey is zeroing in on the Bianchi Volpe, which I think is a terrific choice. Twenty years ago, the Volpe was actually the nation s first hybrid bike. (Hybrids shifted to upright handlebars soon after that.) It was conceived not as a touring bike per se (although it performs terrifically as one) but as a bike to do exactly what ADVENTURE CYCLIST MARCH 2006 ADVENTURECYCLING. ORG 33

3 Rainey wants: ride til the pavement ends, keep riding, and keep grooving. I just hope she either finds one in stock or takes a deep breath and orders one. It ll be a sweet ride. From the back roads of New Hampshire, I now take you to Spain s Pyrenees Mountains, where Tom Sawyer, a sixty-six-year-old Silicon Valley computer dude, is planning the trip of his lifetime: a three-week pilgrimage to visit the remains of St. James on the Camino de Santiago. People have been taking this trip since the ninth century, and one of my favorite cycling writers, Cindy Ross, covered it in the August 2005 Adventure Cyclist. Tom hopes to do it in September Many years ago, I read about this pilgrimage in National Geographic, Sawyer said. Well, you read about a lot of things in National Geographic, and some stay with you and some don t. This one did, and I ve always wanted to do it. When I saw the story about the Santiago trip in Adventure Cyclist last year, that renewed my interest. Sawyer will be in the company of hundreds of other pilgrims, most of them on foot. He ll sleep in hostels along the way. Sawyer hasn t been a cyclist for long. About three years ago, he got a bike for rehabilitation from a torn Achilles tendon. He must have liked cycling, though he s ridden 7,000 miles in the past two years, and his main ride is now a titanium Litespeed Tuscany. The Camino de Santiago is not a route for a Litespeed. It s deliberately kept its medieval character, with cobblestones and dirt paths. It was built for ninth-century pedestrians. So Sawyer s only questions are, What kind of mountain bike should I get, and How do I carry my stuff? The advice Sawyer got from local bike shops was suboptimal. They all told him that he should buy a hardtail bike and carry all his stuff on a rear rack. Fifteen years ago, I would have given him similar advice. Suspension systems of that era were notoriously unreliable. But times change, bikes change, and suspension systems have improved. And you can put good front and rear racks on almost any mountain bike, despite the mountain bike makers failure to supply rack mounts. I thought a full-suspension bike would be better because the suspension would keep the wheels on the ground at all times, improving traction, Sawyer said. My question is, can I carry twenty pounds on that thing? The answer is yes, front and rear. Buy your racks from Old Man Mountain. (Full disclosure: Cyclosource, Adventure Cycling Association s mail order outfit, sells Old Man Mountain racks, and gleefully so.) Old Man Mountain has spent ten years making racks that fit on full-suspension mountain bikes, using the axles and brake bosses as attachment points. Which bike to buy? For that answer, I turned to Adventure Cycling 34 ADVENTURE CYCLIST MARCH 2006 ADVENTURECYCLING. ORG

4 Association s tours director Rod Kramer, who in an earlier life ran Dirt Camp, the nation s preeminent mountain-bike skillstraining camp. There are single-pivot designs and four-pivot designs, Kramer said. You want a single-pivot. It has fewer moving parts and fewer bushings to wear out. (Wear in the bushings is the enemy of good suspension performance.) Years ago, single-pivot suspension was inevitably inferior because the more sophisticated linkage in the four-pivot design could make the suspension behave better. But today, the sophistication is inside the shock cartridge, so you can have the sophistication without the moving parts. I told Sawyer to buy a single-pivot full-suspension mountain bike that will take Old Man Mountain racks. And send me a postcard from Spain. My final corespondent was Kathy Shapiro, a math teacher from Orange County, California. Shapiro used to have three bikes in her 700-square-foot condominium. One was a 1990 Cannondale touring bike, and she sold it a decade ago to make room for a Bike Friday. She got a bigger condo, and now has room for a fourth bike, and by gum, she wants once again to own a standard touring bike. It will join the Bike Friday, a Trek 5200 gofast bike, and a mountain bike in her, uh, dining room. I asked Shapiro how she s gone about looking for a bike: I haven t readily found shops that sell touring bikes, she said. There are dealers who can order a touring bike, but I generally don t find touring bikes in stock. My main way of looking for touring bikes is on the web, reading Adventure Cyclist, and talking to friends. Bike shops have not been my method of looking for a touring bike. So there, Orange County bike shops. I kinda looked at Bruce Gordons and Cannondales. I called Rivendell and asked them a couple questions. And one of the gals in my Sierra Club bicycle-touring section told me that Georgena Terry was coming out with the Madeline touring bike, and she said to check it out. ADVENTURE CYCLIST MARCH 2006 ADVENTURECYCLING. ORG 35

5 Shapiro was soon on the phone to Terry Precision Bicycles, interrogating the customer service desk with excellent questions. Why did the sample on display at the Interbike trade show have a miserly 28 spokes in the front wheel? ( I don t know, but production bikes will have 32. ) Will the front fork get threaded bosses for low-mount front panniers? ( No, but you can use clamps on the fork to mount low-mount front panniers. ) One of Shapiro s questions to me was a first: Is this bike too light? (The listed weight is 21 pounds.) My reply: I trust Georgena Terry to make it tough enough for touring. With a small frame and all the component weight reductions that have taken place in the last twenty years, 21 pounds sounds possible. And at a moderate price of $1,250, the Terry Madeline zoomed into first position. Then I muddied the waters. I asked Shapiro about fit. I m 5 5 1/2 tall, and my frame size is 20 1/2 inches, she said. I looked at the geometry of my old Cannondale and of the current Cannondale. When I looked at the current Cannondale s standover height, it was the same as my inseam! (In other words, the bike was too big.) I have an issue with long top tubes. I am uncomfortable with the reach. Shapiro noted that the 19-inch Cannondale had a top-tube length more to her liking, but she was concerned that the bars would be too low. I coulda said, Just buy the Terry, (which she ll probably do anyway) but in the interest of rigorous discussion, I couldn t leave it at that. Frame size is becoming an almostmeaningless measurement, I told her. It worked well in the 1970s when all frames were made the same, with top tubes parallel to the floor. Now many frames have a rising top tube, and that throws off all your old assumptions. With a rising top tube, a rising handlebar stem (which is what you get with threadless headsets) and a seatpost almost twice as long as olden-days seatposts, your new bike may have a frame size several inches shorter than your old bike, and still fit you the same. In the past couple years, the bikes I ve road-tested for this magazine have had nominal frame sizes ranging from 17 inches to 21 and 5/8 inches, and they ve all fit my 5 8 body just fine. So now Shapiro wonders if she should re-open the bidding and find a 19- inch Cannondale (Sorry, Georgena.) Either way, I predict great success. There you have it: four buyers, four sets of needs, four diverging stories. Each of them will get a different bike, and all four bikes will be great choices. Technical Editor John Schubert cheerfully accepts your unending stream of corrective missives at schub ley@aol.com. 36 ADVENTURE CYCLIST MARCH 2006 ADVENTURECYCLING. ORG