Wheel deal
I don’t have a bicycle problem. You have a bicycle problem.
I am putting together yet another bicycle. Building up a third bike in four years might make some sense if I got distinctly different machines out of it – a racing road bike, a full-suspension mountain bike, and a fatter-tired gravel bike, for instance. Instead, this will be the third version of pretty much the same thing. The differences are small enough to escape the notice of most.
But I like what I like, and I prefer to ride on paved roads. Trail riding, whether bone-rattling or smooth-sailing versions, and the current fashion for gravel bikes with wide and “supple” tires don’t appeal to me. I like to pedal as fast as I can manage and to roam as widely as possible. Three decades ago I bought a hybrid Bianchi and it was fun riding a gravel road west out of West Plains and halfway to the North Fork River, but its limitations were many and my chief takeaway lesson was that a hybrid version of anything does not fulfill the promise of being pretty good at a few different things, but rather a hybrid only succeeds at being completely disappointing at everything.
I like to ride a road bike.
I have a road bike with an aluminum frame. It’s got a cool paint job, bulletproof and stolid Italian parts, and is equipped with racks to haul bags. I ride the Cloud Bike in the winter when I need to take off extra layers of clothes.
I have a road bike with a carbon fiber frame. It is jet black, feather light, and outfitted with svelte Italian parts. Its wheels have very few spokes at very high tension. I ride it when I want to go fast. On long descents I find myself thinking what strategy I would pursue to survive the crash a catastrophic carbon fiber or exotic wheel failure would cause. In future I will ride Hugo Black on flat terrain on speed workouts.
I am preparing to build a road bike with a titanium frame made in Chattanooga. It is raw; unpainted and unpolished. I will construct it with the latest, and greatest Italian parts that balance weight and dependability with perfect aplomb. This bike will never let me down, it will never fail. It’s a good bike to ride after a war. I will ride Trip – that’s Little Lois Lynskey, aka LLL, or Triple L, or Trip for short – until the day I die or the day I stop riding bikes.
My fondest hope is that those will be the same day.
OK. There are more bikes.
Before I get to Triple L, I’ve got to finish putting together the bonus bike, the remainder ride comprising the components that get displaced by the latest build. This tradition goes all the way back to the Cloud Bike, built on the frame of a used Cannondale that was dismantled and born anew with Campagnolo raiment. I found a bare frame in the back of a suburban Memphis bike shop and bought it, in essence getting another bike for $50 with the SunTour and Sugino parts on the original. Now, as the hand-me-downs cascade again, the lowest rung is full Campag for what is dubbed the Rain Bike – as counterpoint to the Cloud Bike, but also reflecting its utility as the bicycle I would ride in expectation of rain and thus diminish the need for weather-induced maintenance. In practice it has become the Trainer Bike, the one I ride on my indoor rollers and don’t care if I sweat all over. Various versions through the years have been much beloved beater bikes.
Of course, the aforementioned Bianchi hybrid is still around, the recipient of its own extreme makeover as a city bike.
And the road tandem, a Santana, has had its own tear-down and limited rebuild. That project does not feature Italian parts, but sweet componentry nonetheless.
So, yes. It becomes harder to support the proposition I do not have a bicycle problem. But if loving bikes is wrong, I don’t want to be right.