The Radavist

I made a comment on Twitter this morning about “cross practice”. To me, bike control is inherently more important than learning mounting and dismounting techniques. If you’re new to cross, riding in the woods will teach you everything you need to know, from cornering, dismounting, run ups and bunnyhopping. Clinics are great and I fully support them but you’ll learn more eating shit on a trail than riding in a grass field.

You can learn other techniques as you go, but bike control is going to win you a race, not saving a fraction of a second on your dismount (especially if you’re a new rider / racer). Get out in the woods and get rad. Ride, have fun and eventually, you will be damn good at it and make it look easy! As exhibited here by Matt Hall on the new Breadwinner Cycles Hole Shot cyclocross bike.

Granted Matt Hall has been racing cross in Portland for over a decade… Check out more lovely detail shots of this rad bike at Breadwinner and apologies for my Monday morning rantings.

Even if you’re not into disc brakes on cross bikes, you’ve gotta admit, that’s one Beautiful Bicycle! Head over to the Baum Flickr for more! I betcha it feels like riding a piece of surgical equipment. So good.

Sorry for the lack of updates this weeekend. We’ve been soaking in Minneapolis in various ways and that means I get very little time to update the site with all the shenanigans. Here’s a quick pre-ride shot from the other night’s ride with the Fulton Brewery All City racing team.

Kyle had a little atavistic urge to get rad… Regular posting will commence tomorrow!

Well, I’m in Minneapolis, crashing at Jeff from Bike Jerks / All-City’s house for the All-City Championships and while the main event is Saturday, Bandit Cross is kicking it off on Thursday night. You should really come out if you can. I’m pretty stoked on this event!

I feel like today’s Beautiful Bicycles are sporting some of the most outrageous finishing jobs. First that Death Spray track bike and now this Firefly light-touring bike. Keep in mind, this is only one angle and you can’t even see all the insane detailing (masking hell!). In order to do that, you’ll have to go to the Firefly Flickr!

The world is going bonkers for disc brakes on drop-bar bikes and Surly is leading the way. While I’m not sold on the fad, I will say this bike looks sick. Here’s the word from Surly:

“…the Straggler, Surly’s long overdue disc brake equipped cross bike. The first thing you’ll probably notice is that it’s got disc brakes. Good, now that we got that out of the way let me point out a couple more things that make it stand apart from our venerable CrossCheck. The rear dropouts have been totally redesigned with a couple things in mind – Disc brakes, rear derailleur, single speed, and ease of wheel removal. The Straggler frame & fork is also ED coated to help to improve the life of your frame. The Straggler fork is using the Long Haul Trucker dropouts, mid blade & crown eyelets to accommodate a wide verity of fenders and racks.  A complete build spec will be available on our website soonish.”

Throw some Bruce Gordon Rock n Road tires on that thing and rip away! Keep an eye on Surly for more updates.

TCB gets into the dirt for a quick ride in some of San Francisco’s trails.

My childhood winters and summers were spent on the Canadian border in Vermont. To this day, a majority of my dad’s side of the family lives in the Green Mountains and their foothills (Vermont actually translates to green mountain in French).

After a 17 hour drive yesterday, my mom, Lauren and I arrived at my aunt’s house. She lives on the top a hill that as we were driving up it last night, all I could think about was bombing down it and consequently riding back up on my Geekhouse Mudville.

This morning, like an excited kid on Christmas, I kitted up and headed down to the main road before turning around and climbing back up. My plan was to do it four times, but neighboring hunting dogs kept me from more than two intervals.

These country roads are amazing. Most of which are closed during the winter months and are straight out of an “epic” ride video. Even though I’ve only got two days up here in the mountains, I’m planning on sneaking a ride in tomorrow morning before heading to Burlington on Friday for the JDRF ride with my mom and brother.

Remarkably, I’ve got wifi in the middle of nowhere, so I’ll do my best to update the site as events warrant.

As a side-note: I’m really digging the RX100!

… and someone’s got a new Firefly. That thing better be getting muddy ASAP!

If you need scientific data to support tire purchasing, you need not continue reading. Just look at the pretty photos and move on. This is not a controlled test on rolling resistance, aerodynamics or puncture protection. I don’t do that kind of product review. What I do is actually use something until I feel like I can sign off on its quality, before I choose to write anything.

Let’s look at this tire’s history before we go any further. Bruce Gordon was arguably one of the first builders in the USA to support “gravel grinding”. His bikes were straight-forward, utilitarian beasts that sometimes were painted like an 80’s hotrod, or even adorned with animal print. They are wild. In fact, one of the first BG bikes I ever saw was a flat bar cross bike, with these tires and tiger stripes that was well before any 29’r hit the market. A lot of bikes back in the 80’s couldn’t even fit these tires. There weren’t exactly stock framesets that fit a 700c x 43c wheel, so these stood out from other offerings of the time.

Bruce’s Rock N Road tires are iconic, much like his bikes. Originally designed by Joe Murray, a well-known figure in the MTB community. These 43mm (1.72″) tires were designed to be high-volume, fast rolling and rip through gravel like I rip through a Frito Pie. Are they slow on the road? Of course. They have decent tread. Are they good for loose and sandy conditions? Mostly, yes. They move as fast as you pedal them.

The Rock N Road tire is one that’s at home on chip seal, paved, gravel, rock, sand and just about everything else you can throw at it on a ride. It’ll handle great at 60psi on asphalt and excel at 40psi in gravel. I had a great time ripping through the cedar-topped trails here in Austin, as well as a few gravel roads and even rocky terrain. All save for one flat (snake bite in a rock garden), I’ve yet to have any issues. Let me add however that if all you do is ride sealed roads on your rig, I would go for something else, mostly because you’ll probably wear through the tread too fast.

Puncture protection? It’s not thorn season here in Austin, so I’ve yet to tackle anything like that but I’d say they’re pretty resilient to the normal road and trail debris. Some tire liners would help and I read somewhere that people have been successful at running these on a tubeless wheel. If anyone has insight to that, share in the comments!

If you want a big, fat tire for your cross, touring or even MTB with 700c or 29’r wheels, look no further. $50 a piece is a great deal for anything coming out of the Panaracer facilities in Japan I might add! For the weight-conscious, they’re 540g each. One major note. They’re BIG and wouldn’t come close to fitting on my cross bike, so MAKE SURE YOU HAVE CLEARANCE!

Pick up a pair at Bruce Gordon’s online shop in skinwall or blackwall.

I know I’ve plugged the Giro Privateer shoes numerous times on the site before and yet I continue to get emails from people asking what shoes I wear on my cross and mountain bike. These days, I travel exclusively with my Mudville cross bike. For road rides, I bring Jack Brown tires, for dirt, I bring Grifos. Spending serious saddle time in shoes will either make or break your relationship with them but spending a lot of time on the road in MTB shoes is sure to test their comfort.

In dirt, you tend to move around a lot more, stop, hike and the time you spend actually sitting and climbing is limited. At least in my experience anyway. Especially when I come to California, I find myself climbing mountains on my cross bike, in these shoes. People often comment on how they hate riding road in mountain shoes and I used to hate it as well but then I got the Giro Privateers. I’ve been amazed at how comfortable they are, at such an affordable pricepoint. They also come in HV, or “high volume” for wider feet.

This isn’t a “paid advert”, this is just me sharing with you something that I use a lot more than I anticipated…

Cinelli’s Bootleg Hobo site just got a new addition:

“Hobo is a totally new steel frame bicycle, engineered and equipped for off-road rides on long distances, already proving itself along the adventurous 12.000 kilometres of the 2013 Tour d’Afrique. TdA is a world renowned endurance-race, now in its 11th edition. What better way for the hobo to announce itself to the world than with 3 distinguished Cinelli riders blazing across the African terrain.

Chas Christiansen, 100% pure San Francisco and one of the top riders of the Cinelli Mash Team, an iconic figure of the fixed-gear culture, always on the highest steps of Criteriums, Alleycats and Cyclo-Cross Single-Speed races podiums.

Lucas Brunelle, native of Boston, is an established filmmaker who introduced a unique first-person filming technique in cycling races thanks to his great riding skills and the innovative helmet-integrated camera-system. Lucas is responsible for filming and reporting the most extreme race contests all over the globe for more than ten years.

Dario Toso couldn’t miss out, designer and explorer of the contemporary and long-time ambassador of the “Bootleg State of Mind”.”

Expect some photos of this bike soon!

There are few builders out there who have mastered the art of documenting their process. Need examples? Click on the Frame Builders tag… Cycles d’Autremont is one of those builders and while there isn’t a whole lot from this Burlington, Vermont craftsman on the site, I hope to swing by their shop when I’m in Burlington for the JDRF ride in July.

It doesn’t take much to sell a client on your product. A few photos of your work environment, some macro shots of your in-process lugs, or even a full-blown phototorial on why you prefer to make and modify your own lugs can do wonders for your client base.

If you flip through Cycles d’Autremont’s Flickr, you’ll find everything from a clean cross bike, to a rigid MTB fresh from paint, to a porteur to a dirty cross bike. With all this eye candy, it’s still hard for me to not fixate on their killer headbadge.

Hell, I don’t even think my shop visit photos would come close to Hubert’s own! We’ll see I suppose…