Day Forty-Nine: The Bike
I have been asked what I'm riding. My bike is a Cannondale CAADX Cyclocross, aluminum with a carbon fork, 2x10 gears and hydraulic disc brakes. I've switched in a Brooks B-17 saddle and Rene Herse 35 mm supple-sidewall tires. A cyclocross bike is designed for sporty riding in mixed terrain including single track trails and gravel. It is not designed for touring, making this bike something of a compromise bike for this trip. It has shorter chainstays which shortens the wheelbase, and the bottom bracket is higher off the ground which makes the riding position more upright. A tighter, taller ride favors quick movements over uneven terrain. It is indeed a snappy ride, which is essentially meaningless when I weigh the bike down with racks and touring equipment. The bike wants to move lighter and faster than a dedicated touring bike. That is, if I, the rider, can move light and fast. That's a big reason why I trained to lower my own body mass and get quicker as an athlete, to be able to ride this bike more in the way it is intended to be ridden, even while touring.
Another compromise with the CAADX is it does not have attachment points to bolt racks and gear to the bike. For instance, there are none on the carbon fork, and carbon is too delicate to just crank down a hose clamp and hang weight off of it. Carbon is strong where it is engineered to be, and crushes like a beer can when it is stressed where it's not meant to be. Imagine a carbon fork crushing and collapsing on a 30-mph descent on a mountain road. No, you really don't want to imagine that. It would be a crash one may not walk away from.
I had to get creative to get my gear onto this bike. To install a rear rack, I found an aftermarket attachment ring that wraps around the seat post instead connecting to the seat stays. To connect the rack lowers to the rear wheel frame triangle, I had to file the frame down to attach the bolts to the fender eyes. One of these bolts has subsequently snapped off in the threads and the left side of the rack is not really attached. It happened just this morning. I have to figure out how to secure it with zip ties or something. Not sure what to do yet, but it's not a ride-ending failure, unless the extra stress busts the bolt on the right side. At that point I would have remove the rear rack and stash it and the extra gear somewhere, retrieving it later with a rental car trip. I'm so close to the end of the trip that I can think about non-solution solutions like that.
Without a front rack, I couldn't ride with a typical touring setup, front and rear panniers with plenty of room and a symmetrical, I've-got-my-act-together look. Instead, the bike has a mix-and-match look: a tourer from behind, a biker packer from the front. It's a little shifty, a little sloppy. I have all sorts of stuff hanging off the bike from the seat post forward. My frame bag inside the triangle covered a water bottle attachment, so my second water bottle holder is zip tied to the rear of the seat. The frame bag itself is inverted and connected to the down tube instead of the top tube. Between the handlebars I have a bikepacking handlebar bag, and a kind of roll top purse (fashionably black) attached to the front of it with velcro, to keep it from drooping onto the front tire and wearing a hole in it (again, that is. It already happened once and I patched it with Tenacious Tape).
The main point of all of this is that I am riding across America on the bike that I have. I made it work. Too often, we put off the trip we could do, because we don't have an idea setup, and we risk never doing the trip because we were tripped up by gear wannabe-ness. Go as far as you can now on what you have to get you there. I've demonstrated that with some creativity, resolve, and adapting myself, to show that you can do a lot with what you have, or what you can get your hands on, within your budget, without your dream setup. You don't have to put it off until you feel 100% dialed in.
At the end of this trip, my CAADX will be stripped back down to its elements, and it will be my all-around workout and fun bike, like it was designed to be. I won't take a big tour with it again.
My next touring bike? Ah, we are always thinking of the next bike. I'm going back to a steel frame with every imaginable attachment point. Steel provides a smooth ride and globally respected. I like the clean look of internally routed cables. I'd like to go with tubeless tires and upsize to 38- or 40-mm semi-slicks for road riding. I will probably stick with 700c rims because I like the traditional look and the shallower approach angle of a larger wheel. Sorry, but I still feel like 26-inch wheels look poody, like they are made for kids and old people, despite the fact that they have some clear advantages for touring. I'll never go back to rim brakes. I will stick with a tight frame geometry for as long as I have good balance on a bike, for the fun factor. I don't want a limousine-length wheelbase of some tourers because there is such a thing as too stable. Boring.
My big change will be dumping the derailleurs, gear cogs and chainrings, chain, grease, mess, pain-in-the-ass-when-repairing-a-rear-flat, that all comes with a standard multi-geared bike. For cycle touring, this is an obsolete setup. There is traditional, and there is just old and messy. I like the internal gear mechanisms of the Rohloff and Alfine rear hubs, which I would use on a folding bike. But for my dedicated tourer, I want the newest tech for geared bikes, a true transmission at the pedal cranks, the Pinion gear system, with a Gates belt drive. Clean, elegant, maintenance free, with evenly spaced gear ratios and a no-fuss, no-muss set up for getting the bike on and off trains and in and out of the car, and for repairing rear flats. Internally geared hubs and transmissions are heavier. The Pinion brings the extra weight of the transmission forward and lower, not hanging back there at the rear of the bike, like the Rohloffs and Alfines.
And of course, color matters. British Racing Green with yellow highlights.
I’d love to hear from you. Donate to the ride and send along your words of encouragement and tell me why getting kids outside matters to you.
