I Ride Road Bikes

As I mentioned below, I love bikes. I love all kinds of bikes. The bikes that get me out into the world these days are Road Bikes.

I've owned 5 bikes that I used for riding on the road, though only one has been a real road bike. I love multipurpose equipment, and I've always been attracted to bikes that could do more than one thing.

My first road bike was a cyclocross bike. Cyclocross is a masochistic sport that is like steeple chase but done on bikes. It's done in the "off season" so it's cold and muddy. Cyclocross bikes look like road bikes but have cantilever brakes instead of caliper brakes (more mud clearance) and have wider knobby tires instead of skinny smooth ones. I bought a cyclocross bike because I thought I would ride off road with it. I didn't. Anyway, it was a 2000 Kona Jake the Snake. I rode it here and there for 4 years, I maybe put 100 total miles on it. Kind of a waste I guess. I sold it to a friend - same one who bought my ProFlex - and he rode the hell out of it, and sold it to a friend who is now riding the hell out of it.

Because I loved the disc brakes on my mountain bike so much, I decided I needed disc brakes on my road bike as well. The only bike I knew like this was a bike called the Slider from a small company called Vicious Cycles (great name huh). The frameset was $1300. I was not willing (able) to pay that much. So I found a compromise, I actually bought a 29 inch mountain bike and built it up like a road bike. I got a Surly Karate Monkey in 2004. I built it up with road components, so I had this weird 27 pound road bike. It was heavy and the handling was s l o w, but it had the skinny tires and the drop bars and I made it go fast.

Now within a couple years, there was this explosion of disc brake cyclocross frames. In 2006 I found a Douglas Project Cross on mega-clearance. I bought it, moved all my parts over, and have kept the Karate Monkey around as a play bike. The Douglas was all aluminum and super stiff and fast as hell. It weighed 22 pounds, which for a guy my size is pretty light, and it handled well. I liked that bike a lot, and I was fast on it.

However my generous benefactor (as mentioned in the previous post) struck again. He was getting a whiz-bang super-bike and was willing to sell me his current bike for essentially nothing. So I became the owner of a Fondriest Status Carb. Fondriest is a tiny little Italian bike maker (yes I know Fondriest sounds French, but Mr. Fondriest's first name is Maurizio, he is certainly Italian). Mr. Fondriest is a retired racer, he rode the major events like the Tour de France, until back trouble forced him to retire. Why do we care? Because Mr. Fondriest designs his bicycles to be brutally fast, as a TdF-caliber racer would, but also to be comfortable. The head tube is a little longer, so the bars are a little higher, and the frame is designed to be compliant and therefore more comfortable. The particular bike I own is a Status Carb, which is actually a chromoly steel frame with carbon seat stays. I have made some significant part upgrades since I bought it, and I have never been happier on a bike. I can drill this thing to 30mph on the flats and bury it into corners and it is always rock-solid under me, even though it is also extremely comfortable. I give a lot of credit to the tandem-strength fork I put on it, as well as a set of custom-built wheels. The hubs are Campagnolo Record, the rims are off the HED Kermesse wheelset. To the best of my knowledge they are the only wheels like them in existence; the guys at HED built them just for me. They have my business for life. Anyway the bike is insane, and I have never been happier.

I'll post a picture at some point when I know what I'm doing on this blog thing.