Grinduro Canada: The Mind-Body-Bike Trifecta
I heard it would be sandy, but wow, GRINDURO Canada in Charlevoix, Quebec on August 21, 2021, was next-level! I was both surprised and amused to find the course totally in line with what I designed my custom T-Lab X3 to excel at: dropbarbraap, like this (best) descent from GRINDURO. The pandemic cast all events to the side in 2020, and I wound up building a hardtail MTB mid-summer, so my ‘dropgnar’ X3 was somewhat ‘unnecessary’ within my personal ecosystem of bikes. Since GRINDURO sort of came up unexpectedly, I left my setup as I’d been riding it in 2021, biased toward fast gravel.
If you’re interested, I detailed the design process I went through for my X3’s build in a couple previous pieces.
GENESIS of a Modern Gravel Dreambike
EXECUTION: Ideas Made Material
I’d intended to do an IMPLEMENTATION piece on the bike, but, well, I’ve been glued to the computer way too much for work to bring myself to do so. This piece might suffice nicely! If nothing else, the event helped me crystallize thoughts that connect the recent buzz around the ‘identity of gravel,’ as a ‘sport’ or ‘discipline,’ and some of the norms being touted and defended as inimical to ‘gravel.’ Riding gravel is always about bike-body interaction with the physical world, and aligning these three elements into harmonic resonance has everything to do with the emotions folks attach to ‘gravel.’ More on this to come; read on!
What’s GRINDURO?
If you’ve landed here by chance, because you’re planning to ride a GRINDURO event, rode one, or whatever other reason, you might like to know what the heck the event is all about. Well, Giro started it up a few years ago in California, and deployed the ‘enduro’ format many will be familiar with from MTB, rally-car racing, etc. Believe it or not, we even used the enduro format for an edition of the Ride of the Damned way back when Strava was still new. The idea is simple: you have a course of whatever length, and you have some number of timed segments within that course. Riders can opt to ride the whole course at whatever pace they like, and either time trial through each segment or ignore them. There’s no real reason to blaze the whole course; nobody gets a cookie medal for finishing first. Riders who want to compete are broken into categories (often, but not always), and their segments are added up for an overall time. The obvious strategy for those who want to race is to ride between the segments at a ‘party pace’, and hit each of them recovered and primed to go full-gas.
GRINDURO has grown into an ‘event-in-a-box’ of sorts, expanding across numerous continents. Local organizers partner with GRINDURO to create their unique event, within the parameters GRINDURO has established. If you go by the media coverage of the event over the years, it’s clear that the GRINDURO vibe lands on the more technical end of the ‘gravel spectrum’, straddling the line between MTB and gravel bike appropriateness. Unlike most gravel events, which demand all sorts of concessions to aerodynamics and reduced rolling-resistance, GRINDURO comes across as being borderline MTB-appropriate. While routes will often be ‘blind’ to participants, especially when travelling from afar, aerobars certainly don’t seem relevant, and tires with at least some tread seem necessary. Given the race aspect of the event is structured in such a way as to render a flat tire totally ‘catastrophic’ from a results perspective (meaning, you will NOT win if you flat within a timed segment, guaranteed), the wise choice for tires lies on the more ‘trail’ end of the spectrum than ‘packed dirt road’.
In sum, the GRINDURO approach aligns with a bias toward gravel bike setups that ‘can handle anything’, where the caveat is that ‘handle’ means ‘survive’ or ‘make it through’, albeit not necessarily fast or actually riding the bike. Walking might occur where a mountain bike would be capable. This begs the question: is a gravel bike that is juuuuuust barely ‘not-a-mountainbike’ what we want or need?
Is GRINDURO ‘The Pinnacle of Gravel’?
Here’s the thing. GRINDURO is not ‘gravel.’ ‘Gravel’ is not a thing. It’s also not nothing.
I mean ‘gravel’ is not monolithic. It’s a concept, a categorization, a type. It’s not an ethos. It’s not specific. It’s not a spirit. the sense you might get from the cycling media, what ‘gravel’ is not has more to do with its popularity than any of the ‘defining characteristics’ that have been imposed upon it. Whatever ‘it’ is.
Naming a thing doesn’t necessarily make it a thing. Gravel is things; it’s a multiverse. The ‘a’ implies a singularity that is not real.
In the gravel multiverse there are (in)numerable gravel realities playing out. Across each universe within this multiverse, the same laws of physics apply. However, the contexts physics determine (see The Huberman Podcast with Dr. Robert Sapolsky for an excellent discussion of determinism) shape and are shaped by the minds of riders as they engage physical space through and on their bicycles.
Contexts Shape: We are Cyborgs
The confluence of surface material, topographic profile, visual stimulus, and proximity to ‘civilization’, in relation to the rider’s skill-set, fitness, energy and mindset at a given point in time, and dynamics pertaining to other riders sharing the experience, are mediated by the individual rider’s bike and the kit on their body. Each rider-bike entity moves through time and space in relation to the other rider-bike entities sharing the ride.
There are feedbacks between each cyborg that inform how the strata is experienced, and how the technological elements of each cyborg’s assemblage are perceived. Seamless engagement and flow through the terrain of a given ride marks a harmonic resonance, and a feeling of ‘rightness in the world.’ In contrast, where the technological aspects of a given cyborg unit conspicuously prevent the ‘natural’ movement of bike-body through the world, the experience is jarring. Where flow is desired, interference is experienced.
Aside: this isn’t the first time I’ve written about cyclists as cyborgs. My piece from 2013, re-published, can be found here: Understanding the Cyborg Cyclist
Contexts Shaped by Cyborgs
Mostly figurative, sometimes literal. As bike-body cyborgs pass through terrain, the ‘rightness’ of the interface trifecta - bike-body-strata - colours perception along a spectrum. Pure glee at the rightness of the interface trifecta lives on one end of the spectrum; Type-1 fun. On the opposite end: pure struggle. It’s easy to see how a total mis-match of terrain and bike-body cyborg inhibits flow: the mind is gripped with the thought that what is happening is VERY WRONG! This is an inevitable thought while ‘fighting the bike,’ which characterizes a disconnect between body and bike, rupture of the functional cyborg schema. There’s no ‘at-one-ness’ while micro-managing every rock in one’s path, braking hard on the hoods on and on, of confronting fallen trees with a handlebar bag mounted and a 120mm stem, of having your eyeballs feel like they will rattle out of your skull.
These perturbations, strung together, push the rider in one of three directions:
THIS IS NOT GRAVEL! THIS IS MOUNTAIN BIKING!
This is RAD, but my bike sucks.
Is this good, but I just suck?
Wherever the rider goes with these thoughts determines the category they place the route into, and the valence they attribute to it. They shape the terrain by placing it into a cognitive category, assigning it static identity.
But this identity is, of course, contingent, because it’s relational. In a more literal way, yes, riders shape strata by virtue of riding over it; no surface is unchanging, even ‘at-rest’. Yet more literally, riders might go as far as to remove rocks from routes, petition ‘road improvements,’ remove fallen trees, etc., all from the perspective of ‘rightness’ for their requirements as a bike-body cyborg. But the way riders shape their riding contexts mostly comes down to changes made to the technological aspect of their bike-body assemblage. In other words, changes made to bikes reframe how we relate to the time-space contexts of our personal gravel universes.
By changing our bikes in even subtle ways, we re-shape how we experience time and space, and therefore, how we think and talk about a given route’s characteristics. We put our stamp on ‘gravel’ according to how we experience it, often without realizing that our gravel universe runs in parallel that of other riders within our riding group/s, let alone the gravel universes of others around the world. The tighter the match between a rider’s skills, fitness, and bike set-up, the tighter the similarity between their parallel universes. ‘FUN’ for one will tend to be ‘FUN’ for the other. The more these elements diverge, the more each rider’s experience will diverge.
Returning to the question above - Is GRINDURO the pinnacle of gravel? - I hope my answer is obvious: no. There’s no such thing as a definitive ‘pinnacle of gravel’, and I absolutely do not think riders should look to GRINDURO courses to guide their gravel bike set-ups. I’ll elaborate on why.
Le Parcours
There wasn’t really a lot of intel to work from pre-event, which is in line with the GRINDURO approach I discuss above. The less you say, the more bikes need to be ready for anything. Given I’d never spent time in Charlevoix whatsoever, looking at a route map provided little information regarding surface material and gnar-factor. I focused on the following information on the GRINDURO site.
Segment 1 at km 4.3 – Gros Bras Climb
A 3 km gravel climb, +220 metres.
Segment 2 at km 22.2 – Lac des Cygnes TT
False flat gravel descent over 7,5 km, +25 metres/-170 metres
Segment 3 at km 73.5 – Sprint of the Fields
2.5 km speedster on gravel, +20 meters / -45 meters
Segment 4 at km 102.9 – The Mine's Challenge
A 2.5 km single-track galvanizing dirt pumptrack + descent, +20 meters / -120 metres
As you can see, there’s not a lot of detail here. I read the span of segments as falling into three categories: climbing (not technical), fast-rolling (not technical), and trail (technical).
S1, the first climb, could be anything from a ‘gravel road’ - which is pretty ambiguous - to something like a fire-road. I’d not be the best climber either way, so I’d need to run tires that rolled fast enough not to cost me too much. My 46x42 climbing gear would be fine, given my recent experience around home on it.
S2 and S3 seemed to favour an aero position and fast tires. I’d probably lose time on S1 and have to try to take it back on S2. S3 would be too short to see big time gaps, and didn’t seem like it would be much of a factor.
S4 would be a proper trail, and I’d probably need to try to take the top time there to have a chance of winning. My tires would have to be robust enough for whatever I faced while fatigued and pushing my pace.
I wasn’t concerned about making it through the 110km route, but oriented myself around the 4 segments alone.
What was the course really like?
I mean, c’mon! That shit wasn’t rideable. Nobody could ride that. I didn’t sign up for a walk with my bike; that isn’t a gravel route. WTF?!
More or less, that’s a quote. I’m not going to say from whom, unless he reads this and tells me to name him.
What I can tell you is that I didn’t say it (obviously), nor did Charles Downey or LP Landry, the buddies I rode the event with. We all thought the route was pretty dope. Hard, yeah. LP walked a bunch, while Charles and I worked hard to avoid putting a foot down in error all day; he won: zero to my one dab. Our bikes were quite well-suited to the demands of the route, but that wasn’t true for the rider I quote above. Our experiences over the day shaped our rendering of the route. If it meshed with our ‘gravel bikes’, it would be appropriate to call it a ‘gravel route.’ If it didn’t mesh, it would be experienced as a ‘mountain bike route.’
I didn’t know it was possible to ride so much sand outside of a desert. While this might sound agonizing, it wasn’t necessarily so. We covered a whole heck of a lot of ‘fire-road’, a bunch of singletrack, and very little pavement over the day. Lots of the route was loose, with rounded rocks; not terribly punishing in terms of shock and vibration into the body. One particular stretch of singletrack was essentially a sand spine, which was bizarre. It was also a fun challenge to ride clean. Late into the day, a loose descent was right up there with the gnarilest I’ve ever ridden on a drop-bar bike.
While Charles Downey and I were having fun with all the challenging terrain, conducting a dab-challenge over the day (he won, zero dabs to my one), it was definitely a case of a lot of energy going into line choice and grunting up sandy climbs. The combination of physical and mental difficulty was clearly very hard on many of the riders, while for Charles and me it felt very similar to the 100km MTB rides we do around home. In other words, we were not getting mangled, so we weren’t fighting our bikes. At the same time, we had 47 and 42mm tires; 42 being just big enough to ride well, because Charles is very skilled.
Questions answered
I solicited questions to orient this piece, and collected a few great ones. Thanks to everyone who sent questions!
The organizing principle when getting into discussions and vexed analyses around set-ups for gravel events is that we’re generally not going to want to totally reconfigure our bikes for one-off experiences. Even if we had all the time in the world, and all the bits and bobs hanging around, there’s generally a period of time required after a configuration change to sync up with the bike. If you’re accustomed to riding numerous bike formats, small changes can easily ‘absorb’ into your bike-body-schema. However, more discernable changes might not really register as ‘important’ until you’re pressed to react quickly in a dangerous situation; you don’t want to talk yourself into a change being fine if you’re going to be riding at your limit.
Whether a given event, GRINDURO or otherwise, resonates with your bike setup doesn’t necessarily matter unless it teaches you something about improving your bike for the riding you do in your region and/or enough other events to warrant commitment to a significant change. As it happens, GRINDURO is an OUTLIER in relation to my local riding and every other ‘gravel’ or ‘spring classic’ event I’ve ever done. So it doesn’t push me to change my bike and retain changes. It teaches me, however, to see the Charlevoix region as one that requires a somewhat unique bike setup compared to other regions I’ve ridden in.
Q: Stem length and drop - how do you balance aero positioning and handling for a parcours like GRINDURO?
I’d ridden my bike with a longer, 110mm stem and 44cm bars for months, which puts me into a body position that works well for all-road riding. I’d ridden trails on it, and it wasn’t bad, so I didn’t worry about it. I have a decent amount of saddle-to-bar drop, but the stem is not slammed; my headtube is not tall. Given the segment information provided, I felt I needed to retain my more aerodynamic all-road position than bias toward dropgnar by swapping to my 90mm stem. I thought there would be some pack riding and tactics involved for the segments, which also played into my decision. If I’d have to sag a segment start, then try to pass a group to make time, I’d need to ride in the wind well.
The first climb / segment wasn’t technical or steep enough for my position to matter; inconclusive. The second segment put my aero position to use, sure, but there’s little chance I’ve been slower on my shorter stem due to drag. Instead, my 110mm stem biases weight to my front wheel more, which means that when I hit a rock at speed I’m more likely to puncture.
Fully rigid bikes tend to flat more on the front, because when pitched downhill the weight bias shifts forward a bit, and the rider’s range of motion in the arms is all there is to work with to absorb impacts.
The classic scenario unfolded within the second segment: I didn’t see a square-edged rock at 60kph, and my front wheel struck it hard,. I had enough time to unweight the back wheel immediately after sensing the front impact - typical - which constrained the damage to the front tire alone. Suspension helps with this sort of scenario, of course, but if it mutes the impact enough, the brain-body doesn’t get the signal to unweight the back wheel, transferring the flat risk from one tire to the other. Hence full-suspension bikes.
From experience, I know that my shorter stem setup reduces the force of front impacts a bit; it would have helped, and perhaps just enough, as my flat was an absolutely miniscule hole at the bead, which I could barely find, and had to patch externally (costing me 20 minutes).
For the third sector, the longer stem and aero position helped, but it’s hard to say how much. For the last segment, I’d have certainly been better off with the shorter stem, as it was a MTB trail.
Of course, one might ask: what about the rest of the 110km route? This is interesting to dig into, because segments only constituted 15.5km of the route, and were LESS demanding than the segments. I’ve never seen so much sand in my life over the course of a ride; if I were to return for another ride in the same area I’d definitely mount my 90mm stem.
Q: Thoughts on gearing? Was 46x42 good?
I’m not much of a high-cadence rider, so I don’t tend to lean on the lowest of low gear options for climbing. However, I have run doubles on gravel bikes for every gravel race I’d previously done, with gearing as low as 1:1. I like doubles, but my X3 is built around the 1X format, and while I could convert it, there’s no way I wanted to do so for one event. I’d ridden rings as small as 38t on the bike previously, but a 38x11 gear is far too small for anything but trails, so I moved to a 42, then 46T oval Absolute Black ring (click here for more details on my experience with their oval rings), and have since been quite happy with its top-speed, and climbing gear, 46x42. Related, I used Absolute Black’s GRAPHENlube for the event and weekend, and it held up perfectly in the sandy conditions. It doesn’t ‘attract’ contamination, which is a real asset when riding in dusty conditions. A low-friction, durable lube like this is also really valuable on a 1X drivetrain, where the chain operates at a pretty extreme angle more often than with a 2X, and a clutch derailleur increases pulley tension.
For GRINDURO, I was more concerned about top-speed for S2 than whether the 46x42 would be low enough for S1. For the rest of the route, I didn’t care whatsoever. 110km is not ‘long’ for me in gravel terms, and I’m known to do 100km MTB rides, so I wasn’t worried about my legs being able to turn the gear over as the day wore on.
So, how’d it go? Fine, gearing was never an issue. S1 was a really hard climb because I was racing it. Otherwise, it wasn’t a big deal. I went at it hammer-and-tongs with two other guys, to the point that my arms and hands were numb; hardest effort since 2019. Third over the top, I lay down for 10 minutes to recover. My gear was never an issue, my VO2 capacity was the limiter over an 11-minute effort!
For S2, my 46x11 would be pressed into action. I rolled over the timing mat at pace, and was soon into top-gear at 50, then 60kph. Pushing hard, the gear was juuuuust big enough to squeeze all the speed I could take out of the fire-road style descent, which was fairly shallow in grade, and not technical.
For S3 and S4 my gearing was not challenged on either extreme. I took the fastest time on S3, which was essentially a gently rolling gravel road.
That’s me, and riding 650b wheels means my climbing gear was actually lower/easier than if I’d been using larger diameter 700c x 42mm tires. The course we rode biases toward the lower end of the gearing spectrum, and for some folks a 38t ring would have been ideal. Does this mean that ‘gravel bikes’ should be built with 38t rings, in general? I don’t think so.
Q: What about tire and fork setup - what works best for that sandy stuff?
My tires setup was as small as I’d want for the terrain we rode. Pre-event, I was fretting about them. I’d been riding a Panaracer Gravel King SK in 650x48mm up front for a while, with a Terrene Elwood in 47mm in the back. Opting to race on 650s with tread was a first, but I was wary of bleeding speed on pavement and packed dirt'/gravel. In the week leading up to the event, I swapped to an Elwood up front, unhappy with the rolling speed of the Panaracer.
Among bike configuration changes, tires are generally the easiest and more meaningful. At the same time, they can also be more complicated than they seem. Depending on a bike’s geometry, amping up tire volume can create unsettling handling quirks that feel dangerous. For example, stiff-casing 650b tires that are ‘slick’ can generate significant oversteer that makes the bike scary to ride. While some bikes are designed to accommodate large tires in 700c or 650b diameters, both from a handling and clearance perspective, others merely fit them, but don’t ride well beyond a certain size.
My X3 maxes out at 650b x 48mm at the seat-stays (tightest clearance area in the frame), but fits a larger tire up front, perhaps 55mm. 48s are the largest I own, so I’m not in a position to decide to run anything larger. When I ride the X3 for what I call ‘trail-mix’ rides, which involve everything from tarmac to trails, I tend to prefer 650b x 48mm tires, because they preserve responsive handling while also giving me the volume I need for hitting obstacles at speed. They generally don’t increase traction while turning on loose surfaces, but the do increase traction over loose surfaces while climbing.
The ‘wild-card’ element I have to work with when changing wheel and tire sizes on my X3 is my Columbus Futura Cross fork. This carbon unit has adjustable rake, which I dreamed about ever since riding 650b wheels for the first time years ago. The most noticeable impact of amping up tire volume on a given gravel or cyclocross bike with 700c wheels is oversteer. As 700c tires cross over the 40mm threshold, the stiffer and grippier they are, the more they potentially oversteer. When matched with a typical 47mm rake fork, they can feel crazy. The Columbus’s adjustable rake allows the rider to choose between 47mm rake (which is as low as one would ever want to go for a gravel or cyclocross bike, IMO) and 52mm rake. 47mm rake works really well with 650b wheels and tires, especially when they are knobby (which means less grippy on pavement). If using 650b x 48mm slicks, the grip increases on pavement, introducing the possibility of oversteer. The fork’s 52mm rake setting can be preferable in this case, and will almost certainly be preferable when using 700c tires larger than 40mm, if not even 38mm.
Since I was using low-knob 650b tires, I was happy to leave my fork set at 51mm, which I’d been enjoying when also using my Rene Herse Snoqualmie Pass tires at 700c x 42mm.
As things unfolded, I wished I’d not swapped to my Elwood from the Panaracer Gravel King SK that was on the front wheel for a while prior the event. The SK is a slow-rolling tire on hard surfaces, because it’s both fairly stiff in construction and its multitude of small, square, centre knobs squirm under load. That squirm equates to power loss, which is very noticeable in the rear. I don’t mind it on the front, assuming I’m not riding a lot of pavement. Since the route wound up being vastly off-road, and the SK is actually a more voluminous and durable tire than the Elwood, I’d have enjoyed a little more sand float and flat protection if I’d retained it.
The principle behind tire volume in relation to sand is all about sand type. When wet, sand is pretty firm, and small tires can work well. When its dry, sand moves like snow, and a lot of tire volume is required to float on top of it. Ruts that might form don’t hold, so there isn’t anything firm to ‘cut into’. Loose sand often winds up riding a lot like mud, so for ‘gravel’ the best set-up is a high volume tire with minimal tread (tread has nothing to bite into). In contrast, for cyclocross, ruts often form in the sand, so 33mm file treads end up working the best.
My tire set-up kept my centre of gravity low for the volume they provided; 700c wheels with tires larger than 33mm would have positioned me higher off the ground. For the way sand rides, a low centre of gravity is optimal. The same applies for high-speed descents; there were some of those too. My pedal height isn’t ‘low’ with my set-up, and the course wasn’t one with a lot of potential pedal strikes. But this is something to consider when designing custom gravel bikes.
I could be inclined to think that it would have been ‘way better’ if I had 55mm or 60mm tires on my bike. The GRINDURO approach could easily bias me in that direction, along with the shorter stem and lower gearing. Would that be right, though?
What about a dropper post?
Nobody asked about dropper seatposts, but I gotta go there. I’ve rarely explicitly wanted a dropper post on my drop-bar bikes, but when I have, I really wanted one. For the final timed GRINDURO segment, which I pre-rode the previous day with Charles, I wanted my post slammed. My rationale wasn’t as much focused on sheer speed as safety. It was the end of a long day, I knew the bermed descent could see me get ragged, and I wanted to manage risk; I’d go for it irrespective of seat height. I manually dropped my saddle before starting the segment, and wound up struggling to hold speed across the 1km+ stretch of fairly flat trail that preceded the descent. I missed the top time by 18 seconds. I would have preferred to have a dropper post for the day, no question.
Conclusions
If we add up the elements I’d change if I were to go back to Charlevoix for another GRINDURO tomorrow, throwing in a dropper post: what do we end up with? For starters, while swapping back to my Panaracer front tire and shorter stem would be easy, installing a dropper post would not, unless it was of the wireless 27.2mm variety. I don’t own one of those, and would have a hard time justifying purchasing one so that I could use it a small number of times annually. For reference, the RockShox Reverb AXS dropper post retails for $800 USD. Yes, you read that right. My T-Lab doesn’t have routing for an internal dropper cable, so I’d have to us an external cable option, which I am not very keen on.
So again, let’s say I were to magic up a dropper, made the other changes, what do I have? My X3 would become rather unlike the other bike I use for ‘gravel’, and road, my Brodie Romax Carbon, optimized for rides that involve trails. For longer rides and/or fast-rolling terrain, I’d be annoyed by my body position and tires, wonder WhyTF I was rolling on a dropper post, and thinking about how I should have just swapped the wheels on my Brodie to 35s and ridden it. If my setup - which can do anything! - pulled me to ride more trail-mix rides, versus taking out my actual mountain bike, I’d inevitably experience an increasing number of punctures, not least because my dropper would allow me to ride higher descending speeds than before. The fact is - and I know this from experience - I can comfortably outride what 650b x 48mm tires can handle in terms of puncture resistance, so a ‘dedicated’ drop-gnar setup as discussed is not really what I need for my personal bike ecosystem.
Returning to the question I pose above - Is GRINDURO the Pinnacle of Gravel - my answer has to be ‘it depends.’ For me, it’s a no.
In my gravel universe, a gravel bike that ‘can do anything!’ isn’t what I want or need. I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting with bikes that fit this purpose, and I’ve come to prefer to manage my bike’s ‘soft spots’ through the most demanding sections of rides than optimize for the minority of time spent on the bike. This approach, which involves managing tires - has a lot to do with my understanding that a ‘fun ride’ is one where we are not ‘fighting our bike’ most of the time. When I ride a dropgnar setup for 5 hours on paved and dirt roads, 15 minutes on a technical trail, I want to enjoy those 5 hours, not think about how unnecessarily slow-feeling my bike is. ‘But it’s gonna rule for 15 minutes’ is not something I want to be telling myself. The thing is, yeah, the odd event or race might see a dropgnar setup thrive, and it might be worth the time, effort, and money to tailor your bike for such an event. The whole cost-benefit equation shifts when we’re talking about racing, especially when we have something to prove. In the racing context, there’s often a ‘crux’ section of each course, which will pose the most extreme demands on body and bike. The crux is where the race might be won or lost, so it tends to drive decisions around bike setup and tactics. It’s possible to treat a crux as a section that requires a buffer in order to ride at a slower rate than others, on a less capable setup, or, in contrast, as one where you’ll go all-in, attack, and try to force your competitors into errors. These racing dynamics should not drive what is considered ‘proper gravel’ setup for the majority of riders, ATMO.
Further, I submit that the idea that a gravel bike should be capable for anything just shy of actual mountain biking (another amorphous category) is wrong. I say this because a great gravel bike, I believe, in whatever gravel universe you ride in, is fun to ride on all surfaces. It necessarily embodies compromise, because it’s for all surfaces! In contrast to a modern mountain bike, which is built for dirt alone, and technical trails at that, gravel bikes that ‘make sense’ should be ‘not-mountain-bikes,. and truly so. They should be easily adaptable with wheel and tire changes, and perhaps stem changes here and there, to conform to the demands of the riding being asked of them. For the few riders who don’t and won’t own an actual mountain bike, the gravel set-up will need to be extra-adaptable, fitting tires as large as 60mm, dropper post, broad gearing. Steve Proulx rides such a bike.
The thing to know, however, is that shit gets real fast on a dropbar bike that is extra capable off-road, because these bikes provide a very small window of opportunity to recover sketchy moments at speed. In other words, everything feels good until something goes wrong; then it goes really wrong, really fast. The more we change drop bar bikes to reduce this vulnerability, the more they inch toward becoming actual mountain bikes, with mountain bike bars, etc, and the less we want to ride them anywhere but of-froad. At that point, one has to ask: why am I doing this to myself?
Enter the MTB hardtail.
TBC.
