One Year Later

Blog meta

I have not fussed with the blog, so we're still on Zola. As site generators go, Zola seems to be gaining popularity for its stability, which is another way to say the developers haven't broken things in the name of "upgrades". The little Chromebook must have a tired battery because it doesn't seem to hold a charge. Or ChromeOS doesn't really sleep when the lid is closed. I'm not sure it's worth changing the battery, or trying to repave it with Linux. I wish it could hold a charge and be ready to write when I am but every time I pull it out the battery is dead.

I starting writing a few new posts and now have about a dozen sitting in my drafts. I really should finish them.

Bike stuff

As mentioned in the last post, I caught COVID for the second time last August, and was in a weakened state up until May this year. I was able to get in a couple good rides, like the annual fatbike overnighter we do every year, but I also would have weeks where I couldn't pedal up easy climbs in a 30x51 low gear. A lot of my rides ended up being just toodling around with a camera, taking pictures.

The fatigue was bad enough at some times that I was worried it might not ever go away and I would be stuck with chronic fatigue. Therefore I was not motivated to take on building any new frames. I drew up a bunch of weird ideas for later, but haven't wanted to build anything right now because honestly I'd rather ride the bikes I have.

I did tinker some, so here's the current state of the stable:

Bikepacker

One thing that "grinds my gears" is when people get obsessed with optimizing around bikepacking details, but don't actually spend much time doing bikepacking. Sure, it's your bike and your money and your happiness, but thanks to Gear Acquisition Syndrome people seem to overlook that to bikepack you need 1) a bike, and 2) a way to pack stuff. Getting obsessed with adding a little extra seat tube to get 1 soda can worth of volume more, or going N+1 on bottle bosses probably won't change your outcome one bit.

Of course, I recognize this makes me a hypocrite because I have a custom, built just for the task, bikepacking bike. But my other bikes now share a lot of the features that made it ride distance well. Both the fat bike and trail bike now have similar seat tube angles. The biggest difference is seat tube length so those bikes can run long droppers. This means they would need smaller frame bags, but if I really need that extra space I'll make another bag that sits on top of the top tube.

Since my frequency of bikepacking had dropped significantly, the bikepacker wasn't getting used enough and was basically just a place to dehydrate tire sealant, so I decided to retire it and do my bikepacking on the fat bike.

SC-1

An old friend reached out about getting something like SC-1 custom built. I said I'd do the base design to get him started but it would better if we had a starting point. "Just borrow SC-1 and ride it until you figure out your fit and all that." So that bike is now in the backwoods of Northern California, and eventually we'll find out if he liked it or hated it.

Gravel Bike

I haven't ridden it much. It's racier position was not too appealing for noodling around. My clipless shoes were getting cramped in the toes, and instead of trying to find wider toe box models I just threw some flat pedals on it. It has the Catalyst pedals that were on the bikepacker, and with more regular shoes (more on that later) they're good enough.

One of my bike design investigations this year is some kind of drop bar touring bike, so I did play around with raising my bars to get some idea of what a casual drop bar position would be. No real conclusions yet. Finding Arne Peters' videos (more on him later) about how higher stack positions could be faster might has me experimenting more, but chasing speed really doesn't fit in the big picture for me. But maybe just a little speed tinkering, just for fun? So this bike has been getting some other handlebar setups which I'll post about later.

It still has 155mm cranks, no change there.

Fat bike

After retiring the bikepacker, I laced up some 29+ wheels to use for summer bikepacking and casual noodling. I had a bunch of older 135/177 fat bike wheels from the earlier fat bike taking up room that I had to contend with. I was holding on to them because I was interested in some kind of "quiver killer" fat bike with lower Q cranks for trail clearance. But in the end I decided I didn't really want just one bike. I decided to reclaim some room and unlaced all the wheels, moving my older 27.5 Light Bicycle rims to 150/197 hubs so I now have 5, 4, and 3 inch tire options for the bike.I did save one pair of the narrower hubs just in case...

I rode it enough to come to the conclusion that I had no problem pedaling the wider cranks. With that came a bonus - the wider stance meant I had calf clearance for my Crank Tank which has been sitting on shelf for years. Since the crank tank now takes up most of the main triangle, I had to make a new half-frame bag to fill in the empty space. On this one I tried something new for closures. Since it's a small bag a rolltop seemed too bulky. I've had zippers fail before, so I'd prefer not to use them, but they made the most sense here. I decided that instead of one big zipper that would cause the bag to flop wide-open if (when) it failed, I split the risk between two half-zippers, one on each side and staggered. I can reach the front half of the bag on one side and the back half on the other. If one dies then the bag retains a lot more structural integrity.

Crank tank mode

I've only gotten one trip on the tank and it seems OK, it's certainly an easy way to instantly carry a gallon of water. Normally that water would be split out to bottles on the fork, so now the fork has to carry the gear that used to be in the full frame bag. Floppy bags in undersized adventure cages hasn't left me too excited and I shredded one dry bag when it wiggled out enough to touch the spokes (luckily it didn't lock up the front wheel). I've been using some big rigid containers from Costco snack mixes which sit more securely in an adventure cage. In an emergency they could carry water too I guess. This experience does have me wondering if we went backwards not using more standard racks and panniers.

The half frame bag ended up staying on their permanently, which lead to an unanticpated limitation: I don't have water bottle bosses low enough to mount a bottle cage below the bag. The lowest boss I did install is just low enough for the top hole in the cage, but at the bottom end I have to use a hose clamp. I may think about designing around a "low cage" position on future frames.

This bike still has 152mm cranks on it.

Trail bike

The trail bike never felt quite right. I moved the bars up and down and in and out to try to figure out what it wanted but the handling was still off. It never felt like the bike and my body were cornering around the same point in space. While I could sometimes get it to cooperate by taking weirder lines, I became convinced the bike was too slack and there was too much steering gain when the bike got leaned over. I started to consider ways to drop the trail.

Easiest thing was an angleset. I ordered a 2 degree Wolftooth headset to steepen the bike up to around 67 degrees and suddenly the bike started riding intuitively. Without a suspension fork to dive the geometry was just too slack for my trails.

While working this out, another project fell together. My pal Peter Croce got a Stooge and was blown away by how well its high offset fork geometry worked on trails. This had him also scheming about a "quiver killer" fat bike with Stooge geometry. We were noodling on the design in CAD and wanted to design it around the Jones LWB fork, because not only is it spaced for a fat bike hub, it can clear a fat tire, and it's 76mm offset. The catch is that they have been out of stock forever and Jeff could only say he might reorder eventually...

I personally try not to build forks but a high offset steel fork sounded appealing. I did some brainstorming around a good way to get something close with off-the-shelf tubing but there's nothing available that's close to what Stooge uses. If I really had to, I could build a segmented fork, and while considering that I drew up some designs with a moto-style offset front dropout. Then it hit me - If I can offset the dropout on a custom fork, I might be able to modify a stock fork instead. I did some quick modelling and sent screen shots to Peter: "What if we started with Surly Moonlander forks?" By my estimates we could end up around the same axle to crown, and get around 76mm of offset. Fate delivered, as Peter quickly found someone on Facebook Marketplace trying to offload two Moonlander forks. A bulk deal was negotiated, CAD drawings were sent to SendCutSend, and pretty soon I had a steel 76mm offset fork for the trail bike that I could also try on the fat bike.

New dropouts

All I can say is DAAAANGGG, the steel fork rides super smooth compared to the previous carbon fork. You can watch it flex on the small bumps, but it doesn't feel like it winds up backwards under heavy braking. Speeding up the handling made it corner even better, and the extra front center made the bike feel more controllable when things got steeper.

After some testing I converted the second fork for Peter, who also found it magical on his fatbike. The universe provided again and he found a prototype Stooge fat bike so he now has a real Stooge fat bike with a properly offset fork to match.

Before you ask, no, I don't plan to get in the fork conversion business.

I haven't made a second fork for the fatbike yet to replace its carbon Salsa fork. Since it often has fat tires on it the fork flex isn't as important, the extra front center doesn't really help in the snow, and I don't mind the weight savings when pushing it up dumb routes.

As the trail bike got more dialed and I felt better I got more inspired to mess with it, so I took to opportunity to finally test something that I've been curious about but never got around to trying: oval chainrings. I swapped out my 30 round ring for a 30 oval, and on the first climb I was impressed - I was climbing one gear higher! I was thinking maybe the oval ring drops in radius as your crankarm loses leverage, which balances out your effort or something. When I got home I took a close look and it looked like the timing on the ring was actually to put the minor radius pretty much right in the power phase, not after it. So much for that theory. The next ride I took them on the started to feel a little lumpy. And then I started thinking "if the power phase is using the smallest radius part of the ring, and you're really just coasting across the dead spot in the major portion of the ring, is it really any different than just using a smaller ring?" After the second ride I pulled out a round 28 tooth ring, and it was about the same radius as the 30 tooth oval ring where it mattered. I swapped it in and did the same loop as the first ride and lo and behold, I was climbing in the same gears, one gear higher on the cassette than a 30 round. Because, of course, I had geared the bike down in the front and was compensating in the rear. So I decided oval rings weren't doing anything amazing for me. One neat thing about them though is that if you have a single speed bike that has limited chain tensioning options, switching to an oval ring will pedal like you geared your bike down two teeth in the front, but will tension up at the same effective chainstay length.

Now that bike handled well I wanted to push it further, so I added Cushcores, a regular in the rear with a Bontrager XR-4 2.6", and a Plus version with a Maxxis DHR 3" front tire. I didn't like the DHRs in the past very much because they have a vague spot that doesn't cooperate well with our dry sand-over-hardpack trails. But for some reason with the Cushcores and a few PSI less the vague spot disappeared.

This year I discovered I have a distant relative living nearby in Reno and he's a mountain biker too. He's more of an enduro type of rider, so I got a chance to ride with him and his buddies. We drove up to Sky Tavern and did some laps (I got towed uphill by the ebikers) and the bike did well on the black diamond trails (minus the big hucks, which I don't have the safety gear to risk) and then we dropped back down to town on the local trails (I think it's called College Boy?) These trails get a lot of bigger travel bikes, and a good percentage of them are even heavier ebikes, and they were rough with serious braking bumps before every corner or obstacle. In this kind of riding my Soma Dream 27 degree bars weren't feeling quite as capable, so I did try swapping to Hudski Longhorn 17 degree bar. It did feel better when things got really rough, but I ended up missing the comfort of the Dreams on my local trails so I put them back on. I don't really want to play the DH arms race so I think I'll skip the rougher trails.

The more I rode it, the more I thought about setting it back up single speed, and now that my body was cooperating again I felt I could handle it again. So the gears came off and it's back to 30x22.

For consistency I put the Goldix cranks from the bikepacker on when I converted it back to singlespeed. This bike originally had 165s, then 152, and now it has 160s.

Single speed mode

Short cranks

So, did I stick with short cranks? Yeah, and haven't considered changing. While it's not the only change that has happened in my bike setup, I'm the happiest I have ever been riding bikes. I haven't felt any need to go longer. I have a set of 175s that I will probably cut down to 145 just to see how even shorter feels.

I have been watching the discussion around short cranks online and in the comments and it seems certain people are getting particularly psychotic about them. There's always haters online who get mad about this and that, but something about short cranks really causes people to short out. I don't know if it's subconsciously emasculating or what. One particularly nasty individual in a forum I will not name was concerned that when they went to a shorter crank they would have to raise their seat but weren't able to raise their bars to match (probably some dumb integrated cockpit). When I suggested he just try it out without raising his seat since bike fitters always say the number one problem they see is the seat too high, this guy completely lost his shit and was so mad he was making up stuff about what I was claiming and how it was total stupidity and I was a "piece of work". Just because I dared to say "just try it".

This kind of crap still amazes me - the person who has not even tried a short crank yet, going ballistic on the person who not only has tried them, but has the ability to test them in ways most people can't.

I don't want to be "The Short Crank Defender". I don't care what cranks you run. But I think I'll be strategic about where I dole out any advice.

Shoes

My feet keep getting bigger. 20 years ago I was wearing a 43.5. Now I'm hitting 46s. Too much time in sandals and barefoot I guess. For MTBing I've found that the Whitin Trail Hiker Zero Drop (like many Amazon specific products the name varies) is pretty good, not super stiff but it has a real sole and not a "barefoot" glorified rubber glove. They're not super durable either, but I outgrew my 45s and they're cheap so I'm not complaining. I've considered grinding the soles down and replacing them with better rubber. I could also see putting a thin plastic stiffener in them just for a little more support.

For the gravel bike as mentioned above I had to switch to flats once my clipless shoes got pinchy in the toes. Finding something with the toe box I want and enough rearward adjustability on the cleat is going to be tough. I found something promising, the Candy Lace from Crank Brothers, which does have a slightly squarer toe box, and huge rearwards adjustability. The bonus is that with a coupon they're about $150. But they ended up still not quite right. They don't really fill in the cleat plate recess so I could feel a hole under my foot. I as able to 3D print a spacer to fill that space it. But there was still something off about it, and I think it's that the contour and toe spring of the sole just doesn't match up with my midfoot position. I really want something flatter and roomier still in the toe box. Or maybe I just notice the small platform now coming from big flat pedals.

I am strongly considering taking the shoes apart and replacing the contoured structural midsole with a flat one made from waterjet-cut carbon fiber sheet. But do I really want to go through the effort and then still end up not liking the feel of the SPD cleat?

I did find a pair of Scott's Volt flat pedal shoes on eBay. They are fairly light and slim without a lot of armoring, and fairly low stack too. They're quite flexible for a cycling shoe, but have a dense enough midsole to keep you from feeling high spots from the pedal pins. They are BOA which I don't love but can deal with. These feel pretty darn good riding, though ideally they'd be a half size bigger. They're similar to the Giro Trackers, and I'm keeping an eye out on eBay for a pair of those to try out.

The Strong Feet Athletics shoes look like a great shape, but they're too road oriented for me and the cleat position looks pretty normal. I'm hoping this first model is a success for them and they can release a more dirt oriented model that's closer to what I want.

I also spent a bunch of my down time researching 3d printing shoes. I'm pretty sure I could eventually develop exactly the shoe I want, but it's a lot of CAD modeling and prototyping and again, I'd rather just ride right now. Maybe over the winter.

Influencers

David Weck is an exercise pioneer (for lack of a better term) who invented the Bosu Ball and the Flow Rope thing. He has a lot of interesting ideas that relate to fascial chains, gait dynamics, and other weird stuff that I had been getting from Colby Pearce. He's extremely entertaining too. While his stuff seems to appeal more to MMA and Crossfit types, it's still interesting. I even whipped up a flow rope and trying to master some of the patterns is fun.

Lawrence Van Lingen showed up via flow rope. He's a running coach and also has some interesting ideas about core movement and gait. Unlike Weck his whole vibe is incredibly Zen and way more up my alley. He trains a lot a triathletes and probably has some interesting ideas about bike fit too. I asked Colby Pearce if he'd consider interviewing him and it turns out they knew each other. And just I am finishing this post up, LVL was the latest guest on Colby's podcast. Sitting in my drafts folder is a post also titled "Moving from the center", so I really enjoyed this episode.

Riding the single speed I've been experimenting with tweaking my body position to take advantage of some of the these guys' movement concepts and there might be something there, or it just might be something different to do with your brain while riding the same climb for the hundredth time. It kind of reminds me of how in skate skiing you there are different patterns of how you pole and push off that give you different "gears". If anything I'm entertained.

Arne Peters is a former pro cyclist who decided to do his own thing. He only does TikTok/Youtube Short types of videos, and he has a lot of theories that go against the current trends. He's been designing an aero road bike with a super high stack based on his own aerodynamic and biomechanical testing. In one video he says "I only care about average speed, not power or drag". It's refreshing for someone to attack the problem from both ends recognizing that aerodynamic contortionism can drastically reduce power and oxygen intake, but that dumping lots of power into drag doesn't work either. He's the first person I've seen recommend running shorter cranks so you can run your saddle lower to reduce the frontal profile of your upper leg, something I've also been pursuing. Unfortunately he hasn't hit the podcast circuit yet.

And of course, I still religiously listen to Colby Pearce's podcast as it has the only interesting cycling content I've found.

The State of Marc right now