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Rougher stuff

In my previous entry I mentioned that the forest nearest me which I'd been riding in a lot lately featured a wide, relatively easily ridden main trail but also less easy side trails too. Those side trails call to me. I would love to be able to ride all of them. I've tried to ride one of them, twice. The first time I gave up very easily, the second time I tried harder, got further, had a blast and didn't hurt myself - but still turned back before too long at all because it really did seem beyond me.

The first problem I noticed - and noticed also the one time I visited the larger, further forest which is a bit less manicured - was pedal strike. Trying naively to pedal constantly, or carelessly coasting with one pedal at 6 o'clock or thereabouts, resulted in fairly frequent connections between a pedal and a rock or, more often, an exposed tree root. My first thought was that this would be unavoidable without a bike with a higher bottom bracket to give me extra clearance. But after thinking about it and reading about it I decided that I could probably go a long way toward solving this problem simply with better technique; a combination of paying closer attention to my pedalling and the terrain, coasting with pedals at 3 and 9 o'clock, and "ratchet pedalling" (alternately pedalling forward and backward, keeping the cranks appoximately horizontal all the time). I really like the idea of using more challenging terrain as a motivation to develop better technique instead of a temptation to buy better technology, so I intend to stick with practicing this where I can.

The second, bigger problem is gearing. Even though at 64 gear inches or so the Franken-Peugeot is geared lower than a lot of single speed bikes (deliberately, to facilitate off-road adventures), it's problematic for underbiked riding over rough terrain. I need to roll slowly over this stuff, which I don't mind at all, and I stop and start from time to time (often due to pedal strike!), which I also don't mind. But all of this means that when I get to any kind of non-trivial incline and need to start climbing it from almost a stand-still, the drive train is under a *lot* of strain and I worry about how good an idea that is. Even if I develop excellent technique and totally eliminate pedal strike, I would really need lower gearing to make riding these tougher trails feasible.

Thus, a lot of my time lately has been spent thinking about unconventional drivetrain setups I could use to give the Franken-Peugeot lower gearing options (the conventional derailer solution is not straightforward with this frame, for various reasons), and trying to fight the urge (not easy!) to start a new bike-building project aimed at producing something better suited to harsher off-road riding. This post was *supposed* to be mostly a discussion of options on these fronts. But I ended up undermining a lot of my idle speculation yesterday by doing the incredibly obvious thing of actually exploring one of these rougher side trials in its completeness. Well, actually, I *almost* did the obvious thing, which after all is to just ride to the start of a trail, lock my bike to a tree and then *walk* its entire length, paying attention to the hypothetical cycling conditions. Instead, I simply resolved to traverse one whole trail *with my bike* no matter how long it took; riding it where I could ride it, walking it where I couldn't ride it, and even carrying it where I couldn't walk it. Who knows, maybe after the initial difficult parts that had turned me back before, it got a lot easier?

Nope, it just got harder as I went in. I estimate I rode no more than 20% of the distance, and probably closer to 10%. This simple experiment made it very clear to me that even if I lowered the Franken-Peugeot's gearing substantially, I'm kidding myself to think that this kind of trail is possible with this bike. There are parts that I think really do warrant suspension and giant tyres. Even with ridiculously good technique and arbitrarily low gearing, routinely riding this kind of trail on a road/gravel bike seems like an excellent way to bang my wheels well out of true on a regular basis and probably even break an axle eventually.

To some extent, this was really liberating. Now that I know those trails are totally unridable on any kind of bike that I'm interested in owning or building, the temptation they provided every time I rode past, and the feeling that I need to substantially muck around with my bike to bring them within my reach, is gone. I think there's very real value in accepting and making peace with the idea that any bike is ultimately going to have limits, and that spending time, energy and money on improving and enjoying rides that are within the limits of the bike(s) you have can result in more happiness longterm than always buying new stuff to push those limits. I have to come to appreciate this attitude in photography, in particular. Rather than spend money on a kit of lenses of every possible different focal length and then lug them with you everywhere so you never have to miss a photo opportunity, just accept that you don't need to be prepared for everything, carry one or two lenses with you and get really good at recognising and taking photos that those lenses are suited for, and let the rest go. There's no reason this shouldn't apply to bikes as well. Accepting and embracing these limits conflicts to some extent with the fact that I've long embraced the idea of owning one "do-it-all" bike, and the notion that the plethora of different bike categories of bike in the mainstream industry is an artificial construct designed to sell more bikes (admittedly, something which may be slowly changing with the booming gravel/adventure/all-road category). But it seems unavoidable that there must be *some* limit to generality.

I'll post about unconventional drivetrain stuff in the future anyway, just for fun, since I already wrote most of it up anyway.