This is sort of apropos of a thread I saw on Reddit the other day, of my current dream-bike dreaming, and of a nice ~20mi ride I snuck in over the weekend on the fixed-gear bike. We’ll go in reverse order.

I got to spend a lot of time playing mechanic in the garage this weekend. Friday that meant trying (semi-successfully) to quiet the brakes on the Straggler (which really just needs both new pads and rotors, but that’ll have to wait until our oil bill goes down), replacing the brake pads on the Riddler bike (this was very successful and great), swapping some chainrings from the parts bin to a bike and then that bike’s chainrings to another bike, and some other tom-foolery. All of which is to say, though, that the Riddler bike is in the best condition right now, and a sub-goal I have for this year is to do at least a populaire on the fixed gear, so since the weather was unseasonably beautiful (and therefore scary in a climate-change kind of way), I went out on a longer ride this weekend. Granted, 20mi isn’t exactly long anymore, but given that I a) do not currently have a good way to carry extra food and layers on that bike and b) am still in my "off season ramp-up" and c) who cares anyway, it felt good to get out for a while. I’d done about 20 the weekend before, too, on that bike, in the snow/rain (thus the checking-of-the-brakes and subsequent replacement of brake pads), but that was with a buddy who hasn’t done a ton of that kind of riding and so we kept it flat. This time I did what amounts to a version of my regular "loop" (passing by my friend Jim’s excellent bike shop) that included a reasonable (by which I mean, more "regular") amount of climbing, ~900-1000 ft. Not a ton (or even a "lot," really), but like I said, reasonable, given that we did less than half that the week before.

It’s a pain in the ass climbing and descending on a fixed gear (especially when your gearing is too high and you’re too cheap to replace the cog right now), but it’s also really nice. Other people have written (maybe too much) about that before, so I’ll leave it at "nice." It’s "nice" not to need to think about shifting. "Nice" to feel strong at the top. "Nice" to zig-zag across steep parts of the road to shrink the gradient a little (a trick I learned from Emily O’Brien, fixed-gear randonneur extraordinaire and also maker of cool bags).

The simplicity of that bike is so nice, especially on the over-salted roads of a Boston winter.

And speaking of over-salted, one of the things I had to do to the Straggler bike (aside from attempt to clean off the rotors) was knock fucking rust off the chain and cassette. Granted, if I spent more time on maintenance it wouldn’t be a problem. And granted, I’d left it a while. But also, granted, salt destroys drivetrains, and that bike’s is no exception.

Right now it’s set up in its "original" configuration, a 1x11 Rival setup with 42x11-42 gearing. I swapped it over from the "rando" setup before D2R2, and haven’t bothered to change it since.^[1] It’ll get a new drivetrain (and hopefully new pads/rotors/cables/housing, too) come spring, or at least ahead of brevet season, and in the meantime I ride it on weekends when I’m riding with geared-bike people and sometimes to work, though lately less so since it no longer has a front fender.^[2] The thing about this setup is that it’s very modern. When I spec’d the bike originally, that was the goal: a modern bike. Integrated shifting, 1x, disc-brakes, all the rest. It was definitively cool, especially since it wasn’t stock and at that time stock Stragglers were still on a 2x10 setup, if my memory serves.

But the truth is that I find the integrated shifting…​ uninspiring. Needing to reach down to my nethers and pull a fiction shifter on the downtube feels more like riding the fixed gear: I have to do things to make the bike work. Yes, this is misplaced…​ well, not nostalgia, since I started riding bikes well after integrated shifting was a thing, but "curmudgeonlyness"? I completely understand the convenience of integrated shifting, especially when in a fast-ish group ride. Were I ever to "race" it would be completely necessary. And I do appreciate and enjoy the convenience. Were I ever to build up a "go fast road bike" I wouldn’t dream of not including them.

Which brings me to the current thing I saw on the internet (skipping the dream build thing for now; we’re going out of order, instead of backwards): either go friction shifting or electronic shifting.

(Really, this is all Jan’s fault.)

My experience with electronic shifting is, admittedly, limited. I’ve ridden it a little bit and semi-maintained it when I worked at a shop. I thought it was cool but was a broke grad student at the time and also genuinely don’t like the idea of having another fucking thing to keep charged. But. I know that it’s good and reliable.^[3] And a guy on the 600k told me that (I’m paraphrasing) "it’s an even bigger improvement than going from friction to indexed shifting…​ a real game changer." And looking at high-end bikes, you don’t even fucking have cable stops sometimes anymore! It’s all "electronic-only!" What the fuck!

Also, though: I (sorta) get it. Cleans the front end up.^[4] Is reliable. Arguably easier on the hands over long periods of time. Makes the shifters look less fucking ugly since the hydraulic reservoir doesn’t need to compete for space with the indexing mechanism.

But.

I still don’t really want to have to plug my bike in.

And yes, I know that someone’s working on that.

But another thing I like about downtube shifting (friction or otherwise), is that it forces me to move my hands from the levers. I’ve got to move around. This is a good thing. Keeps my hands from getting numb. Makes me stretch, move my body such that my bum never gets too sore from sitting on the saddle in the same position for too long. In addition, of course, to the intangibles around a feeling of competence, the feeling of "connectedness" to the bike and what it’s doing, the ease of maintenance (along with is relatively much lower cost of upkeep). It just makes me happy, and oughtn’t that be enough?

So this brings me to the dream bike, thinking about what kind of shifting or whatever it would have.

A part of me sort of thinks hey: why not just get a Ti fixed gear frame with a more road-ish geometry? But no, I do like gears.^[5] And I’m conflicted about the whole carbon fork thing, but that’s a separate discussion. And really, the Straggler is pretty fucking close to a "dream bike" and I could want…​ it’s just kind of heavy. But the question is does one go for a thing that will necessarily need to be replaced, or the thing that’s old and maybe not appropriate for that kind of thing?

And this, I suppose, brings me to my biggest complaint about the electronic stuff: it’s now a consumable. Mechanical shifters, even integrated ones, can still be used once the industry has moved on to yet another cog in the back, but once the used market for 10-speed Di2 batteries dries up, you’re out of fucking luck. It’s now e-waste. And a fucking shame.

And yes, mechanical shifting has its downsides. And really really doesn’t work as well once you’re routing cables through the handlebars and stem into the frame and so on. And eventually we’ll get to the point where folks will have reverse-engineered the batteries, the firmware, and we can make 10-speed stuff shift 11- and 12-speed stuff, but I’m still struggling with the idea that ultimately it’s designed to be disposable. And sure, it’s arguable whether or not you can really repair an 11-speed brifter from a company other than Campagnolo, but the point stands. And yes, I know bikes have always been tied up in consumerism and racing literally invented by advertisers, but do we need to buy things just to plan to eventually throw them away if we’re not racing in the world tour?

So I guess the moral is that I’m a Luddite. Maybe not so much as the folks over at Rivendell or some of the YouTubers people love to complain about on the internet. But. I’m increasingly interested in things that last (you should see the patched holes in my favorite sweater, the new bottoms I just sewed into my toe covers). Maybe that means I miss out on the newest and the hottest and the "bleeding-edge best." That’s okay though: at least I won’t have to fucking charge my bike.^[6]