It’s 2021 and I’m about to write a brand new fixed gear article because I personally haven’t gotten any good shots in on this dead horse.
My only road bike is a fixed gear bike, a Bombtrack Needle of unknown and unimportant model year. It’s the one with the slightly lighter shade of green and triangles or whatever all over it. I don’t think you can get one anymore and that’s kind of a shame.
I’ve dedicated significantly more effort to singletrack than road so far in my riding. This is despite the fact that I live somewhere almost absurdly flat and there’s not really a lot of good mountain biking to be found locally. I’ve gotten pretty used to the idea that weekends are for loading up a bike and driving to a trailhead at least an hour away. This year, my goals changed to be more in line with how I like riding bikes and I’ve started to get into this road thing. This has been wonderful because there’s actually a complicated network of paved infrastructure that connects most things to most other things and it starts right outside my front door (yours too, probably.) This is convenient.
Anyway, I started putting significantly more mileage on my Bombtrack. I’ve learned to enjoy road miles as an end in themselves rather than a means to an end. I also probably wouldn’t be enjoying them nearly as much if the stupid bike wasn’t continually fighting me.
So let’s get that out of the way – I readily admit that my fixed gear is a completely suboptimal bike. I can’t coast, so potholes are an experience. So is going downhill, or riding with a tailwind. If I have to go up a grade of any sort, I typically have to mash it out to avoid losing any of my speed. If I manage to spin out the drivetrain, I can’t shift to wring even more speed out of the bike – I just have to try to pedal even faster.
I could be doing all of my miles with a modern road bike and deriving similar benefits for my overall goal of getting faster. It would occasionally be a more enjoyable experience, probably. But the fact is, I wouldn’t be doing it as hard if it was more convenient.
I said above that potholes are an experience. This is true also for anywhere the road gets any rougher than new-ish condition. I had no idea how much I relied on coasting to navigate stuff. A transition between a dedicated bike path to a street is a bumpy experience. Some streets are unreasonably rough. The pothole I keep mentioning nearly unseated me at speed. I stuck with it through this inconvenience and recently had a chance to get back to some sane mountain biking. I was shocked at how my attitude towards pedaling through chunky garbage had changed – keeping up my pedaling as the bike bounced around and did weird stuff was second nature. I was able to navigate sections significantly faster than ever before because my brain has become hardwired to pedal for all I’m worth, constantly.
Of course, I could have learned this in a myriad of other ways, but I wouldn’t have. I am either fundamentally lazy or unable to do two things at once, so if the bike would’ve let me coast, I would have. I only picked this particular skill up by riding a fixed gear bike.
As for hills? I’m actually not a stranger to having to attack a hill to maintain my momentum because a bunch of my time on singletrack has been spent on singlespeed mountain bikes. It’s a new experience for road riding, though, and I was thrilled to be able to carry that skillset over. I’m mostly just going faster than I would be on a mountain bike and it was frustrating to not be able to carry as much of that speed as I could. I’ve gotten into the habit of doing everything I possibly can to keep all of that momentum so that I don’t have to spin all the way back up when I’m done with the hill. This is something akin to interval training, I believe. I’ve tried to do intervals before and they’re simply a non-starter if I’m riding alone. However, if a suboptimal bike forces me into doing that kind of work, I really don’t have a choice.
Finally, improving my times on my various private segments has been more fun this way. If I knock out a better time in similar conditions, that means that I was able to get more out of such a simple machine. It would mean the same thing on any other bike, sure, but distilling out the shifty bits and other conveniences means that I really only get to look to myself for credit for improvements. I could absolutely go faster if I could access a slightly taller gear on demand, but without that, all I get to do is just try even harder. If it’s more fun, that also means that I’m likely to do it.
These things are all terribly subjective. I get that not everyone wants to enter into such an adversarial relationship with their bicycle. Perhaps they just want to enjoy the ride. For me, it is more fun and that translates directly to more time spent on a bike.
As a final note, I’ve often seen other articles extol the virtues of fixed gears with phrases like “more connected to the bike” or “lower maintenance” and things like that. Those don’t really mean anything to me. Every bike I have is set up with clipless and I truly can’t be more connected to the bike than literally fastened by my feet. Maybe if I was also clamped to the handlebars but that seems like a risky proposition. I’ve also had to do intense maintenance oh-so-rarely on all of my bikes, gears or not, regardless of the amount of riding they encounter. But getting closer to quantifiable benefits from riding a fixed gear specifically? That has my attention.
Gradually Faster 