After the last I article, I still was dissatisfied with the available answer on “Why would one ride a singlespeed bike?”
I have a very useful resource to help answer this question: this site’s co-founder, Luke. Even before he spent time in Tempe, riding South Mountain as often as he could, he was very interested in a bunch of suspension and plenty of gears on his bike. Under no circumstances would he ever consider a singlespeed a viable choice for long-term riding. At best, it’s something he’d have around as a novelty. He and I have been nearly opposite in our taste in bikes for many years, because I’m perfectly satisfied with a rigid bike without so much as a hint of a derailleur.
What I believe to be the answer boiled out of comparisons with him about how our day would go if we both picked the rig we’re interested in and hit the same trail. Ultimately, I realized that the ride experience is very different. It’s only by coincidence that we have similarly-shaped vehicles. If he and I went to the same trail with the bike of our choosing, we’d be having extremely different days.
A singlespeed will have a different experience because we have to somehow accommodate the limitations of the bike with relation to what the trail is doing to us. The importance of the bike is minimized and the importance of the trail is maximized. We have to figure out how to conserve momentum and traction. We also have to constantly modify our approaches to hills – some of them can be punched right up, some have to be attacked from the base and mashed out at the top, and some can be done with constant effort.
This is because the vast majority of your trail decisions are informed by what your gearing can get you into or out of. On my singlespeed rig, I might have to plan ahead for a trail feature by carrying as much momentum as I could, whereas Luke would be able to shift and put some power into the bike. I think two areas where these differences become starkly evident are corners and hills. You find plenty of both on most singletrack, so it makes sense to examine them for the purposes of deciphering why someone would willingly choose a less convenient bike.
Corners
Corners are one of the places where the fundamental ride differences become evident. Luke, with all of his gears, will just shift down, brake late, and accelerate out of the corner. It’s pretty straightforward and simple. He won’t spend a bunch of energy doing this, either, because his setup will allow him to hit whatever cadence he finds most sustainable.
My approach is to stay off the brakes entirely. I try to keep in mind when corners are coming up and try to take them as wide as possible to maintain as much speed as I can. I’ll also try to lean the bike reasonably aggressively and work to maintain traction (of course, there is plenty of overlap here with a geared bike, but the gears let you gloss over some of this if necessary).
I do this because, to be quite honest, accelerating out of every corner is awful. It’s exhausting. It’s much nicer to keep my momentum and save those spiky efforts for other parts of the trail where they can’t be avoided.
Hills
The equation for getting up a hill is generally pretty straightforward if you have gears – you just shift down a bit and go. Adjust the gearing to suit whatever cadence and effort you’re interested in.
Meanwhile, I’m dividing hills into roughly four categories, Attackable, Mash, Consistent Effort, and Walk. Again, this is entirely because of the limits of a single gear on my drivetrain.
- Attackable: I’ll spin out before the base of the hill and, hopefully, carry a lot of the speed up the hill with me so I can “catch” my rear wheel to keep it moving with the pedals without monumental effort.
- Mash: For whatever reason, I don’t find this kind of hill to fall into the Attackable category. This kind of hill just requires standing up and putting a bunch of effort into the bike. Climbing them is kind of satisfying, honestly.
- Consistent Effort: This one doesn’t get Attacked or Mashed. Instead you make the base of the hill feel easy and the middle section where you’re actually climbing feel low effort. I generally employ this strategy on longer, less intense climbs. I judge it by making sure I’m setting a pace I could keep up for hours without blowing up.
- Walk: What, you think you’re too good to push a bike once in a while?
Again, there is overlap here with a geared bike because you can choose to employ these approaches pretty much no matter what drivetrain you’re rocking. However, the distinction is that a singlespeed doesn’t have other choices.
So…
I could go on for quite a while, breaking down the kinds of features one sees on the trail and the differences in approach employed by the geared and singlespeed riders, but corners and hills really highlight the main ideas that I care about. One thing to note is that these approaches aren’t really informed by your suspension platform – you’ll be employing these regardless of how much travel your bike has.
The gist of it is that these differences add up to make the two riding experiences very different. I think that this is what people who generally (or exclusively!) ride singlespeeds are selecting for when they choose their bikes.
I should make it very clear that I don’t favor one style of riding over the other, nor do I believe that exclusively riding a singlespeed makes you a better rider. It simply makes you approach a trail differently, and in that difference some of us have found a riding experience that we enjoy greatly.
It’s also worth noting that this analysis doesn’t necessarily apply only to mountain biking. I find that I encounter these same distinctions when I’m riding my fixed gear on the road, doing some singlespeed cyclocross, or cruising around on gravel. The fact that these differences are consistent among the various disciplines, and that there are people who choose singlespeeds of some flavor for those disciplines, suggests that this difference in experience is really what draws us to bikes with one gear.
Even when it’s the wrong gear pretty much all of the time.
Gradually Faster 