There are no easy stages at this year’s Vuelta a España.
Today’s finale appeared to have been designed via collaboration among P.T. Barnum, M.C. Escher and Owsley Stanley. It’s a miracle that the final few meters weren’t greased with human flesh.
I arose just in time to catch the last 50km, my evening’s repose having been less than refreshing thanks to Buddy the Wonder Dog, who is a restless bedmate. Like Turkish, who stretches out next to me like a hot, furry sack of traction sand, the Budster is a fan of body contact and spent the night glued to me like a decal, occasionally snuffling through his abbreviated snoot, rolling over or sighing.
Herself finally caved around 5:30 or so and got up to deal with the little tosser, and I tried to go to sleep. Miss Mia Sopaipilla slipped in through the open door, taking up residence under the bed; Herself corraled her, too, and clicked the door solidly shut so the Turk’ couldn’t join the party.
Long story short, I finally got up around 8:30 feeling like someone had unplugged about half my RAM and poured a beer onto my motherboard. I contributed some weak snark to Charles Pelkey’s LiveUpdateGuy, prepared a late breakfast and now I’m at Heuberger Subaru waiting for them to find something wrong with the rice grinder as I prepare for my triumphant return to Interbike.
There will not be any dogs in the bed in Vegas. Just sayin’.
Mad Blog Media 
You are going to Interbike? Wow…make sure you do a sequel to this one: https://maddogmedia.com/outerbiking.html
Yup, K, I’m back in the saddle again. This will be my first trip to The Big Shew with anyone other than Bicycle Retailer and Industry News — Adventure Cyclist is picking up the tab for this one. Something different (and no long hours in the Sands basement helping crank out the Show Daily).
I’m actually looking forward to it. Imagine that.
Reading the latest BR&IN issue with the lists of who is NOT going to Interbike this year is starting to make me regret buying airtix and reserving a place to sleep in Lost Wages. This year I avoided any type of casino/hotel, tired of being forced to walk a block-long gauntlet of one-armed bandits while inhaling second-hand cancer-stick fumes and getting whacked for an endless list of “extra” charges for basics like electricity. But once I see some of our Italian friends (who I hope will be there) at the show it won’t seem so bad…and barely two weeks after that I’m off to live in Italy anyway.
Meeting up with the Head Dog hisself there will just be icing on the cake…if he’s not been kicked out by the time I get there on Wednesday that is!
Larry, I insisted on a smoke-free hotel too. Last time I went to Interbike, in 2006, the BRAIN trust had us camping at the Riviera. What a miserable shithole that was. Every bluehair in Christendom chain-smoking Pall Malls and working the slots. Walking from my room to the street made me feel like I needed to jog through a car wash.
I love the chain smokers dragging their oxygen tanks around the casino and pumping their SS checks into the one armed bandits. I want to know where in the hell do you get the light blue jump suit w/ the white belt and shoes? Just planning ahead for my golden years.
Holy Cow!! The Mad Dog Rides Vegas Again!!! Too bad I will be doing other (more productive) things than losing my shirts, shoes and shorts to pay the bills in Sin City. Oh well someone has to keep the home fires burning, right?
Will you be offering the usual snark, rants and/or liberally applied slant to things as they occur in the bowels of the Expo Center? I mean besides here of course…..
Hey, James … Adventure Cyclist is my host this time around, and if they can endure some contributions from me on their website, then I will be happy to provide same with the usual disclaimers (handle only with tongs and welder’s mask, read only through rose-colored glasses, etc.)
Otherwise, expect me to do the usual free-form jabbering here. Unless BRAIN or VN want to throw a few shekels into the Dog’s dish.
Jeepers Patrick, I hadn’t seen that old piece on Interbike. I hope the people at Adventure Cycling have something like that in mind again, with your “something different” comment. Go to it!
Hey, Jon … that’s an oldie, from BRAIN, way back in the day. Glad you liked it.
Four years away from the big show and hanging with a different crowd should flush out the graying headgear a bit. The BRAINiacs have been good to me for a whole pile of years, but still it will be interesting to view Interbike from a different vantage point.
The Adventure Cycling folks are all about getting from point A to point B. This process doesn’t always demand the latest and the greatest, and occasionally requires quite the opposite. Touring is a niche, like cyclo-cross, which saved me from the high-gloss hell of road racing.
I read the Aurora Elite road test, Patrick. Sorta disappointed in their solution to the lack of a bailout cog.
A 30-30 Shimano combo is barely lower than 34-32 and still classifies that bike as a credit card tourer. But hopefully with those bar end shifters, you can drop a 12-32 or 12-34 cogset on the back and a smaller granny ring on the front, preferrably a 26 or lower. That would give you a real tractor pulling gear combo for those long climbs over 10,000 feet at the end of the day with a full load of crap on the bike. I suspect you might need to replace the rear derailleur for one with a bigger maximum rear cog and more chain wrap capacity.
I set up our first tandem that way. It had a 50-36-24 on the front and a 12-34 on the rear, with Shimano bar-ends and XT derailleurs. We could just about ride vertical. One has to shift a little gently when pushing the envelope with what are now considered extremes of gearing, but I think a serious touring rig has to have such flexibility. A 110 BCD crankset makes more sense than Shimano 105, too.
My $0.02, anyway, in honor of Frank “you can never think too much about gears” Berto….
K, the 30-30 ain’t gonna get it for the likes of thee or me, to be sure. And the 110 BCD crankset is most definitely the way to go.
I never needed the granny ring on my ride to Pueblo and back, but there was no substantial climbing involved and I was carrying comparatively light weight.
Now, if I were to decide to visit my friend Hal in Weirdcliffe, I’d be looking for something along the lines of a 24×32 to get up the steep bits of Hardscrabble Cañon, if I picked that route. I might need a 22×34 if I instead chose the gravel-road option from Cañon City that takes me to Hal’s place via Boneyard Park.
I have three bikes with triples now, the most manly serving up a low end of 22×28; all three have bar-end shifters, two have MTB derailleurs (one XT, one Deore), and one has an eight-speed drivetrain. Each shifts flawlessly despite the mix-and-match setups, and if things get dodgy I have a friction option.
I feel for the product managers who have a limited palette with which to work. But I look at touring bikes as personalized machines, the same way I did cyclo-cross bikes before everybody and his grandma dove into the niche. Most of my bikes sport bits of this and that, items I chose, things that work for me. You can’t get ’em off the rack, and maybe you shouldn’t.
Thing is, most folks will probably buy something off the rack to get their feet wet, and that’s OK. They’ll get religion real fast, lugging their kitchen and bedroom up Wolf Creek Pass into a headwind with a low end of 30×30.
Most of my bikes have ended up being mix and matches. Even the Six-Thirteen now sports a Frankenstein cassette.
I like the 11-32 combo for most utility riding. I have an 11-32 cogset on one set of wheels for the Salsa LaCruz and a 12-34 on the other, paired with a 48-34 front end (nine speed Shimano). I typically use the 11-32 to ride to work or the store but during the winter with big cross tires for the occasional snowstorm, use the 34 low end. Or, when I was carrying ten pounds of potatoes to work the other day for my techs, after Meena found out the little bag of spuds her friend at work offered her weighed forty pounds. Even I can’t eat that many spuds. On the other hand, I have this Irish pen-pal…
Interesting comments Khal. I don’t know squat about loaded touring rigs but your observations made me think about the “typical bike shop employee” who might sell this bike. I can’t count the times our clients have told us their LBS, when shown our gearing suggestions, have made wisecracks and quite often simply refused to try to provide the gearing. “With gears that low you might as well walk!” is often the smart-ass comment. We’ve amended our instructions to point out that this smart-ass is NOT going to ride with the client and quite likely has NEVER ridden on anything as steep as the climbs in Italy but the situation has not changed much. I wish the use of 34 X 32 gearing on the Angliru climb by the guy who is likely to win La Vuelta this year would get more publicity…but I doubt it. There’s just something about low gears that folks equate with weakness and impotence….so the product spec-guy spending the extra dough to equip a bike with them doesn’t do much for its appeal on the showroom floor or the spec sheet. They’ll spend the loot on something useless but more visible and sexy every time! Sadly most of the bike makers don’t really care if you actually ride the things anyway — they’re just designed to SELL, maybe collecting dust in the garage until you’re again tempted by the newest-latest version. Cynical? Yes…and I doubt my upcoming trip to Interbike will do anything but reinforce my attitude about the current state of the bike biz.
I think Shimano would be wise to push it’s new 30 speed XT mtb group at the touring crowd. A few crank gearing changes and it would be the bomb. Smooth, quick, precise, even when packed full of mud and crap. To me, it would make so much more sense than the mix and match that currently seems to make up touring drive trains.
Hi, Larry
I suspect there ain’t much turnover in loaded touring rigs in your average LBS, hence their scarcity. Looking forward to Patrick’s report for Adventure Cycling.
Asking your average wrench to experiment outside the box with gearing is probably a howler, too, since gear trains are now pretty standardized; I suspect its a dying art. I cut my teeth on serious cycling in the days of Frank Berto’s Bicycling columns and chain whips being standard tools of our avocation. The options were endless, but shifting was nothing like today’s foolproof (sort of) clicks.
I’m thinking of getting an inexpensive frameset and building a serious touring rig out of the parts box and by cannibalizing the old Trek tandem, which gets little use since the Co-Motion is in the garage. Just gotta decide if it will be 26″ or 700c. Long Haul Trucker is one option. I’m lusting after a Co-Motion Americano, but can’t justify it until I start putting serious miles into touring.
I found this site below, which shows a reasonable number of examples sold with gearing such as 46-36-24 spinning an 11-34 cassette. I’m waiting for someone to slap on one of those new 12-36 cassettes from the 29er crowd.
http://www.bicycle-touring-guide.com/touring-bicycle.html
These are for serious, long, self-contained tours. I recently was riding up the Jemez climb on my Cannonball and ran into a tourist on a 26″ Long Haul Trucker who was carrying his life in a BoB trailer for the trip. He had mighty low gears.
Me? I don’t even pretend to be fast any more, and my knees don’t pretend to be young. I run my road bikes with a 50-34 on front and a 12-26 or 12-28 on the back. I discovered I could swap the 26-29 inner cogs from my old Chorus cassette onto the eight higher gears of an aftermarket 12-28 and make a quite serviceable 12-29 that only grumps slightly in the 34-29 combo. That’s my ticket over Bobcat Pass this weekend (which you crest at 10,000 ft at mile 96 of the Red River Century) after a very rotten summer of fires, too much work, too much tonsil polish, and not enough training.
Why do I do this to myself???