Why it’s always worth remember the lessons of the past
By Roy Gregory
The bike I’ve taken to riding through the winter and early spring is sick. It’s built around a Cervelo RS, the frame designed to carry Fabien Cancellara across the brutal, gap-toothed cobbles of Northern France. They say that winning Paris-Roubaix once is enough to make a pro’s career. Cancellera won the race three times, along with a trio of RVVs, three Strade Bianche and countless other classics – even racking up a win in La Primavera! It’s safe to say that the Cervelo can take even five-years of winter riding around these parts. Sadly, the same can’t be said for the bottom bracket, which has started wheezing and groaning like a panhandler working a crowd for his next meal. A visit to the bike Doctor is definitely in order…
Which raises the question, what to ride? The equally obvious answer? The bike I rode through ten winters before picking up the RS for a song…
That earlier ride is a classic ‘winter’ bike. A lugged steel Mercian, it was built out of Reynolds 853 tubes, the same way the company has been doing it since 1946. In fact, 11-speed group-set aside, with 32-spoke, low-profile alloy rims, 23mm tires, rim brakes and more round-section tubes than a pack of rigatoni it’s not even one step removed from the bikes that those giants, Anquetil and Poulidor, Merckx and Simpson, dragged up and down French mountains in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It’s also a blast. It’s heavier than my other road bikes – the fork alone weighs more than the entire frameset on several of my ‘best’ bikes. It’s undoubtedly slower round the same training loops. It’s not as responsive to input or as agile. But boy, is it a pleasure to ride. Yes, it has a somewhat lazy acceleration and a cushioned ride that lacks the same sense of immediacy and contact I get from carbon framed bikes. But the flip side of that is a comfort and smoothness, a fluidity to progress that encourages a smoother, higher cadence and a calming sense of balance and stability. It doesn’t skitter over rough surfaces and if the gear ratios installed over 15-years ago were calculated around younger legs, these days precluding the kind of high-cadence assault calculated to get you to the top of a savage rise or sustained slope as quickly as possible, well – it just doesn’t seem to matter.
Priorities, priorities…
Reaching home after my first outing it struck me that I’d not enjoyed a ride so much for quite some time. Rather than constantly mining the Garmin for performance data, I’d barely even notice the head-unit, until it came time to turn it off. This was cycling from an earlier era – an age of innocence if you will. It brings a whole new meaning to the acronym JRA (letters that stem [for the non cyclists amongst you] from the number of times that a bike shop door swings open to admit a customer clutching the badly broken bits of a bicycle: the first words out of their mouth? “I was just riding along…”)
