roadration

Rode Hard and Put Up Wet: The Rain Bike

It's getting to be that time of year again - temps are getting lower, dusk falls in the blink of an eye, and yes, rain is in the air. For a lot of Northwest cyclists, that means time to pack it in unless we get lucky and wake up to a glorious day on the weekend, but the daily routine of training rides and commuting to work goes on the back shelf until sometime next spring. I'm one of those people too - every year I say I'm going to ride right through the winter, but somehow I always lose motivation as the days get darker, colder and wetter until by December I'm lucky to be riding once a week.

Last year, however, I finally did something about it. I built up a full-time rain bike from a custom steel MAX EL frame/Look carbon fork, adding a new DuraAce gruppo, Mavic Open Pro Ceramic wheels on Chris King hubs, Campy Record Carbon seat post, Ritchey WCS bars/stem, and SKS fenders. Overkill? Probably. Most people do perfectly well on their old road bike with fenders slapped on, and I could have too. But I was in the mood for a new bike, and there is something to be said for having the bike you ride in the wet be your best handling and most reliable one.

The new bike did the trick - I no longer had an excuse not to ride in anything but fairly heavy rain or snow. As most of us know, it doesn't usually rain that HARD in Seattle, it just mists a lot, and for hours on end. The full-time fenders kept the spray from soaking my feet and back, and a cheap clear plastic coat and Gore-Tex socks (I wear them under my shoes) go the rest of the way toward keeping you comfortable if it's really wet.

I heartily recommend this approach of maintaining a permanent rain/commuter bike (I rode it to work this summer, fenders and all). It doesn't have to be fancy or super-light, but it does need to be reliable and have handling you can be confident in. If it gets you out on the road one or two more times a week through the winter, you'll be flying (relatively speaking) when spring rolls around.

Some Suggestions:

• Ceramic Rims: Mavic Open Pro Ceramics are expensive, at $100 a pop, but worth it. A season or two of road grit ground into your braking surface will eat an anodized rim, but these will last for years. They also give you vastly improved braking in the wet.
• Be aware of what we used to call "toeclip overlap" - if your toe touches your front tire slightly when you turn sharply, it'll hit solidly with a fender on - be aware of this at low speeds.
• High-quality, bigger diameter tires: move up in size to a 23 or 25 mm tire with a well-sealed sidewall and a puncture resistant belt. It's a pain trying to fix a flat in the rain.
• When it's really pouring, forget about your fancy Gore-Tex gloves - my Atlas brand lined vinyl work gloves are completely waterproof, and cost $5.99. If you need to stick your hands in a vat of paint thinner sometime, they're chemical-resistant, too. Take your glasses off and put them in your pack or jersey pocket - you'll see better and there's not much particulate matter in the air when it's raining.

Back in the Day

When I was a kid, I spent many of my after-school hours hanging out at Jerry Baker's place. Jerry, having tired of the Boeing engineer life, had switched gears and was running a mail-order business called Baker's Bikes out of his house. My friends and I would sit around and watch him, learning how to build wheels, take apart a Campy Nuovo Record derailleur, fix a tire, or rebuild a hub. It was a great way to learn the art of bicycle maintenance from the bottom bracket up.

In those days, a tire was a sewup. You had a couple of choices, but basically you used either Clément Campionato del Mondos or Paris-Roubaix's for training and 250 or 220 gram Criterium Setas for racing. Hell, we TOURED to California on del Mondos. Once a year we would put together a big group order and each buy maybe 10 or 12 tires for about $8.00 per; it was considered the year's major expenditure. Pretty much everyone used 36 hole Fiamme Red Label rims on Campy Record hubs; 32 hole was considered radical and potentially unsafe, at least for road.

Years later, I moved from Seattle to New York City, and then to Los Angeles, all the while keeping up my riding and never veering from the true tubular way. Silk gave way to cotton Cléments, and then when the brothers reached a slow consensus on the declining quality of Clément, to Vittorias. The standard setup in the '80's was a CX on the front and a slightly heavier CG on the rear, glued up on Mavic 32 hole grey anodized GP4 rims.

When I moved back to Seattle in 1991 with two kids and two house payments to juggle, I somehow decided that the new Michelin clinchers were "just about as good as sewups" and a whole lot cheaper and easier to fix. I sold off all my good aged Vittorias and sewup wheels, and convinced myself that I couldn't afford to ride tubular tires anymore, and since I wasn't racing, why bother?

Last year, though, something clicked inside of me and I decided to build up a set of sewup wheels just for the "really nice days." I got hold of a pair of 32 hole Reflex Ceramics and built them up on DuraAce hubs with DT 14/15 spokes - nothing fancy, just solid, strong road wheels. I located some $29 Continental Sprinters at Ital-Tecno and stocked up. And then I rode them.

It was like being a kid again. They were faster, lighter, and cornered better. They were more supple and gave a better ride without sacrificing rolling resistance. And they especially were superior at transferring power when you stood up on the pedals; the sewups just seemed to store up energy and sling you down the road with it - I found myself comfortably using a 1or 2 tooth smaller cog than I had with clinchers. Was it all in my head? I don't really know, but I found myself using them more and more, until this year I even ended up riding them to work through most of the summer.

Would YOU think it's worth the time, money and extra effort? That's a hard call. I don't know who you are, where you ride, or what your finances are like. But life is short, and my advice is this: ride sewups whenever you get the chance, they're a shot of sweetness in a vast and bitter world.

Greg Louie

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