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Stephen’s Mudhoney SL – A Love Letter

Stephen's Mudhoney SL lying in the autumn leaves

This is Stephen’s Mudhoney SL, built with our friends at Sigma Sport in Surrey, UK. We might tell you more about the bike, but Stephen has done that for us. There is no better email to get from a rider than one like this.

Stephen says:

Hello Seven,

I promised myself a Seven for my 60th to keep me fit into my dotage. I needed a performance bike; one suited to my advancing years but capable of going anywhere. It’d have to be versatile, comfortable, tough, low maintenance and reliable. Thus, the Mudhoney SL stood out and, with the expert guidance of Mick Silles at Sigma Sport of Kingston Upon Thames in UK, my bespoke Seven took shape.

Getting the specification just right took several months, but throughout, Mick was the very best adviser. He listened carefully and accurately translated desires into needs (both frame and components). Mostly this was happening at a distance, because though I’m a Brit, I live in Vienna, Austria. I visited Sigma just three times, first to spec’ the bike, then for very thorough fittings and finally to take delivery. In between there were lots of emails!  You surely know it already, but in Mick you have an excellent UK representative, advocate and enthusiast.

So now I’ve been riding the bike for a couple of weeks since delivery. With true good fortune, this Austrian October has been unseasonably warm and sunny – in fact, perfect cycling weather. I’ve taken advantage of that and taken off into the Wienerwald at every opportunity. On road and trail the bike is a revelation!

In climbs I’ve become instantly fitter (or just maybe, the Seven frame transmits way more energy to the road). The bike is comfortable and assured. I get no pins and needles in my hands, nor tired shoulders. Everything just falls to hand and I’m perfectly positioned to ride for hours on end. I corner confidently, everything feels taut and I know exactly what’s going on where tyres hit road.  Nothing creaks or flexes, even when I’m pedaling out of the saddle.

Stephen's Mudhoney SL

Then there’s the aesthetics. I wanted an understated look. No paint, no discs, no suspension, no accessories. Avid Shorty canti’s, Chris King ‘Sotto Voce’ components, ENVE CX forks …. everything bare titanium or plain black. It looks fantastic but rides even better!  Incidentally, for the record, I’m now a convert and consequent zealot for Shimano’s amazing Ui2 gearset – beautifully integrated into the Mudhoney frame, battery and all.

In summary, I got the bike I desired and, thanks to Sigma Sport’s good advice and the skills of the Seven Team (especially Lauren Trout and Stef Adams – oh God, those welds) I ended up with every machine I needed for fitness, sport and fun. I’m in love!

I’m so impressed with the craftsmanship, the attention to detail (like the inspired chain hanger and the rear canti’ cable post) and above all, with the way you’ve served your motto – I got my one bike and mine alone.

I’m motivated alright – next spring I’ll try the Grossglockner ….

Thank you for making me a very happy customer.

Stephen

Bike Radar: Pro bike – Mo Bruno-Roy’s Seven Mudhoney Pro

By Matt Pacocha, US editor, in Madison, WI

When Seven Cycles put Maureen Bruno-Roy (MM racing) on their new prototype carbon fiber and titanium cyclo-cross bike, the top tube said ‘Mohoney’ – a play on the name of their Mudhoney ‘cross line. The Mohoney has since turned into the Mudhoney Pro, which will be a production bike in 2012.

The new bike, which was released as a prototype in October, incorporates additional carbon tubes into its design, when compared to the Mudhoney SLX bikes that Bruno-Roy has ridden for the past four seasons – not just the same model mind you, but the same exact frames.

While the SLX has carbon top and seat tubes, the Pro trades out its titanium seatstays, head and down tubes for carbon as well, in an effort to lighten the frame and further dampen the vibrations that reach the rider, while retaining the terrain hugging suppleness and feel of titanium.

Bruno-Roy’s Mohoney race rig was the first ’cross bike Seven assembled with carbon rear stays, which are an adaptation from the company’s Elium SLX and 622SLX road bikes. “This rear triangle was completely novel for them, in terms of ’cross,†Matt Roy, Bruno-Roy’s husband, team manager and mechanic, told BikeRadar. “So this was the first one and it became the basis for the new Mudhoney Pro.â€

Rob Vandermark, Seven’s founder, laser-cut all of the titanium lugs for the Mohoney frame by hand. On the SLX these lugs are structural but on the Mudhoney they’re there purely for aesthetic reasons, as the carbon tubes are mitered and bonded to each other. The new bike is roughly 1lb lighter than Bruno-Roy’s SLX rigs. “I don’t think they expected it to be that much lighter,” said Roy.

Bruno-Roy’s Mudhoney Pro gets the SRAM treatment, in terms of groupset and accompanying kit – Red with a compact crank and 44-tooth Thorne Components outer ring, and Zipp’s Service Course alloy cockpit. The handlebar is Zipp’s new Service Course CSL, which is made especially for smaller handed riders and has a ‘super-short reach’ and two-degree outward bend in the drops.

A compact gxp crank with 34-tooth sram inner ring and 44-tooth thorne outer ring: a compact gxp crank with 34-tooth sram inner ring and 44-tooth thorne outer ring Mo uses a 44-tooth outer ring. Since SRAM only make a 46t ring, she opts for one from Stu Thorne’s Thorne Products. Also note the ‘late model’ Shimano PD-M970 pedals, which remain more popular on the cyclo-cross circuit than the M980 model due to their better mud performance Deviations from the SRAM brand come in the form of Bruno-Roy’s TRP EuroX Mag brakes and Mavic wheel choices. She has both Cosmic Carbone Ultimate and R-SYS SL tubular models. The former are mostly used with Challenge Grifos (with both standard Challenge and FMB casings), whereas the R-SYS are set for mud with Challenge Limus and FMB Super Mud tires. Roy takes a meticulous approach to the upkeep of his wife’s bikes and it shows through in the finished product. When we saw the bike the day before the USA Cycling cyclo-cross nationals in Madison, Wisconsin it sparkled and gleamed, with touches like fully sealed and shrink wrapped cables, custom stickers on the Fi’zi:k TK saddle and an expertly taped handlebar.

Complete bike specification

  • Frame: Seven Mudhoney Pro prototype
  • Fork: Seven CX
  • Headset: Chris King NoThreadset, 1-1/8in
  • Stem: Zipp Service Course SL, 80mm, -6°
  • Handlebar: Zipp Service Course CSL, 40cm
  • Tape: Fi:zi’k Microtex Bar:tape
  • Front brake: TRP EuroX Mag w/ SwissStop Yellow King pads for Mavic wheels
  • Rear brake: TRP EuroX Mag w/ SwissStop Yellow King pads for Mavic wheels
  • Front derailleur: SRAM Red w/steel cage
  • Rear derailleur: SRAM Black Red
  • Shifter: SRAM Black Red
  • Brake levers: SRAM Black Red
  • Cassette: SRAM PG1070, 12-28t
  • Chain: SRAM PC1091
  • Crankset: SRAM Black Red Compact, 170mm, 44/34t
  • Bottom bracket: SRAM Red GXP ceramic
  • Pedals: Shimano XTR PD-M970
  • Wheelset: Mavic Cosmic Carbone Ultimate (or R-SYS SL w/ mud tires)
  • Front tire: Challenge Grifo, 17-21psi, Aquaseal coating
  • Rear tire: Challenge Grifo, 17-21psi, Aquaseal coating
  • Saddle: Fi:zi’k Aliante Donna K:ium
  • Seatpost: Zipp Service Course SL

Critical rider measurements

  • Rider’s height: 161.9cm/5ft 4in
  • Rider’s weight: 48.08kg/106lb
  • Saddle height from BB, c-t: 66.4cm
  • Saddle setback: 1.8cm
  • Seat tube length, c-t: 50cm
  • Tip of saddle to center of bar: 46.5cm
  • Saddle to bar drop: 2.9cm
  • Head tube length: 9cm
  • Top tube length (virtual): 49.5cm
  • Total bicycle weight: 7.4kg/16.33lb

Gallery Images

Mudhoney PRO
Maureen Bruno-Roy’s Seven Mudhoney Pro prototype
brakes
Bruno-Roy sticks with TRP’s old-school EuroX Mag wide-profile brake
front end
Bruno-Roy’s Mudhoney Pro carried her to a top 10 finish at the 2012 USA Cycling national championships
brakes
SwissStop Yellow King pads for the TRP EuroX brakes
crankset
A compact GXP crank with 34-tooth SRAM inner ring and 44-tooth Thorne outer ring
pedals
Shimano’s stalwart XTR M970 pedal
seat post
Fi’zi:k’s Arione Donna women’s saddle
saddle
Matt Roy hand placed the Fi’zi:k logos
headset
The Mudhoney Pro uses a carbon head tube that’s wrapped in titanium. Mo’s is just 90mm tall
down tube
The Mudhoney Pro also employs a carbon down tube…
seat tube
… and a carbon seat tube
rear end
The mixed carbon-Ti seatstays
rear brakes
The Ti sheaths extend so to hold the brake bosses
top tube
Mo’s bike
sticker
Inspiration from the mechanic – that’s an alien with a ray gun
front derailleur
The steel caged SRAM Red front derailleur
fork
Seven’s carbon CX fork
tire
Roy uses Aquaseal on the sidewalls of Challenge’s Grifo
top tube
The Mohoney turned into the Mudhoney Pro
handlebar tape
An expert tape job with a custom finish
stem
Zipp’s Service Course cockpit
brake lever
The Service Course CSL bar has a compact bend with a super-short reach
bottom bracket
The Red GXP ceramic bottom bracket
front derailleur shim
Roy finds that clamp-style front derailleurs are stiffer and shift better; Seven use a set of shims to more evenly distribute the clamping load on the carbon seat tube
sizing up
Mechanic Matt Roy running us through Mo’s bike
lug
Custom sealed cables
barrel cable adjuster
Roy uses shrink tubing found at electronics stores to seal the cable system
rear derailleur
He even seals the cable as it exits to the rear derailleur anchor bolt
details
More custom sealing
details
Seals on the front derailleur; Roy also uses the shrink wrap as a cable end cap

cyclingnews.com: Seven Heaven – a tour of the Seven Cycles Factory

By Steve Medcroft

The first Seven I ever saw up close was Mary McConneloug’s Tsumani cyclocross bike. She rode it during the 2004 U.S. Gran Prix of Cyclocross series. We wrote a pro bike report on it. Her partner and teammate, Mike Broderick, said that Mary had been riding the same frame for three years and that fact stuck in my head. Three years. Most riders are issued new bikes every year. Most bikes are changed and modified enough each season that the manufacturers have to upgrade their sponsored riders.

But three years before our article, Seven Cycles fit Mary for her Tsunami and she hasn’t needed to replace it since (and was giving no hint that she intended to replace it any time soon). It left me with the impression of a Seven as a lifetime purchase, a frame that would be with its owner forever.

I ran into Mary and Mike at Interbike this year. Mike and I were eyeballing Seven’s IMX hardtail mountain bike; which features titanium lugs and carbon tubing. We were talking about the way the bike rode and he was explaining how Seven tunes the bike for each buyer through a customization process that factors in something like one hundred data points. From how you like the comfort of the bike vertically to how stiff you want the torsional drivetrain, you can have a Seven built to ride and feel exactly like you want it (or exactly the way that will emphasis your riding and racing strengths and minimize your weaknesses).

But Seven isn’t a typical custom bike builder (a small shop designed around a single master frame builder); it’s an eight-year-old, 35-employee, Boston-based bike manufacturer. How do they mass-produce highly customised bicycles? I couldn’t pass up the chance to swing into the Seven factory after covering the USGP stops in Gloucester the weekend of Halloween.

First impressions

Seven got its start in January, 1997 when Rob Vandermark, head designer for Merlin Bicycles, struck out with a small group of colleagues to occupy a 1,000 square-foot corner of someone else’s machine shop 30 miles north of Boston. “The guy who owned the shop was extremely generous to us,” said Vandermark when I visited the company. “He was excited to see us get off the ground. We grew to twelve people quickly with everyone doing everything from welding and machining to sales and R&D in that tiny space.”

Seven Entrance

Vandermark, an engineer by practice, had a vision for an industrial process that could bring hand-built custom bicycles to an audience as large as a mid-sized mass-producer. He says he felt that the larger companies were too inflexible to truly process customization through their company’s systems and most custom builders were limited in size due to their single-handed approach to customization.

Seven executed Vandermark’s process in that small space until they moved to a 12,000-square foot facility in the lower level of an industrial park in Watertown, MA, about six miles from Boston Harbour as the crow flies. At the company’s front door, there is no fanfare, no neon-lit 20-foot-high Seven logo. The door is, in fact, almost hidden from view in a cul-de-sac at what looks like the rear of the building. I actually walked up to the door and backed away, convinced it was a private entrance or a loading dock and circled the whole building looking for a front entrance before coming back to the cul-de-sac.

I sat with Director of Marketing, Jennifer Miller, in Seven’s showroom, a cavernous, brick-walled corner of the space complete with racks of completely built Sevens along two walls. The display was a good example of Seven’s line: bikes designed for all different types of riders (The Elium competition road bike, The Alaris Race crit bike, the Axiom Steel for traditionalists, Sola for cross-country racing or Duo for all-mountain riding).

One thing that stuck out about that selection of bikes was the variety of frame materials. I always thought of Seven as a ti shop. “From day one, we worked with materials other than titanium,” Miller said. “The first bike we ever made as a company was steel. We were also working with carbon fibre from day one and introduced the Odonata – the first bike to strategically employ both carbon fiber and titanium tubes – in our first year. The design inspired a revolution; within a year, everyone was doing metal bikes with carbon seat stays, etc.”

Miller’s point is that to Seven, the frame material isn’t the focus of bike (most frame materials can be manipulated to produce almost any desired effect), it is the ultimate one-bike-at-a-time tuneability that can be achieved with almost any frame material that matters most.

A Fit for a King

To learn about the customisation and fit process, Miller introduced me to Zac Daab, Seven’s Senior Fit Specialist. Seven’s bike-build process starts when the retailer fills out a comprehensive customer questionnaire to gather everything they need to know about the rider’s desired fit and comfort, handling and performance, tubing and materials preferences, features and options and any accommodations the bike needs to be ready for the rider’s future.

Rob poses with Seven #001

“The questionnaire contains the hundred-plus data points we use to come up with the final build,” Daab said, using a marked-up (the document is continuously refined) copy of the Custom Kit to make his point. The goal is to gather enough data to build a custom frame without ever seeing the rider, so beyond the questions that can be answered by measuring a rider’s legs, arms, wingspan, inseam, etc, Seven asks about a rider’s weight, their previous bike, the components they plan to run, what kind of riding or racing they do. “We want to know if they are using riser bars,” Daab says, “how they want their cable routed, do they want pump pegs, the color of their decals.” Every answer matters. “Fork choice is important, for example; it can help us change the geometry of the front end of the bike.”

Daab says that Seven asks questions customers aren’t used to answering when they buy a mass-produced bike. “When you buy a bike off the floor, for example, it doesn’t matter if you’re doing centuries, crits or full-on time trials every weekend; the handling for that bike has been selected already. By handling; we mean things that control handling; the head tube angle, the bottom bracket drop, the chainstay length – they are already figured out and it doesn’t matter who you are. With a Seven, what we’re working on through the Custom Kit is how to build the perfect bike for that single rider.” That data gathered in the Custom Kit is balanced into a frame design that sets the rider in a neutral position with as much component adjustability as possible.

To prevent ambiguity, a Seven fit specialist calls the buyer directly before a final design is committed to production; a practice Daab says Seven remains committed to event though it has become a much larger task than when Seven was small. “Sometimes we’re resolving inconsistencies – if you said the reach of your current bike felt way too long but we’re looking at your body data (arm length, body length, top tube dimensions) and it doesn’t seem to check out, we want to talk about it with you to make sure we build exactly the right thing. The call is about tuning the build a little bit tighter.

Sweeping the Factory Floor

At about day eleven in the four to seven-week process, the customer signs off on the build then a build sheet, detailing the frame’s design, is sent to the floor. I left Daab, and Miller led me through a double door to view the frame production area. With concrete floors and work zones crammed with stock, machinery and welding equipment, the Seven factory floor is a genuine production facility; a dirty, grungy, make-something-with-your-hands kind of place.

Frames in production

At first pass, it looked chaotic, but although it was a little cramped (Seven has signed a lease on an adjacent space and will double the production floor in early 2006), there seemed to be purpose in the placement of ever person, every tube, every lathe and drill press.

Seven frames begin life in the frame stock bins. Stock tubes are cut, shaped, bent and butted into what is essentially a bike in a box; literally, a shallow, cardboard box filled with a jigsaw puzzle of metal tubes that will be tack-welded together at the next work station. Once the tubes are tacked into geometric position, the assembly is passed to the welders.

“Tim Delaney is a career-professional bike builder,” Miller said as we watched the lanky Delaney work the head of his Tig welder around the contours of a bottom bracket. “He’s been welding his entire life. Most of our other welders have been trained here. They may receive up to six months of training before they even tack a frame.”

A braided hose hung from a coupling attached to the bike’s head tube. “The frame has to be completely sealed,” Miller said. “It’s filled with Argon (an inert gas) to purge Oxygen and other environmental elements that could compromise the weld’s intergrity if present when the titanium is in a molten state during welding.”

When the welders (of which there are several besides Delaney) finish the frame, any carbon elements are screwed and glued in place, the frame then receives its final pieces and parts then moves on to the finishing stations where they’re buffed and prepped for painting and decals.

Before and after finishing, the frames hang on a rack for Quality Assurance to make sure there’s no reason to send them back to the floor before the final product is shipped.

Knowing which way the rudder is pointed

The fact that the core of the thirty-five employees at Seven are cyclists is evident; many wore long-sleeve wool jerseys and a half-dozen people arrived to work on bikes during my time there. But just as many employees learn their passion for cycling by working at the company. “We have a really good employee purchase programme,” Vandermark said, “We offer a very, very low price. And to the extent our employees can do any work on their bike off the clock, that’s totally taken off the top.”

So at Seven, there are a lot of people paying a few hundred dollars for very expensive bikes. “And there’s a lot of bartering going on,” he added. “A welder who can’t machine will go to a machinist who can’t weld and they’ll trade work on each other’s bikes. We have employees that have built five, six, seven bikes over time. Which is important to us; it helps to have that appreciation when you’re stressing and fussing over details.”

I asked Miller where she thought Seven would be in five years and she grinned and leaned forward in her chair. “We want to grow but we measure growth in different ways. Clearly, sales is one reason to grow and one way to measure growth, but growth also represents the opportunity to do the kind of product development we want to do, to reach that size where we can support things like health insurance and 401k’s and profit sharing. A certain amount of growth is necessary to be able to create the kind of company we want to be.”

What Miller is hinting at is something every small to mid-sized company struggles with; how do you create opportunities for smart and talented people to grow within your organisation when there are only so many ‘big’ jobs to do? “We hire a lot of creative people (an unusual number of art students, Miller told me earlier). It’s important to us that we give them a real career path; a way to start at the entry-level and develop a real career for themselves.”

The company is also dealing with the transition beyond Rob Vandermark’s ability to manage every aspect of Seven’s operation. “In the early years,” Miller says, “we had to manage growth in a different way. We couldn’t keep up with orders. As we mature, we know we have to be more sophisticated with how we chase growth. We need to bring in other perspective and we need to spread the burden of growth. I see that as our big challenge but I feel like that’s an issue most companies our size have to deal with so I’m sure we can work through it.”

There’s also the challenge to Vandermark’s customization process. Can it stay intact if Seven becomes, say, three times its current size? “It doesn’t scare me,” Miller says. “When people say ‘how can you continue to profit with a single-piece flow like that’ I just think back to when we first started. Our labor hours per bike are so much lower now than they were then. I’m confident we’ll continue to get smarter.”

Seven Partners on the Racecourse

Mike & Mary

It is not uncommon for a bicycle manufacturer to promote its product by sponsoring racers or a racing team. Seven Cycles is not a big-budget, mass-market brand so it has passed on the cost and logistics that come with the opportunity to outfit a 13-member road team and instead works closely with racing and life partners Mike Broderick and Mary McConneloug.

“We can be seen as a road manufacturer so sponsoring a mountain-bike team is odd,” Seven’s Jennifer Miller said during my visit to the company’s Boston factory. “But most of us here at the company, the founding team, were seriously into mountain biking – we all raced and we loved it – so we’re almost living vicariously through Mike and Mary.”

Don’t get Miller wrong; sponsoring McConneloug and Broderick isn’t a corporate whimsy. “Our relationship goes back almost five seasons now. I was racing mountain bikes at the time and Mary won a race that I and another member of our team was in. When Mary and Mike approached us after that about sponsorship, they presented us with a serious and professional agenda.”

The couple seemed to align philosophically with Seven’s founding team as well; they showed a focus on the environmental issues surrounding mountain biking just as Seven has implemented environment-friendly policies throughout the company. “That part of it mattered in a lot of ways,” Miller says. “And since Mary and Mike have increasingly done better and better year after year, we’ve been happy to keep working with them.”

Could Mary and Mike’s success make them more attractive to a bigger-budget team and pull them away from Seven? “Every year, we wonder whether we’ll be able to maintain this relationship,” Miller says. “And I wouldn’t blame them one bit if she was looking for something big. But part of their values are that they want the freedom to race what they want to race and they feel strongly about the companies they work with. Since we feel like we’ve formed a relationship with Mary and Mike and that our sponsorship is not purely a commercial enterprise, there’s no reason why we won’t continue to work together.”

Rob Vandermark’s Resume

1987

— Vandermark is involved in designing and building frames for Olympic medal winners, world champions and Tour de France winners including Lance Armstrong’s Subaru-Montgomery team.

1990 — Designs custom frames for Greg LeMond and his Tour de France winning Z-Team.

1991 — Began two-year study of wheelchair ergonomics and develops revolutionary wheel chair designs. Applies this knowledge of ergonomics to bicycle fit and design.

1992 — Introduces the industry’s first size-specific tube sets.

1993 — Introduces racing wheelchair for Bob Hall (the first wheelchair athlete to complete the Boston Marathon and who went on to form Hall’s wheels, a racing wheelchair supplier). Scientific Frontiers television program calls the chair “A design revolution.”

1994 — Introduces innovative light, mobile, and with a low center of gravity everyday wheelchair.

1997 — Leaves Merlin and launches Seven Cycles using the Custom Kit and Client Interview processes which allows Seven to produce highly customized bicycles in a mass-production scalable system.

2004 — Seven Cycles fits and builds 10,000th bicycle frame.

Triathlete Magazine: A Cyclocross Bike May Be Just the Answer to Break Monotony

by Roch Frey/Multisports.com

Mudhoney
Seven Cycles Mudhoney cyclocross bike

You’ve ridden every road within a 50-mile radius of your home so many times you know every crack in the pavement. Does the mere thought of doing the same old rides make you nauseous?

Are you starting to see the dirt roads along the way and wonder where they go as you fantasize about hills not yet climbed and rednecks not yet encountered? Granted, some of you are so obsessed with specificity of training (and not getting dirty) that you’ve never considered anything beyond two skinny tires and smooth tarmac. But if you are starting to feel bored to tears by routes that were once exciting, it’s time for you to “cross” over.

Many triathletes own a mountain bike and in the off-season — or very early season — they actually use it, but only if it’s not too close to their sacred triathlon season. There seems to be an underlying assumption that it’s OK to go off-road, but only if it’s not during serious training time.

“No sir, we sure don’t want mountain bike riding to ruin the upcoming tri-season! What if we’re not on our aerobars by January? Maybe we’ll grow hair on our legs and start enjoying a little dirt coating on our two front teeth. Maybe we’ll start laughing during rides and forget to wear our heart rate monitor (the horror)! Surely, we’ll miss out on some crucial neuromuscular development.”

Wrong!

The perfect alternative

Mountain biking is a perfect alternative to your rides on the road and is good for your head — not to mention those bike-handling skills. Have you ever stood on a corner at an Ironman race and watched the participants try to negotiate a 90-degree turn on their bikes?

If NASCAR fans only knew how close a crash was to happening 2,000 times at any Ironman bike course turn (4,000 times for a two-loop course), they’d leave their television sets and set up bleachers and a beer tent. Memo to all of you: When going around a corner, keep your inside pedal (the one closest to the apex of the turn) up! Phew! You’re scaring me to death.

“But,” you say, “I don’t like fat tires. They go too slow and I don’t need the suspension because I’m not going to risk crashing on technical, rooty, rocky terrain. I want something I can cover some ground on. I’m sticking to graded dirt roads.”

Meet the bike

Funny you should bring that up, because have I got the bike for you: Meet the cyclocross bike, or ‘cross bike or CX as it’s sometimes called. You’ve probably seen one — you know, it looks like a standard road bike but with fatter tires and those funky center pull brakes.

Cyclocross racing is enjoying some healthy growth and CX bikes are back in the limelight. The racing is fun, but, more importantly, this is a bike that can go anywhere, anytime, in any conditions. It’s the perfect addition to a triathlete’s two-wheeled arsenal.

You’re thinking, ‘OK, Roch. You explain to my people (family, spouse, etc.) that I need to purchase yet another bike. I can barely get an entry fee without a General Accounting Office fact-finding mission. Now I’m going to get another bike? You could have told me about this before Christmas!’

The fact is you’re going to ride this bike all year long — not just in the off-season — and you do have a birthday coming up, don’t you?

Again, this isn’t just about riding off-road for a change of pace and then, once the pre-season arrives, going back to the tri-bike full time.

Riding once a week on your tri-bike is an important early season practice. It will allow you to gradually adapt to the flexibility needed for the aero position and the specific recruitment of time-trialing muscle groups. If you’re set up well on your ‘cross bike there’s no reason you can’t use it for all other rides.

Then, once the race season arrives, 90 percent of your rides should be back on your tri bike for the training specificity of the aero position. That still leaves you one ride each week where you can swap out the aero bars and road rage for the peace and quiet of those exploratory backcountry rides on your ‘cross bike.

This is also a great way to justify the purchase of a new bike as you will use it year-round, and it offers the ideal mental break from the normal road cycling training grind. “Honey, it’s a justifiable expenditure. I need it. Roch said.” Leave that last part out; but the rest should work.

Is a ‘cross bike truly as good as riding a road or tri bike on the road? Let’s see. The fatter tires give you some bite and suspension when off-road, but once they’re back on the pavement they roll almost as fast as the skinny 19-22-millimeter tires on road bikes.

This is the key: you don’t feel as if you are sacrificing your fitness on a ‘cross bike, yet you still have the ability to head off-road and liven up your training. Riding on rough or dirt/gravel roads also builds bike-handling skills.

Improve your handling skills

Most triathletes (yes, even you) get into the sport of triathlon without first developing cornering, descending and braking skills — not to mention bike etiquette such as holding your line, pointing out debris and obstacles in a group, etc. Hitting the dirt forces you to build technical proficiency. This is true of mountain biking, too, but the trails may be intimidating to beginners and even some veteran triathletes.

Yes, one could use a mountain bike on the rolling backcountry gravel roads, but again, the thought, “It doesn’t feel like my tri bike, therefore it must not be doing me any good” tends to wander into the mind of the obsessive, compulsive, I-have-to-be-going-at-least-18-mph triathlete. Of course, it’s not true, but on a ‘cross bike you don’t tend to have this thought.

A little too cold outside to hit the road? Take the ‘cross bike out and hit the trails. Your speed will be slower than on the roads, reducing the wind chill and allowing you to last longer and feel like you are getting a “more specific” training session.

Peter Reid has been using his ‘cross bike for years. “From March to September I ride it once a week,” Reid says. “I do this awesome 100-mile loop all on fire roads. Riding those roads really makes me strong due to the constant rolling resistance. You never seem to get a break. Right now my ‘cross bike is converted to a full-on winter bike. It weighs a bit more but I can put some major fenders on it compared to a tri or standard road bike.”

Aside from building bike-handling skills and affording you the joy of getting on some dirt, you can also use the ‘cross bike on pavement in the rain, as its bigger tires give you more traction. You also save your beloved tri bike and its fancy components from the bad weather.

Change is good. While training should be specific, the key to longevity in any sport is variety. Throwing in some ‘cross riding year-round will keep you fresh mentally and add some fun to your cycling. Come July, it’s been five or six months of toiling on the tri bike and suddenly you find that those long Saturday rides are not as inviting.

Switch it up! Get the ‘cross bike out and ride a completely different loop. Before you know it, you’ll find yourself riding around a muddy circuit in November, dismounting and mounting your trusty steed in one smooth motion like a seasoned Euro, and you’ll wonder why you were so hesitant to try a ‘cross bike.

You know what they say? Once you’ve ‘crossed over you’ll never go back.

Roch Frey coaches all levels and ages of multi-sport athletes from beginner to professional athletes including Heather Fuhr, 1997 Ironman Hawaii Champion and Peter Reid, 1998 and 2000 Ironman Hawaii Champion.