Evergreen SL – Page 3

Evergreening Georgia

Bike building doesn’t offer up a lot of natural holidays. We can build every day of the year (we don’t), and still have work to do. So when most folks were packing in around a table to pass the turkey and stuffing this year, we were boarding a mostly empty flight to Atlanta.

This time of year we’re looking to ride where it’s warm, where it’s mostly flat, and where you might not think to find good riding. Georgia, specifically Athens and Augusta, is something of a secret cycling gem. The locals know how good it is, but you don’t read a lot about its flowy, endless single-track or its labyrinthine red clay roads.

We found the Georgia woods perfect for Evergreening, free of the rootys and rocks that make our New England woods so challenging to ride. For the first time in as long as we can remember, we never felt compelled to stop. Local mountain bikers take such good care of the trail systems, and there are so few momentum-sapping obstacles, that it was only fatigue that forced us to take a break. This kind of riding is really good for the soul, endless, twisting paths through gorgeous woodland, long, straight roads of firm, dry, red clay.

On the road, we found drivers universally courteous, and even on the edges of the cities, the mixed terrain riding was outstanding, ribboning along rivers and snaking under highways.

We flew back the Monday after the long weekend. There were, after all, more bikes to build, but Evergreening Georgia was as worthy a way to spend Thanksgiving as we could imagine.

See the Seven Evergreens .

Henry’s Paris-Brest-Paris Adventure

We are proud to say there were a lot of Sevens at Paris-Brest-Paris this year, and we had the chance to spend some time with one rider, Henry van den Broek, who is local to us and a Ride Studio Cafe regular, to hear about the adventure of riding 1200km.

He says, “I started Sunday evening in the 90 hour wave at 18:30. Apart from some short stops at the controls (less than 30 min), I rode through the night and the following day for 24 hrs until Carhaix which is 525km, just before the halfway point in Brest. After sleeping for 3 hours on a field bed in a gym, I left that night at 11pm for Brest and kept riding through the night and next day until Fougeres (921km) where I arrived with fellow Seven rider Dave Bayley Tuesday night.”

He continues, “Dave I met in the morning just after the Loudeac stop. This had been a tough morning where I felt pretty groggy and had a hard time making speed, but after plenty of caffeine and ice cream I got my mojo back. Dave continued that night for Fougeres, while I slept on a gym mattress for 3 hours and left at 4am Wednesday for the last 300k to Paris, where I arrived at 8:30pm, finishing the ride within 74hrs.”

When you’re speaking to someone who aspires to riding for 3 days straight, the first question is always going to be, why? Henry laughs when we ask, “Why do I do it? On the ride, I sometimes wonder myself what I am doing, but I ride for the sense of adventure, exploring, seeing new places, new landscapes. Randonneuring reduces life to its basics. You are just eating, drinking. You ask, how is my body feeling? You become your own little world. Also you can meet friends through this shared suffering. On long rides, you have a chance to meet, hang out.”

Henry only started randonneuring three years ago, encouraged by Patria and the crew at Ride Studio Cafe, and then he wondered if could even do it. 200km? 300km? 600km? Now he finds himself wondering what’s next after PBP.

“With all the preparation I had,” he says, “I was not that worried. I did 1000km in July, and PBP is not that much more. During the ride, I got more and more confident. Unlike many of the brevets I did in the season where there are typically 20-100 participants, there were more than 5000 people starting at PBP, all trying to finish. This year less then 75% percent finished.”

He continues, “When things get hard, typically I do a check up. Hard can be multiple things, overheating, tiredness, pain, sleepiness. How are my back, my arms, my legs? Most things can be solved by eating. Electrolytes and sugar can cure most problems. Grogginess is a tough one. I had three hour sleep stops on Monday and Tuesday nights, but it wasn’t enough. The jet lag didn’t help either, flying into Paris two days before the event. Coffee was the only way to get over it. Chewing gum can help. Next time I want to try caffeine gum. You think it’s a mental thing, but that really comes back to sugar levels. Your brain is just saying it needs more fuel. This is about being in tune with your body.”

It is not every day you ride 1200km. Most who finish PBP only do it once in their lifetime, so strategizing for a ride like this comes down to the experience of the “shorter” brevets and reading about how others have handled the distance.

Henry says, “What I realize now is you have to be careful how much power you’re putting out. You have to measure your effort, not go too hard. Even 1% over your pace will catch up to you over these kinds of distances.”

Henry’s Seven Evergreen SL was built with more than just PBP in mind. This is a bike that Henry uses on group rides with the RSC club. He has done the full brevet series on it. And now that it’s fall, he’s racing cyclocross on it as well.

He says, “I love the frame. I love the versatility of it. I was always completely worn out by my old bike. This season I’m on the Seven on 38mm tires with supple casings. It’s so smooth. They roll so well. The Evergreen has a lot of clearance, so you have choices in tires. The disc brakes give you reliability in all weather. It’s very stable, too. I ride with a very light touch on the bars, so no back pain ever.”

“I also really love the custom paint,” he adds. “So many people look at my bike and love the paint job. It’s orange from Holland. I always get attention with it, and it’s really MY bike. It has my name on it, my color, made for my body. It’s a statement. It’s me. I feel very together with the bike.”

Ken’s Evergreen SL

This is Ken’s Evergreen SL, another great build from Bob at Wheel Werks in Crystal Lake, IL. It’s hard to tell how well the bike came out, because Ken more or less immediately put it through hell (see his comment below), and he sent pictures with it still covered in mud from one of the more intense editions of the Dirty Kanza in recent memory. We love it.

Ken says:

The bike is great, couldn’t be happier. Two days after I picked it up I did a 300k and if performed perfectly in terms of fit and performance. Also did Dirty Kanza 200 a few weeks later, same thing (rider, not so good…19hrs, 59 minutes).

See more of Ken’s photos here.

bRad Across America – Through the Mid West

When last we checked Brad’s progress in the Trans Am Bike Race, he was cruising through the Rockies. Over the last few days, he’s really put the pedal down (pun intended) and crossed off all of Kansas and most of Missouri. He’ll cross the southern tip of Illinois and then head into Kentucky over the next few days. If he didn’t still have so far to go, we’d say he’s on the run in to the finish. And while he’s confessed to being tired, he’s still covering 150-200 miles a day, sometimes riding at after dark to avoid the mid-day heat.

As always, he sends back great photos, especially for a guy literally racing across the country.

On the Road – Evergreening Paris

We caught the red eye, the last flight on the departures board before an air traffic controller’s strike shut down the Charles De Gaulle Airport. We set our bikes up at the hotel (we’ve got reassembly down to 22 minutes now), and immediately hit the pavement, excited to see Paris from the saddles of our Evergreen SLs.

It might be lame to cast Paris, the City of Light, as an amalgam of American metropolises, but to us, Paris was like a perfect cross between Boston and New York, windy and narrow like our hometown in Massachusetts, but congested and massive like the Big Apple. Fortunately, Paris’ motorists don’t resemble Americans. They drive a bit more slowly (the roads don’t permit much speed), and they are far more accepting of cyclists. We don’t recall a single horn being honked in anger, despite the fact all the bike lanes run opposite the flow of traffic. This was confusing and occasionally terrifying, for a pair of over-tired, over-excited Americans, but it seems to work well for Parisian cyclists. It would be hard not to want to ride a bike there every day, or all day on the one day you had, which is what we did.

Characterizing the riding in Paris in general is hard, because the whole city doesn’t conform to any one style. There are cobbles aplenty, as well as the asphalt you expect from any place this massive, but there is also a fair amount of dirt and mixed-surface, whether it’s grassy verges or sprawling park and garden spaces. Our shake out ride did more than whet our appetites for more, but having skipped food after coming off the plane, we needed to get back to the hotel and prepare for the real exploration to come.

We gave ourselves some time the next morning to rest and refuel, not throwing legs over top tubes until 10am, but it was fourteen more hours before we returned. We wanted to maximize our ride time here, to do a week’s worth of exploration in the one day we had, and there is always something to see in Paris, some bit of architecture, an open plaza, an opportunity for food that kept us going until midnight.

We followed the Seine out into the suburbs, clinging to it like a trail of bread crumbs, trusting it to take us someplace great, and it delivered everything, from the drama of the city center, to factory districts, to bucolic suburbs and a lone hill overlooking the magical sprawl. We found urban double track, and abandoned, nearly primitive sections of the city’s manufacturing past.

We could have kept on riding, but rolling back into the hotel after a full day and night on our bikes seemed smart with the Paris-Roubaix Challenge on tap for the weekend. We did another ride around the city center in the morning, before repacking our bikes and boarding the train to Lille and the shuttle on to Saint Quentin, where our adventure would continue.