On the Road – Page 11

On the Road – 250 Miles of New England Dirt

Rob is obsessed with dirt. That is, perhaps, an oversimplification, but it gets pretty close to the truth. For years and years he thought of himself as a mountain biker, both as a racer and a committed adventure rider. Then his riding migrated to the road, but any chance he had to spin out onto a trail, even on skinny tires, he took. The dirt has always called, and his obsession has been a blessing to all of us here at Seven.

If you’re looking for a good all-dirt or mixed-terrain route to ride, Rob has it. Rob can show you trails, in your own neighborhood, that you’ve never seen before. We call this style of riding, on-road/off-road/trail, “evergreening,” and none of us was really surprised when Rob started Overland Basecamp to spread the gospel of dirt far and wide.

OB recently ran the Maneha 250, a two-day, 250 mile ramble through some of the best mixed-terrain in New England. The pictures tell the story:

Riders took a couple of different approaches to the challenge. Some rode self-supported, packing all their food, clothing and camping supplies. Others took more advantage of the organization Overland Basecamp provided.

This unofficial pit stop belies the quality of the food served throughout the event, which was catered by Mayfair Farm in Harrisville, NH. They also hosted the campsite and provided the stunning evening view…for those who got in early enough to see it.

Here, our very own Matt O. rolls through an abandoned narrow-gauge rail bed with Brad on his wheel. They both rode unsupported.

One of the most charming (and unavoidable) features of our New England topography is the endless, punchy, rolling hills. The Maneha 250 has a climbing profile like a heart patient’s EKG.

Sunrise breakfast and strategy session at the campsite, a pretty great way to start day two.

More Sevens rolling by this abandoned freight, go ahead and ask Rob how he found this spot, likely riding around in the woods in the dark.

Read more about it on the Overland Basecamp site.

Cobbleside at Paris-Roubaix

After the Paris-Roubaix Challenge on Saturday, we took our tired bodies back to the course for the pro race on Sunday, and we were lucky enough to get inside the start area, to walk among the bikes and riders as they prepared for the mayhem to come. It was fascinating to see all the tweaks, to tire pressure, saddle height, etc. that the racers insisted on making right up to the moments before the starter’s pistol sounded. The nervousness in the air was palpable. Paris-Roubaix has a controlled start, which means the entire peloton gets rolling parade-style before anyone is allowed to go full tilt.

Unlike the morning of our own date with the cobbles, the sun shone brightly. Support cars with a dozen bikes on top rolled out in an endless procession. Many of them would reach the finish with just one, if any at all.

From the start, we went directly to the Arenberg Forest where a sort of carnival was underway. There were so many cycling fans there it was hard to get a good sight line to the race, and when the peloton arrived it was more by the rumbling of the ground that we knew it. The cobble bed is raised there, and you can feel the passing of more than a hundred charging bodies in your feet. The whole mass of them was still moving very fast at that point.

Next we went to the Carrefour de l’Arbre, 242km into the race, where the winning move tends to take place. Here we were right up at cobbleside, and the flatness of the area let us see the riders coming from something like a mile away. There was a dust cloud and a wave of cheering.

The first through were coated in dust, and having been out on the punishing course all day, most of them looked exhausted and angry, like disgruntled ghosts of the group we had seen at the start in the morning. Dirt caked at their noses and mouths, and there was ample evidence of crashes, blood, torn clothing and mud caked across their bodies.

After the leaders came through we expected the peloton, but Paris-Roubaix abhors a peloton, and the race was completely strung out, riders coming past in twos and threes.

We listened to the finish huddled around a radio perched on a card, and though we don’t speak Flemish, the emotion in the voices, and in all the other fans cluttered by the roadside told the whole story. When the German, John Degenkolb, won, a few incomprehensible curses were muttered, and the locals trudged away disappointed.

We didn’t have a horse in this race, as the saying goes, and the whole day was thrilling from our perspective. It really is a thing you can’t imagine until you see it, even if you’ve raced bikes before, even if you’ve watched on TV, even if you rode the same cobbles the day before.

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.

Wheel Test – Paris-Roubaix Pacenti Luxe Disc Wheels

We’ve been looking for good go-to disc wheel for mixed-terrain riding. It’s a category with a number of entrants, but few products that really hit the mark. So we connected with Justin Spinelli at Luxe Wheelworks and Kirk Pacenti at Pacenti Cycle Design for a set of Pacenti’s own rims laced to White Industries hubs with Sapim bladed spokes.

They proved very durable and, at 24 hole front and rear, they manage to strike the right balance between weight and strength for us. Certainly we were impressed with them over the 54km of cobblestones at the Paris-Roubaix Challenge last weekend, not to mention the 14 hour mixed-terrain odyssey we did around Paris a few days before. We did both these rides without a broken spoke, dent or even a flat tire.

We rode them with Challenge Paris-Roubaix 27mm tires, similar to what the pros ride, to really put them through their paces. Justin had promised us that we’d have no problems, that they’d be bulletproof, but the cobbles of northern France have crushed all sorts of wheels (and spirits). We were impressed enough with them that they’ll become the default wheel for our Evergreen line in the coming months.

On the Road – The Paris-Roubaix Challenge

We packed our travel cases in a low-level frenzy, trying to get designs done and customers taken care of before getting on the flight to Paris. By the time we landed, our heads were full of cobbled dreams. And doubts. Were we fit enough? Did we bring the right clothing? We looked around at the others in our group and got quietly into the van.

We’re not like most of the people who take on the Paris-Roubaix Challenge, either die-hard amateur racers who want to test themselves against the famed pavÃ© of northern France or die-hard race fans who have memorized the route, can talk at length about each edition of the Hell of the North, and who want only to ride in the tire tracks of their heroes. We are fans, but bike-building precludes us from taking much else very seriously. We love to ride, but going fast is more something we measure against ourselves than against the pros.

We came to the Paris-Roubaix Challenge as a way of breaking out of our daily context, to see a part of cycling culture that exists in a parallel universe, and to test ourselves (and our bikes) in a way we hadn’t tried before. Oh, and we wanted to see the race, arguably the most storied event in pro cycling.

At dinner the night before our own ride, war stories crossed the table like a full salt shaker. Many of our table mates had ridden it before. Some were planning to wear two pairs of bibs. Most had their bars double-wrapped. As first-timers, all we could do wassecond guess our own choices, our bikes set up more or less as they always are for travel.

Fortunately, the Paris-Roubaix Challenge does not take in the 100+km of pavement the pros ride before the first sector of cobbles at Troisvilles, so we were fresh, if a little nervous, when we got there. Our first impressions, in all honesty, were that the cobbles were fun to ride. We are avid trail and gravel riders, and the cobbles, though each sector has its own unique character, present the same sort of bike handling challenges. The dead flat terrain let us focus on keeping our front wheel moving forward.

We rolled out in a cool, light rain, the sort of grim, gray day that part of the world, and certainly the race, is known for. The rest of the day would bring everything from cold showers to bright sunshine, and rather than struggling with the constant changes, we found they really just set off the different phases of our adventure.

We had fun trying to figure out the best place to ride through each sector of pavÃ©. Sometimes it was the smooth gutter. Other times it was right on the crown, down the middle of the road, although rain slick as they were, you could feel your tires sliding off those tallest stones. In some places the road was so bowed upward, so concave, that the following cars would scrape loudly over the crown, a horrible sound, especially for their drivers.

When we reached the Arenberg Forest, we found complete mayhem. This is the sector that claims the most pros every year, and the same was true for the amateurs. An ambulance was parked 50 meters in, already attending to someone with a day-ending problem. The cobbles there are larger than the other sectors and more irregular. The gaps in between seem to fit a tire perfectly, and the whole thing was covered in black mud. We felt fortunate to make it through unscathed.

The hardest section, though, came later at the Carrefour de l’Arbre. This sector is long, and there is no where to ride. The gutter is uneven and unpredictable. All the cobbles had rounded tops that rattled our teeth for more than 2km.

For all this, we felt surprisingly good at the end. All day we had been careful to keep the right pace, often slowing down on the pavement between sectors to save our legs. Over most of the cobbles, it actually seemed to help to ride faster, to try to ride across the tops of the stones.

Rolling finally into the famed velodrome at Roubaix, the transition from the day’s rumbling and bouncing to the smooth, curved bank of the track was jarring. We didn’t feel elated or relieved or victorious, so much as overwhelmed, trying to build a little speed to keep from sliding down the steep embankment just short of the finish line.

We’d come through. Our bikes had come through, performing flawlessly, not a dropped chain, not a flat to change, and given a little time to think on it, we saw it for what it was, one of the most extraordinary days we might ever spend on a bike.