No, actually—not even close. Not since a third-generation Yalie picked up a Texas accent and ran for President as a Washington Outsider has a brand been so obviously out of sync with its own reality. Cyclocross, while thrilling and fantastically enjoyable, is also the most expensive cycling discipline for those with an actual desire to be competitive, and the least friendly to the common racer stepping up to give it a shot.

On the road, race-able bikes start at around $1000 and, without swapping a single part, can be trained on and raced competitively for at least one season. That’s certainly how I got started, and I remember the winning selections of collegiate B and C races stocked with Dura-Ace and Sora in roughly equal proportions. All due respect to the high-gloss fields I currently run with, but thanks to some impressive raw talents and a general lack of any tactical know-how, those collegiate events remain some of the fastest, hardest-fought races I’ve ever had the pleasure of contesting.

Manufacturers can wage nerd war til the cows come home, but road races aren’t won and lost at the bike shop. Zipp and Cervelo will remind you of Cancellara’s amazing charge at the ’07 Tour, but his on-the-hoods, out-of-the-saddle position on that particular rampage more than negated any aerodynamic advantage of his wheelset. Road cycling isn’t contested by torso-less robots on trainers in wind tunnels; it’s a game of canny, back-biting, and subterfuge, and 99 times out of 100, you’ll do better to poach another rider’s aerodynamic advantage than to invest in your own.

By comparison, gear in cyclocross actually matters—specifically, tires. While entry-level CX bikes often offer a lower price, what you get for the money is also drastically reduced. I’ll overlook the downgrade from Ultegra to Tiagra (as I mentioned above, if the gears shift, you’re good to go); I’m complaining about the “cyclocross” tube and tire setup that has no place on any respectable race course.

After a few seasons of attempting to race ‘cross on clinchers, I’ve arrived at the conclusion—one that ought to be plastered in bold-face at the beginning of any article on cyclocross—that attempting to actually race cyclocross with clinchers and innerubes is an often pointless endeavor. Maybe if you’ve got the mad handling skillz and mimized downforce of, say, Rudy, you can venture out past the fringe of the greens on your local golf course. Otherwise, the tire pressures you need to run come with a DNF rate (via pinch flat) of about 1 in 4.

Tubulars fix this problem, of course, but they’re astronomically expensive. The tires start at 70 dollars, and even Williams Cycling’s much heralded “affordable” $369 cross wheelset represents an outlay as large as I’ve ever made on a pair of road wheels. To me, “affordable” applies to <$150 wheelsets, like the Maddux F20 I put 6000 miles into over the past two years.

Another reason competitive cyclocross all but requires tubulars is that, without free laps or follow trucks, you’ve got to be able to get to the pit on your own—much tougher on a flat clincher than a flat tubular. And once you get to the pit, you’ll need something to put on your bike; tack on another $470 for a second wheelset. And patching that tubular tire back up after the race…let’s just hope your puncture solution is a simple as an injection of Caffelatex.

But as anyone who’s been to a muddy Verge Series race knows, the only really competitive support is to have a second cyclocross bike at the ready in the pits. ($800 + $470) x 2 = $2,540, or better than twice the up-front investment of a raceable road bike. And keep in mind, these ‘cross figures are still for Tiagra level parts, while a similar road rig ships with Ultegra gear that’s good for at least few seasons to come. Much as I appreciate the functionality of Shimano’s low end parts, an ill-timed spill in the sand pit might be all she wrote for that budget shifter.

And of course, no detonation of this populist facade would be complete without pointing out how thoroughly cyclocross kowtows to the elite. A sponsored rider has to worry about almost none of the things I’ve listed above—no entry fees, a guaranteed spot on the line, free pit bikes, boatloads of swag, and a retirement account’s worth of wheelsets, making an unexpected snowstorm as manageable as a wheel swap.

I hasten to add that there’s nothing “wrong” with this—good riders are fantastic marketing exposure, and with the salaries (or lack thereof) offered to the pros, the people who are actually good at ‘cross need as much help as they can get (see #livingthedream).

At the end of the day, though, what road racing does that cyclocross doesn’t is routinely turn out Frederick Vuechelens, Bobbie Traksels, Frederic Guesdons and host of other one-off winners who saw an opening, read a race, or were otherwise crazy enough to pull off the unlikeliest of upsets over the most elite of fields.

In road racing, there’s a sense that any rider with the skills to hold position, the watts the get free, and the stones to give it shot is guaranteed an opportunity to make a race-winning move. Most times, it doesn’t work—heck, sometimes it doesn’t even get attempted—but the option is there for any rider who would lay claim to it. Drop Zdneck Stybar into the first lottery spot at a World Cup and I don’t think he’d enjoy that same opportunity.

The point of all this isn’t that cyclocross needs to be somehow “fixed”. Obviously, I wouldn’t mind if the industry turned out more ~$1000 CX bikes that weren’t built to sit in the garage, but ‘cross racing is just fine in its current incarnation. Adam Myerson’s fantastic piece on CX racing rings as true for the guy in first as it does for the guy in 101st—I would know, having found myself riding in both positions at various moments over the past three years.

What bothers me is this position cyclocross seems to enjoy in the popular imagination of cycling fans as a, blue-collar, working (wo)man’s sport, as if mud, beer, tents, and Belgian country music were proof positive that it’s a somehow purer competition, geared to the common rider. Make no mistake about it, cyclocross rewards privilege—both in terms of income and talent—above almost anything else.

Related posts:

1. On “Cyclocross” Clinchers
2. Tubeless For Cyclocross – The Complete Saga
3. Why George Hincapie Will Never Win Paris-Roubaix

In its natural state / by Brian Ellin cc-nc-sa

Occasionally, people ask me why I don’t more actively seek out work in the cycling industry. Aside from the fact that it’s an insider’s game and I’ve got the schmoozing skills of a dyspeptic orangutan, there’s just no way I could bring myself to participate in the absolute nonsense the positions tend to require—all the more so when that nonsense runs contrary to the interests of the company I would hypothetically be supporting.

Case in point—the sidewalls of the pro cyclocross bikes making the rounds on cycling news websites the past few weeks. While I applaud the spirit of whichever mechanic or press agent decided to turn Ryan Trebon’s sidewalls into a massive, garish Clement ad, it’s pretty clear no one was fooled by the effort. And while I’m sure the people at QBP smiled warmly at James Huang’s insistance that the uproariously camouflaged Dugast was merely a placeholder, it sure doesn’t look like the Typhoon has been cut from Treefarm’s arsenal.

Maxxis has at least taken a step in the correct direction—kinda. It seems a more-than-open-secret (mentioned at least twice) that Geoff Kabush is running tubulars with a Maxxis tread, but glued to a Dugast casing. To my consumer’s eye, that’s awesome step forward, and one Maxxis should be touting. But instead they’ve Sharpied over the sidewalls, lest the random passer-by find out what anyone who might possibly buy these (unbuyable) tires already knows.

It’s bad enough that blacked out sidewalls scream “we’re trying to cover something up”. But when you consider the unbelievable history of iconic brand crossovers, it’s almost criminal that anyone could pass an opportunity to advertise their racers on the Shelby GT of cyclocross tires. It’d be like Cinelli or Trek attributing the artwork on their iconic machines to “some contemporary artist” to save the feelings of their in-house designers.

Just some artist / by lafattaturchina cc-nc-sa

As The Economist noted, brand is critical in cycling—and if you can clothe yours in the finery of someone else’s, all the better. Perhaps some tire makers out there still consider Dugast and FMB to be “competitors”. And maybe, if it takes you three weeks to turn out 20 tires at $350 a pair, letting people know your top riders race on someone else’s casing might be a mistake. But for most of the industry, churning out affordable rubber in industrial quantities, a sewing a little free advertising for the boutiques into your team equipment will come back in positive brand association at the bike shop ten-fold.

Of course, racers and brand managers would still—at least for the first few seasons—have to answer questions from fans and press about the (OMG) off-brand equipment. Aside from stressing the talking points that casings are just part of a tire, and that FMB buys both tubes and treads from somewhere else, here are some blurbs that everyone should feel free to crib:

“Obviously, [sponsor] has the best tire arsenal on the market today. But when you pair [sponsor]’s treads with this custom casing, [tread name] really is the ultimate weapon”

“99 times out of 100, [sponsor]’s stock tires are the best thing out there. These custom casing models are a huge investment on the part of [sponsor] to cover the remaining 1%.”

“These tires are really indicative of the support we’re getting from [sponsor]. These are the best casings out there, and [sponsor]’s tread is a decade ahead of where the stock rubber is.”

“You couldn’t be competitive in today’s field without custom casings. And thanks to [sponsor]’s tread pattern, today’s field could be competitive with me.”

There was once a day when sponsorship was 100% about advertising. When differences between production models and custom machines came down to minute subtleties in lugs and steel, and when the public’s only window onto them was a small collection of low-resolution photos, the only thing that mattered—the only legible detail, really—was the name on the downtube.

But in the modern era, where every pocket holds a combination high resolution camera and instant publishing platform, and where fans are bombarded with a constant flood of information, I think the idea of cycling sponsorship really has to evolve from the purchase of rolling billboards to a more holistic concept of rider support.

This isn’t to say that riders should be able to run whatever the heck they want no questions asked, but if a rider competing at the top level feels that in certain conditions, they need a certain part to be competitive, a good sponsor will be willing to make a concession—just like Maxxis has done for Kabush. Now it’s time for the marketing side of the equation to catch up.

Related posts:

1. On “Cyclocross” Clinchers
2. Tubeless For Cyclocross – The Complete Saga
3. Cyclocosm 3.0

If you really felt like spending, you might get a blocky device with a usb cable and CD of poorly-written software (PC-only, of course) that turned your speed and HR into confusing looking graphs that you could compare against all your other confusing looking graphs from previous workouts, and not much else.

Thankfully, recent investor interest in social media, and the proliferation of GPS-enabled phones with reasonable amounts of processing power has resulted in a bloom of social fitness sites. The results aren’t universally good—my disdain for the unusable, boggy, UI carnage of MapMyHumanaRide is well documented—but generally speaking, the situation is a lot better than it was. And of all the options out there, I think Strava is the most thoughtfully crafted.

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ll note that back in 2010, Strava provided me a year of free membership and a Garmin 305 GPS unit to review their product. Lest you think I’ve been bought off, those of you who follow me on Twitter will note my repeated issues with the Edge 305 device, from broken buttons to fragile screens to DOA refurbs, and I currently pay full price for membership, and have been doing so since my trial offer expired.

As far as using the Strava site goes, your killer feature will depend on what you’re interested in as a rider. When I first began using it, the buzz was focused on a power-inferring algorithm, which made up watts for rides without power data, based on rider weight, speed, and road inclination. A cost-effective way of measuring power has long been a holy grail of the cycling world—remember the iBike?—but as intelligent readers probably knew going in, Strava isn’t going to take the place of a PowerTap or Quark anytime soon.

That said, while drafting, downhills, windspeed, and rolling resistance all play hell with Strava’s calculated wattage numbers, it does produce startlingly accurate results for any climb longer than a minute or so. Again, it’s not something you couldn’t do with your existing data, a well-crafted formula, and a calculator, but laid out alongside everything else, in a clean, smooth, web interface, you begin to think that this might be a feature worth paying for.

Indeed, data analysis and presentation is really Strava’s strength—and nowhere is this more evident than in its comparative data segmentation feature. Clocking historical times for a popular climb or TT is nothing new, but being able to spotlight, second-by-second, the moment where the truly talented make the difference is pretty darn cool. And if analyzing your own crushing defeats isn’t your thing, there are (if you pay) age group, club, and weight class filters, so almost anyone can find a combination of criteria under which they are King of the Mountain.

This sort of “competition without a number” at first struck me as self-aggrandizing and self-indulgent. But as it turns out, it’s a pretty useful training tool. Sure, KOMs might as often be determined by wind direction as wattage, but knowing you’re in an understood race against an army of online competitors is a great way to motivate for the extended agony of simulated race effort, and being able to compare efforts against yourself is fantastic training feedback. Maybe it’s just because my idea of a training log has historically consisted of remembering the previous day’s workout, but I found the total climb and mileage stats almost invaluable.

Of course, it’s not all completely rosy. For some time the segment and ride search tools have been pretty iffy—tracking down segments from a previous year’s race, for example, can be tricky. A lot of this is really a cataloging and indexing problem, since people will refer to races in a variety of different ways (Green Mountain, GMSR Stage 2, Green Mountain Stage Race, etc), but timestamps/geolocation should be enough to link the listings. In a similar vein, every long climb seems to contain 3 or 4 segments, reflecting various start and finish points. I’d be great if these could be grouped as subsections of one primary listing.

Still, the site is under near-constant development, and their recently added “Segment Explore” addresses many of the old issues, laying out all the segments by climb category in a given region via map view. The consistent, steady evolution of the site is very encouraging for future development, though I might gripe a bit that a good deal of the recent work seems to have been aimed at running-specific features. I understand the business logic, but I miss the good old days of “Strava is for Cyclists”.

Finally, and despite pouring some time into creating an API, Strava doesn’t play particularly nicely with others. Their API seems to be focused on allowing other applications to make changes within Strava, without necessarily freeing up any of the data it uses for cool new tools or external analysis. After much user bellyaching, they finally introduced a GPX export feature, but it’s pretty rudimentary, lacking many of the data sets collected by the site, and without the ability to export segments or your performances across them.

So in the interests of interoperability and data liberation, I’ve built two web tools to get your data off Strava the way you want it. One, the GPX Exporter, is not new, but remains the only way to export data for segments and efforts alone, or to get a GPX containing heartrate, cadence, or temperature. The other, a Strava to TCX export tool, ports everything—yes, including power—into Garmin’s bloated, mangled, propriety TCX format.

I didn’t build these tools just for users. As a product, Strava needs export, and probably a route creation feature. After all, what good is a great Explore tool to find a new routes and climbs if users need to handwrite cue sheets to get themselves out there? The fear, I suppose, is user exodus, but at the end of the day the data is cheap, and usability—which Strava has in spades—is the best guarantee of user retention.

This is why I pay for Strava, even though I (and all users) get the site’s most useful features for free. Don’t get me wrong—the things you get for a paid membership are very cool, but what I really want is continued development of data analysis tools with the same eye toward cleanliness and ease of use that the site currently has. And the five-dollar-a-month user fee seems a pretty fair investment to make for pushing things in that direction.

Related posts:

1. Race Day DVD – Review
2. “Crash!” DVD – Review
3. Overcoming – Review

This is the real tragedy of tubeless cyclocross set-ups: when they work, they’re awesome. The problem is that for racers, they don’t reliably work. There are plenty of instructions out there, and lots of positive stories. Unfortunately, I can’t say this is one of them.

From the Beginning

In 2009, I had a pretty miserable run of it on clinchers. Some bad luck, some bad riding habits, and some unwillingness to suffer a jarring, high-psi ride left me as a DNF in one out of every five events I started. So after flatting out of a grassy practice race at the beginning of 2010, and being unable to afford the expense and hassle of tubulars at that time, I decided to give tubeless tires a shot.

I ordered a Stan’s Conversion Kit for the Easton Ascent II wheelset I had from road racing. It was with much trepidation that I drilled out the inner wall valve hole to 7/16″, but the wheelset (running standard road clinchers) held up just fine through the 2011 road reason—impressive considering its age, let alone the enlarged hole. I will say that the rims are on the “tighter” side of 700c, and I couldn’t mount any tires with the conversion kit and the factory rim strip in place. Even with just the Stan’s rubber strip on the bare metal, it was a tight squeeze.

The tires I chose—Hutchinson’s tubeless-ready Bulldog CX’s—only made it on to the rim with a tremendous amount of effort and a few broken Pedro’s levers. Once I’d wrestled the tires on, I’d expected my lack of compressor would be a liability, but the front tire, with some soap, a half-cup of Stan’s, and a floor pump, actually inflated pretty handily with the valve core removed (others have had similar experiences). Once I’d set the bead, inflating with the valve core in was no problem.

The rear proved more difficult. No matter how much Stan’s/suds I used, air stubbornly kept slipping out faster than I could put it in. Even at the local garage, the (max 85psi) air pump couldn’t keep up with the leaking. Only after I gave up and removed the tire did I notice that the left-side bead had snapped, leaving a flaccid indentation that refused to hold the rim, even when mounted with a tube.

Eff This, I Wanna Ride

The thing is, a freshly-mounted tire really makes you want to ride. Especially when, pry as you might, you can’t get it to slurp even the tiniest bit of air as you manually wrench it back and forth at 29psi. So I grabbed an older Michelin Mud2, a cup of Stan’s, and another bucket of suds, and within a few minutes, had a second tubeless tire mounted—to the Reservoir!

That puts us back at the beginning of this story—tear-assing like a boss through trails that I had no business riding on a ‘cross bike, to the point that the hard bottom-outs were beginning to bang-up my a-little-light-for-this rims. Even on the faster, more-CX-like sections, the compliant ride and tear-the-grass-out cornering grip were just amazing; everything I’d wanted but never gotten on the clinchers I’d been suffering with for years.

There was still the matter of the broken bead, of course—I’d purchased through an online retailer and the warranty process was going to take weeks, since I had to send it to them, and they had to send it to Hutchinson, and then the process had to reverse. But the Mud2 seemed to be getting the job done.

Some Cracks in the Armor

After a few more vigorous shred sessions at the Res, I’d only found one situation where I encountered the dreaded burp—remounting. Now, my remounts have never been graceful, and last fall they were particularly bad, but only on the ugliest, most awkward landings—overjumping by seven or eight inches and slamming onto the saddle as much sideways as down—did a small bit of air scoot out of my rear tire. It was, according to my mini-pump, less than 5psi on the first burp, and generally, 2 or 3 were survivable before things got sloppy enough that I needed to re-inflate.

Because of the burp-out issue, I had to run the rear tire at a higher pressure (35+ psi) at last year’s Cycle-Smart International, which kinda defeated the purpose—namely, to pedal, rather than bounce, across a notoriously rooty section at that race. I also found myself reverting to step-’n-hop mounts to prevent burping, which cost me additional time. While I had no qualms about driving the 30psi front tire through corners, as the grassy, hard-grabbing corners wore on, I definitely felt my rear tire getting floppier—not enough to physically slow me, but certainly enough to sap some confidence.

A day or two before Putney, the sidewall on the several-years-old Michelin Mud2 finally broke, rendering it more or less useless for tubeless. I picked up a Maxxis Raze at the local shop, which turned out to be a mistake. By the time of the B race, most of the course had sticky, hard-packed mud ruts—fairly easy to ride, but they also pulled hard at tire bead on every corner. I went about a lap and a half before totally deflation and tire loss. Not cool.

(The Raze also rolled at Ice Weasels, running with a tube. As a race tire, the Raze sucks.)

A Side-by-Side Test

Warranty hassle rolled inexorably onward with the Hutchinson Bulldog. The online retailer I’d bought through couldn’t get in touch with the company, so I went through a back channel, and finally got the case addressed—though my tire would not be in before the end of the season. So I bought a Michelin Mud2 at the local shop, and restored the tubeless set-up I’d run at Cycle-Smart, without too many issues.

Last year’s Baystate Cyclocross provided some slick conditions and a truly infernal course—great for testing the efficacy of different cross setups. To sweeten the deal, Colin Reuter lent me a pair of FMB tubulars on the second day, so I had something more or less resembling a side-by-side test.

It wasn’t perfect; Colin, being insecure about his baldness, took a swipe at my weight by not letting me run 28psi in his tires, and there was a not-insignificant difference in tire width (31ish on the FMBs and 34 on the Hutchinsons). That said, while I had a pretty dismal showing in both races, the tubeless setup easily matched the bite and cushiness of their $150 European counterparts.

While I doubt I could have dared the 22psi employed by tubular aficionados in the loosest of muck (and I still had to half-ass remounts and deal with the slow-seep from the rear) the results showed that tubeless was closely competitive with more traditional setups, in addition to fixing many of the problems endemic to clincher racing.

Things Fall Apart

As the numerous Stan’s torture videos will tell you, tubeless is great at resealing itself. But at a Waffle ‘Cross ride in Boston a few days after Baystate, I caught a piece of glass that made a relatively normal puncture in my rear tire. I’d seen Stan’s take care of some pretty gnarly things (tree branches, barbed wire) on MTB tires, but for whatever reason, the cut just wouldn’t seal up, leaving me floundering around on a flat tire until some Good Samaritan passed me a tube. While not a race incident, it sure was “deflating” (tee-hee) to see tubeless fail in the very situation where it was touted as invincible.

In the interval between Waffle ‘Cross and Ice Weasels, things really started to wear out. My rear Stan’s rubber strip failed around the valve hole—or more precisely, the valve ripped free of the rest of the strip. I was able to create a usable seal by reinserting a valve stem cut from a flatted tube through the inside of the hole left in the strip, and bolting it against the rim. However, there rest of the conversion strip hardly seemed in better shape, as it had small cuts and deformations due to the spoke holes.

So I set up what the Internet glibly refers to as the “ghetto rimstrip”—essentially, half an innertube split open and laid down inside the rim bed. This would prove to be a bad decision. While it worked reliably on the trails, on the hard packed corners at Ice Weasels, it slowly leaked air on every hard bend. The demise was slower than Putney, and I managed to get to the pit before total failure, but the tube just isn’t thick enough to seal off the tire under racing forces and pressures.

During the winter, Hutchinson finally came through with the warranty tire, and I was like “effing finally”. After all, running a tubeless-ready Hutchinson with an intact Stan’s rim strip had been great on the front tire all season long. I’d never managed to test it against the arguably more tubeless-unfriendly forces on the rear tire, but there was reason for optimism. That was, until the bead snapped (again) during installation.

It might seem a little defeatist to give up on tubeless, having never simultaneously run tubeless-ready tires without a proper conversion strip on both wheels. But the fact is that the only tire that seemed to be able hold air to the forces of for-real cross racing—the Hutchinson Bulldog—broke before I could set it up almost every time.

To their credit, Hutchinson has backed-up their product, sending me replacements and alternative tires, but [SPOILER ALERT], they’ve given up on producing tubeless-ready rubber for 2012 because their solution, the low-flex carbon bead, can’t stand up to the forces of installation across the variety of rim diameters out there.

We Must Never Forget That There Is Hope

My own relatively frustrating experience doesn’t mean I think everyone out there having a blast on tubeless tires is a liar. For shredding trails on a CX bike—which is awesome, by the way—tubeless was never a hassle for me. And if you’re a for-fun racer with clean remounts who doesn’t mind backing off in the corners a bit, I think you could even get away with doing some less crowded (so you can pick a clean line) CX events on a tubeless setup.

I think there’s also something to be said for rim choice. Both Shimano and Stan’s make what I’m told are very legit tubeless rims. Unfortunately, unless you already own them, it means you’d need to go out and buy a new set of wheels, and the ability to re-use an existing road wheelset is one of the major reasons people race ‘cross on clinchers (and thus inevitably look to tubeless because clinchers aren’t competitive).

Shimano and Stan’s also ship these tubeless rims/wheels at a prices well above Williams’ much-heralded entry-level tubular wheelset. If money is a concern, tubulars (mindbogglingly, considering how much most tubular tires cost) remain the cheaper option.

Mavic’s Ksyrium and Ksyrium-like wheels, which are certainly more broadly distributed within the peloton than either Stan’s or Shimano’s tubeless offerings, might also provide some hope. The rims are free of air-leaking, rim-strip-slicing spoke holes, and as a co-developer of the UST standard, you’d think they’d have the most respect for a solid tire-rim interface. While the company has stepped away from an “official” road tubeless wheelset in recent years (because weight weenies ruin everything), I’m not the only one who thinks it might secretly already exist.

A Note On Tubulars

A lot of people seem to think I view tubeless as some sort of evolutionary replacement for tubulars. I don’t. If you don’t mind dealing with tubular setups (or can afford to pay some other bastard to deal with them), I see no reason to ever switch over to tubeless. Tubies are indeed a complicated, outdated, dirty, resource-intesive, brute-force solution, but they have one singlar, massively compelling argument in their favor—they work.

But viewing the state of tubulars on the road, I think the appeal of a tubeless cyclocross wheelset becomes clear. While pro cyclists with pro mechanics and free gear still use tubulars, most broke-ass racers who purchase and maintain their own equipment don’t. While I’ll stop short of saying there’s no difference between a $180 Tufo and a $60 Michelin on the road, I will say that you’re not going to lose a race because the guy next to you had tubulars and you didn’t.

A viable tubeless CX option would make that competitive parity between tubular and non-tubular a reality in cyclocross as well, and that—from the standpoint of both racers and manufactures—should be where the real allure of tubeless cyclocross lies.

Related posts:

1. On “Cyclocross” Clinchers
2. Milford Cyclocross Classic Race – Report
3. BCA Cyclocross – Report

It’s Not All Bad, I Guess

I should be specific here: most cyclocross-branded clinchers work well enough—so long as you have no plans to actually race. And in and of itself, that’s not a bad thing. For decades, a loud and long-bearded contingent of Internet cycling personalities has bemoaned the popularity of race-inspired equipment that is ill-suited to the needs of the casual cyclist.

For rough pavement or all-weather commuting, fire roads, and light trail use, a fatter, slightly knobby tire road tire running a 60+ psi is a great choice, and even the least sophsticated CX-branded rubber is a quantum leap beyond the 800g Cheng Shin monstrosities that spread like an STI in shops and box stores alike during the hybrid boom of the 1990s.

Racing on a Crummy Clincher

In terms of actual cyclocross racing—with high-speed cornering on mixed terrain, there are a lot of clinchers out there that simply aren’t competitive. Sure, if you’re willing to endure a masochistic enough pressure, you can hack your way through a race, and maybe even feel like you’re going pretty fast.

But if you’re really tight-roping the ragged edge of traction, hard tires don’t hold on washy, off-camber bends. Hard tires spin out as you try to apply power at the slightest suggestion of mud or loose terrain. And most importantly, hard tires don’t conform to obstacles, subjecting your body, your bike, and your most fickle components (derailleurs, spokes, seatposts clamps, headset bolts) to hammer blow after hammer blow.

There was a time when I thought this lack of suspension could be overcome by vigilant mechanical work and pure physical toughness. But after a few seasons, it’s become clear that the jarring and abuse is a secondary issue. The facts are that you can’t steer or apply power using tire that’s actively careening off the very surface obstacles that make cyclocross awesome.

Go Ahead. Lower the Pressure. See What Happens.

The obvious solution to these problems is to lower your tire pressure, but it’s a bitterly double-edged sword. With every psi you drop, your odds of catching a pinch flat increase, and the bumpier the course gets, and the more you have to gain from compliant, lower-pressure tires, the less safe it is to go for the low-psi advantage.

In my experience (at a not-particularly-nimble 165lbs) 40psi is about as low as you can go with a reasonable expectation of not flatting—and at that pressure, you’re giving away speed. You can still be competitive against tubulars on anything that’s not too muddy/bouncy, but be mentally and physically prepared to close a lot of gaps—rattling ass-in-the-air over washboard hardpack while your rivals pedal away is a psychological disadvantage that gets worse with every lap.

If We Have to Name Names

That said, cheaper and less experienced riders are more or less stuck with the clincher—even $2,600 race-branded machines ship with them. In a perfect world, I’d have bought every clincher I could get my hands on, and I’d let you know which ones suck and which ones rule. Alas, my masochism has limits—having found a handful of tires that don’t work, and a single one that does, I’m disinclined to further study.

My clincher of choice—for 100% of race conditions—is the Michelin Mud2. It has fantastic traction in almost anything, and supple (if somewhat fragile) sidewalls that make it feel tubular-awesome starting around 34psi (if you’re willing to risk a pinch). Sure, it’s a little knobby for hard-packed terrain, but rolling resistance caused by tread pattern (as opposed to say, pressure) is almost meaningless. Unless your ‘cross races are decided by paved, downhill coasting sections, it’s not something I’d bother worrying about.

As far as bad ‘cross tires go, it’s really hard to pick any one offender. There’s the Maxxis Raze that I managed to roll in the SS race of last year’s Ice Weasels. There’s the Vittoria XG that measured 2.5mm narrower than listed and slid six inches sideways every time I tired to pedal it through downhill corners at Green Mountain. And of course, there’s the old “tubeless-ready” Hutchinson Bulldogs that were actually pretty nice, except that their beads broke every other time I tried to mount them.

As always, your mileage may vary. Feel free to comment if you’ve had a good or bad experience with a particular clincher—and be specific about how you’ve used it. I’ve heard good things about a one or two other models, but as I said earlier, there are so many bad tires, and my experiences with them have been so awful, that I really don’t have the stomach for looking anymore.

Suggestions and Practical Advice

If you’re looking for a rule of thumb on what’s awful and what’s not, minimum recommended pressure has been a pretty good indicator for me. Numbers well outside the realm of what’s reasonable for CX—50 on the Raze and 60 on the Vittoria—have always turned out poorly. I’d long considered pressure indications were the result of much legal hang-wringing, but my experience seems to be suggesting that the Mud2 really has been engineered to effectively hold the rim and the dirt all the way down to its 29psi lower limit.

So it seems to me that a great solution this problem would be a little more truth in advertising—namely, not presenting tires with a 60psi minimum recommended inflation as cyclocross race equipment. I understand the marketing imperative of covering the CX niche, but let’s be honest: there are a whole lot more people out there commuting and pleasure riding on 23mm tires who’d be having a whole lot more fun and a lot fewer flats on my Vittoria XGs. Don’t insult consumers and batter your brand by pretending anything knobby is a CX tire because you feel like it needs to exist.

Industry publications could also help the alleviate some of the problem by keeping reader expectations a little more reasonable. While I’ve never been the biggest fan of Matt Pacochia, I give him credit for prefacing this article on CX clinchers by saying (essentially) “tubulars are better” (and also for only including three models, all of which I assume to be race-viable). The cycling press could still maintain its uncomfortably cozy relationship with manufacturers by ranking tires that don’t cut it in actual CX racing under a separate set of criteria to keep the scores inflated (so to speak).

Related posts:

1. BCA Cyclocross – Report
2. Catamount Cyclocross Weekend – Report
3. Pro Cycling News – There’s No Crying in Cyclocross

All the more so, in fact, when you’re dealing with a wrecked, seasons-old bottom-bracket, where half the cup teeth have been chewed off, and everything’s sealed with a fresh coat of North Beach mud. I had been pretty confident about the correct direction to turn things, but after a few mintes of struggling, I figured it’d better check the directions. RTFM or STFU, right?

click for full-sized inspection

See that part, under Item 1 in “BB Installation”, about how “English threaded bottom brackets have a reverse threaded non-drive side cup”? That part that I highlighted in red? That’s not accurate. And I was pretty sure it wasn’t at the time.


But when you haven’t had your coffee and you feel and look a bit like Laurens Ten Dam’s nose, you’re dangerously willing to defer to authority. Needless to say, the extraction process was downhill from then on. Fortunately, the story has a happy ending, thanks to Northampton Bicycle and the newest addition to my dream workshop, an impact wrench. But it also got me thinking.

Over the past few months my circumstances, my day job, and—most destructively—my commute have really precluded me from doing anything creative, either on this page or anywhere else. I’ve been self-medicating with as much riding as possible, but this fall, that’s become more difficult as I’ve encountered technical problems resulting from gear that just isn’t very good.

So, through the end of ‘cross season at least, I’m going kill two birds with one stone and start reporting on the crummy parts that keep me from riding, make patently false claims, or otherwise ruin my day. Hopefully it can stir up some of my old productivity, but if not, at least the Internet will have a fairly extensive record of what just does not work for the budget-minded ‘cross racer.

Related posts:

1. A Dash of Cyclocross News

Measuring things in defined units (a Pavel: ), using images, being funny, stringing more than two sentences together, making actual points, segueing smoothly between sections—a more than solid effort, especially by today’s standards.

But hey, maybe you’re a “shit floats” kind of person, and you see no problems with a best-of list that starts off “It’s indisputable that we’re in the post-literate age, but it’s still possible to find lovely & [sic] interesting writing if you seek it out” before calling a site that unironically uses exclamation points in groups of eight “a slam dunk” for Blog of the Year. And no, neither the best-of list or the blog it names will be getting linked to here.

Or maybe you’re the sort of reader who needs to suckle at the teat of repetition. If so, you were no doubt rejoicing (though not especially surprised) to find that same image-thieving, underwritten, over-exclamation-pointed blog mentioned in both Embro’s and Pavé’s end of year lists.

Then again, maybe I’m the one in the wrong here. Maybe my standards are too high. After all, when the publication of record can’t seem to get itself together over whether or not a rider has signed with a new team, why should I expect the part-timers to reach any higher?

That said, online cycling coverage and commentary at the end of 2009 isn’t entirely a lost cause: I’ll readily credit Pavé for mentioning a blog based purely on a nicely-done layout. While I’ve got reservations about anyone who claims that “When Simoni was on top of his game he got to demand whatever he wanted” (Like this 800g front wheel?), or that “Aluminum was still the choix du jour” for frames in 2003, it’s still nice to find an author-designed blog that doesn’t look like a cached Angelfire page.

And I cannot express how deeply reassuring it is to find at least one other entity in the cycling world willing to stand up for something other than pandering to its advertisers and partner sites. Even the various incarnation of Velonews.com’s redesigns throughout the year—regardless of your opinion on their efficacy—also reflect the genuine desire to present the reader with an improved online experience.

Perhaps 2010 will be the year when this desire finally finds itself aligned with the talent and opportunity to needed create something great.

Related posts:

1. Pro Cycling News – Worst Readers’ Poll Ever, Assorted News
2. The Worst of Cycling 2005
3. Worst Bike Video Ever?

That said, despite regularly producing some of the most original, creative, highest quality work in the cycling world for the past four years, there’s a fair amount of respect I’m not getting. I don’t think there’s anyone out there doing what I do or even coming close to it—certainly not the people collecting redirects from the parties targeted above.

So I think it’s time to start aggressively calling out the the motivations behind this industry’s self-appointed arbiters of good taste. My last naming of names got a fairly good response—and, really, what do I have to lose? The respect referrals I’m already not receiving?

Of course, the suggestion of an “axis of evil” in the cycling industry is obviously and intentionally bombastic, so if you find yourself on the receiving end of this, just consider it a friendly nudge—but one that leads with an elbow nonetheless.

No related posts.

Kohl had just better hope that no enterprising competitors—an ex-con, ex-manager, for example—decide to open “rejuvenation clinics” in the neighborhood.

Now this Velonews article is how you really sell bikes. The author, who has plenty of opinions about doping, sticks to talking about the things that make cycling awesome, while subtly mentioning the zillions of accessories (coffee, vests, gloves, bottles, cleaning supplies, etc) that go along with it. Now the same overpaid Masters racers are fired up to ride, focused on having a good time, and ready to buy, almost without regard for result.

Doping, as Kohl no doubt discovered after he was caught, is really only good for grabbing press. Even non-dopers (or at least those who’ve cleared a few more hurdles to avoid being caught) have realized this. The only word I’ve gotten of Chris Anker Sorenson’s new book is that he talks about the one time he missed an out-of-competition test in it, but that tiny incident was enough to get worldwide, English language press.

Not bad for a TdF domestique from a country most Americans can’t find on a map.

Related posts:

1. The Headlines are Only Boring if You Read Them Somewhere Else
2. “Did We Know This?” – The Hot New Cycling Game.
3. The Passion of the Ullrich, Old Racers, Flanders Fever

In a claim worthy of Chesterfield Cigarettes, Speedplay has asserted that wind tunnel testing has proved its pedals will save you an astounding 33 seconds per hour if you use the four bolt attachment.

There are, of course, the obvious problems with this wind-tunnel derived claim—you don’t ride hour-long time trials; even if you did, you couldn’t ride them a consistent 30mph; even you could, they have hills and corners, and you’re overweight and a lousy bike handler. Then there are cross-winds, other competitors, traffic, mental toughness, etc.

But in this post I will ignore these things. Instead, I want to focus on highlighting Speedplay’s ill-conceived methodology and misleading conclusions.

“…the testing of a single component by itself raises questions as to whether or not the component will perform in the same way when installed on a bicycle and used outside of the tunnel.

With this in mind, we mechanized a life-size, lower-half of a mannequin so the mannequin, rather than a person, would pedal the bike.

Yes, you read that correctly—the problem with wind tunnel tests is that they’re not like real life, so we replaced a real life person with a torso-less pair of mechanical legs. Does its motion churn the surrounding air like a real human set of legs? Are its proportions correct? What about foot position—idealized by biomechanics, or average observed foot position of pro riders? These are questions Speedplay didn’t feel like addressing.

At any rate, Speedplay’s use of de-torsoed legs in means that the results—in the unit-less and not particularly useful form of coefficient of drag—apply only to this mannequin. When this bodiless apparatus is wears shoes with 4-bolt-mounted Speedplays, that coefficient is .237.

However, Biomechanics and Biology of Movement found that “a cyclist on a standard road bike in racing position” has a drag coefficient of 0.78. That 200% increase reflects all the things Speedplay’s disembodied legs left out of their results.

So what appeared to be a small difference in coefficient of drag—2.5%—is actually an all-but-insignificant 0.7%*. And even that minor change requires to you have faith in the reliability of Speedplay’s procedures. Measuring drag coefficient to three significant digits—the finest measure available from the wind tunnel if Speedplay’s videos are any indication—and coming away with a single thousandth of variation invites far closer scrutiny of the study.

Sadly, Speedplay states only that the tests ran for five minutes, at a cadence of 100 rpm, and a headwind of 30mph. Data on number of trials for each pedal design, and variation in wind speed during the course of each trial would be more than welcome, but are entirely lacking.

Speedplay offers similarly little help in saying exactly what “available data” lead them to infer that the advantage to their pedal is “equivalent to the speed gained when switching from a standard front wheel to a deep-profile, aerodynamic front wheel.” The only data I could find using coefficient of drag were from Greenwell, which describes aero wheel advantages roughly two to ten times more pronounced than anything measured by Speedplay in this testing.

So, Speedplay—as far as I can tell, you’re lying to sell more gear. You certainly wouldn’t be the only ones. But I’d hate to stand here casting such aspersions without giving you a chance explain or clarify your findings.

I want to see the precise data behind this test—with detailed descriptions of apparatus, methods, and raw results. I’d also like to know the names and qualifications of those who designed and carried out this test. Finally, I’d like to see what research you used to conclude that, based on the data in this test, Speedplay pedals deliver such marked aerodynamic savings.

My request for this data is genuine. Readers and tech editors alike will tell you I’m receptive to criticism and more than willing publish your response.

*actually, I’m told that the increased surface area of a full-sized rider would make the coefficient of drag an even less relevant than the absolute value I’ve derived here.

Related posts:

1. Breaking Down the Voigt Crash
2. That’s Not What I Call Data.
3. Vino Strikes Back – News