Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 5 2021 i Bicycling

JACKIE MAUTNER FRAME BUILDERS, P.44 A great bike is any bike you love so much that when you’re not on it, you daydream about riding it, and when you are on it, you’re having so much fun that it’s the last thing on your mind. ALSO: Don’t overpay for tubes! Patching a tube costs you a fraction of the price of a new tube and keeps a tube out of the landfill. You could put the money you save from not buying new tubes toward better tires—or anything else your heart desires!…

I knew that by dedicating our cover to Justin Williams and calling him “the most important bike racer in the world,” I might be ridiculed as a racing ignoramus—I mean, just to start, how in the hell could I ignore the way van der Poel and van Vleuten and Pogačar and others are forging a new golden era in which to be considered one of the best you must excel at all kinds of races? But I said what I said about Williams. Because it’s true. As Carvell Wallace says in his story on Williams (p.24), the racer “has taken it upon himself to represent for every Black cyclist,” but also for “every marginalized rider, every person who has been told, ‘You don’t belong here.’” Inextricable from this ambition is…

If properly adjusted and maintained, your bike’s headset should be one of the most durable components on your bike. But ignoring this critical part can lead to premature wear, noise, poor handling, and even costly frame damage. The headset fits into the head tube of your bike frame and connects to the steerer tube of the fork so that it can freely rotate—enabling you to steer the bike. Much of the component is hidden from sight within the head tube, and you might be surprised to find out that it’s made up of numerous parts, as many as eight and often more. There are also two main types of headsets, threaded and threadless, with threadless headsets being more common. To learn more about how to maintain a bike’s headset, we…

WHAT DO YOU want the bike to do? This question is the basis of Jackie Mautner’s design philosophy. “Some people are looking for a Swiss Army bike that does everything and so does nothing very well,” she says. “It’s better to think of where you’re going to ride and what kind of riding you’ll do. That gives me the parameters to explore what details will give it that special touch.” Mautner’s philosophy is the result of a trajectory that began with drafting classes in high school followed by a degree in architecture, a custom-frame building course at the United Bike Institute, and then a job building bikes for Breadwinner in Portland, Oregon. Now she’s on her own with Untitled. Adjacent to that trajectory has been her progression from commuter and…

“HOW MANY WOMEN frame builders are there in the world who’ve got a background in occupational therapy?” It’s a rhetorical question, but Elizabeth Colebrook answers herself anyway. “I don’t think there are any.” In fact, Colebrook, 58, is probably the only one. And there’s little doubt that her background shaped her approach as an artisan builder. Colebrook started riding as a kid on a tricycle. “I just wanted freedom, she says, “and the bicycle is the first independent form of transport for a child.” At the age of 12, after splitting the cost of a new 3-speed with her parents, she promptly took the bike apart, painted it, then put it back together again. That was just the beginning. Later she went to art school, bought a bike from a…

Endurance athletes often obsess about carbs, and for good reason: Your body turns stored carbohydrates and glucose found in your muscles, liver, and brain into glycogen—and that’s what your body burns to fuel hard, high-intensity efforts. Glycogen also assists in the body’s fat-burning process. If you don’t have enough, your body breaks down muscle tissue and amino acids to make glucose—essentially eating itself to keep going. If you want to ride far and/or fast, you need at least some carbs. Your carb stores are also limited. You’ve only got about two hours’ worth of carbs stashed away—a stark contrast to the nearly endless supply of fat reserves we all have, even the leanest riders. So it’s in your best interest to become the best fat-burner you can be. That way,…

It’s been two decades since mountain bikers first started experimenting with tubeless-tire sealants. We’ve made it through the awkward early design phases, with questionable chemistry, limiting tire standards, and messy applications. And things are getting good: Sealants work, and you can find tubeless-ready wheels on bikes that cost as little as $1,000. Road tubeless still has some catching up to do, but expectations are high for mountain bike and gravel systems. With several good options now available, we devised a test to determine which ones worked best for most riders.…

PRICE: $4,800 / WEIGHT: 17.2 LB (54CM) WHEN THE $13,000 S-Works Aethos launched last fall, it wowed us with its clean lines, graceful ride, and incredibly light frame (585 grams). But the five-figure price tag put that stunning road bike out of reach for many riders. The latest Aethos to be added to the lineup, the Comp Rival eTap AXS, comes in at a more accessible, though admittedly still not cheap, $4,800. And though its frame (Specialized calls it the 10R) weighs 144 grams more than the S-Works model’s 12R frame, it is still one of the lightest in the world. It has the same stiffness, handling, and compliance properties, as well as the same minimalist profile and understated graphics, as the S-Works version. It even has something the 12R…

You’re ready to buy an e-bike. You’ve done your research. You’ve narrowed your choices. Now it’s time to decide. A close look at the numbers tells you how fast the bike goes, how long the battery will last, and how powerful the motor is. An even closer look reveals that two of the bikes on your list have identical motors, but one has a rating of 250 watts while the other has a rating of 750. Because an e-bike’s motor is rated in watts, you might be inclined to think that the higher the number, the more powerful the motor, and therefore, the more powerful the bike. Only it’s not that simple. Watts measure consumption, the rate at which energy is used. The more powerful the motor the more watts…

PRICE: $6,299 / WEIGHT: 53.4 LB (M) / CLASS: 1 / MAXIMUM TORQUE: 85NM / BATTERY SIZE: 630WH THE MARIN ALPINE Trail E2 is a dancing bear of a bike: big and heavy but all nimble and energetic on the trail. It has a coil-over shock, a Fox 38 fork, and a 63-degree head angle. But I can promise you—because it surprised the hell out of me—that the Alpine Trail E2 is more lively and agile, and more capable on flatter trails and climbs, than you’d expect from a bike with those specs. To be clear, this bike is built to fly downhill despite its relatively modest travel: 150mm (rear) and 160mm (front). It’s the stiff frame, slack geometry, superb Fox suspension, mixed wheel size, and relaxed geometry that make…

SWANEE RAVONISON FRAME BUILDERS, P.49 I put together my first bike when I was 10. It looked like a time-trial bike: The wheel in the front was smaller than the one behind. No gears, bullhorn handlebars, a new bike from old parts. When I was on that bike, I felt I was always going fast. ALSO: One of my best rides was not a race but a trip with my mountain bike and a friend to discover northern Madagascar, where I’m from. A race has never given me the same pleasure as riding to explore.…

TARA SEPLAVY SENIOR TEST EDITOR LOOKING PRO WHILE GOING SLOW PRODUCTS I’M USING RIGHT NOW 1 / Watr Bodl From $13 Quirky and cheeky bike bottles are good for a laugh. 2 / Velocio Lux Bib Shorts $279 These are my favorite for long days in the saddle. They fit super well, the chamois is plush, and you don’t have to remove your jersey for a nature break! 3 / Scott Foil Pro $9,000 It’s been making me ride like a grand tour stage winner during every lunch ride. GREATEST RIDE OF MY LIFE The first time I rode Whistler Bike Park with my son. It was so special to see him shredding and having fun on trails that hold lots of personal memories for me. DREAM RIDE PARTNER Chelsea…

CHRISTINE FENNESSY P.40 → Fennessy, whose work has been featured in Outside and The New York Times, spoke with six female bike builders on their role in pushing for representation in cycling. “Before talking with these builders, I never appreciated the patience, skill, and physicality it takes to construct a frame,” she says. “Their dedication is making the sport more accessible to more people.” CARVELL WALLACE P.24 → Wallace, who covers culture, sports, and race for such outlets as ESPN and The New York Times Magazine, spent time with Justin Williams, cofounder of the Los Angeles–based L39ION team and changemaker within American bike racing. “It was cool seeing Black people in my life and online pumped about cycling, especially after Tulsa Tough,” he says. “It was like having your friends…

FROM MARKETING TO MANUFACTURING, THE BUSINESS OF CYCLING HAS LONG BEEN OVERWHELMINGLY WHITE AND OVERWHELMINGLY MALE. But actual bike ridership reflects a different reality. The number of Black cyclists in the U.S. nearly doubled from 2010 to 2019, and the number of Latino cyclists rose 29 percent, according to a 2020 MRI-Simmons Spring survey. Over that same decade, white ridership grew by just 3 percent. New data from Strava Metro, which collects and contextualizes the app’s anonymized dataset, shows that in the U.S., women uploaded 47 percent more bike rides in 2020 than they did in 2019. In New York City, the number of women using bikes in 2020 increased by 82 percent over the previous year. Other major U.S. cities show a similar trend. The industry is still catching…

BACK WHEN HER main goal as a custom frame builder was to get as many people on bikes as she could, Megan Dean was cranking out 20 to 25 bikes a year. “That’s kind of what broke my hands down,” says Dean, 37. “It’s a lot of repetitive motion. Sometimes after working, I couldn’t hold onto anything with my right hand. I thought I was done for at one point.” She’s since dialed it back, right-sizing her business, Moth Attack (so named after a long-ago kitchen infestation when she lived in Los Angeles). That move—plus a good chiropractor, a lot of ice, and switching to a mill to cut tubes—toned down the tendinitis that threatened her livelihood. Dean, who now lives in Tucson, began building frames full-time in 2009 after…

YOU CAN TRAIN WITHOUT ANY CARBS THE FACTS: You need carbs to survive and perform. You can’t stop eating all carbs and expect your body to continue to work efficiently, or you could end up undermining your training. You need 1.5 to 2.5 grams of carbs a day per pound of body weight just to maintain your glycogen stores, even on days when you’re not training more than an hour, says San Millán. YOU ONLY NEED CARBS BEFORE RACE DAY THE FACTS: If you train without carbs, and then add them back in before your big event, you’ll have an unhappy belly in a hurry. Because your gut adapts to absorb the fuel you typically put in, you need to train your stomach to process what you’ll eat on race…

Many popular sealants work the same way, by suspending small, solid particles in a liquid, usually latex. That liquid sloshes around the empty space between your tire and rim. There, it has two jobs. The first is to seal the tubeless system by filling minor gaps where your tire bead connects to your rim and coating the inside of your tire to prevent air from seeping out. The second is to repair small holes from sharp, pointy objects, like rocks or thorns. When a puncture occurs, the air pressure inside your tire pushes the sealant toward the hole. Then the suspended particles in the sealant provide surface area for the latex to coagulate around, helping it seal. Ideally, this happens with minimal air loss, and better yet, without the rider…

PRICE: $13,000 / WEIGHT: 49.7 LB. (S3) / CLASS: 1 / MAXIMUM TORQUE: 90NM / BATTERY SIZE: 700WH SPECIALIZED’S THIRD-GENERATION Levo Pro is the benchmark trail e-bike. While there are other great trail e-bikes, when you take into consideration the e-MTB experience as a whole—a bike’s battery range, features, system integration, ease of use, suspension, handling, and how well its motor performs—the Levo is more polished than anything else currently available. A big reason for that is because Specialized takes ownership of a lot of the e-bike components other brands farm out: It develops its own motors, software, user interface, and motor controls. This results in integration and features that no other e-bike has, such as a compact and highly functional display in the top tube, and Micro Tune, which…

DANIELLE SCHÖN FRAME BUILDERS, P.46 I’m a big numbers person. I need to know exactly how many kilometers left and meters to climb. I think it comes from boxing, when you need to make sure you have enough gas in the tank for the last round. Then I break it down into mental math: Okay, I’ve already ridden this far, so there’s only X amount left until the summit, which is only half of what I’ve already ridden—easy! ALSO: Wear what you want and ride where and what you want. There’s always going to be someone who has something to say about it, and if you’re enjoying yourself, then it really, truly doesn’t matter.…

DEREK BRAUN, 2 5 PARKVILLE, MISSOURI JUST PEDAL AND BREATHE CYCLING ACROSS THE POND While studying in Brighton, England, I’d skip the bus or train to join the few hundred other bike commuters. I loved it—but it could be exhausting. One day, pedaling home in high winds and rain, I sheltered beneath a bus stop to text a friend about the miserable commute. He responded: “Yeah, but someday you’ll miss this.” I suppose he was right. To this day, that five-mile commute in the blustery Brighton wind and rain was one of the hardest, but one of the most memorable, rides of my life. GREATEST CYCLING ACHIEVEMENT Nothing compares to the excitement I felt after rolling into Emporia, Kansas, under glowing orange skies as I conquered beating the sun on…

Cycling in hot weather comes with a whole set of challenges, including dehydration, which can lead to bonking, decreased performance, and sometimes serious heat-related illness. That said, a little bit of sunshine or humidity shouldn’t keep you off your bike. Here are five tips to help keep you cool when the mercury climbs. GET ACCLIMATED // “The biggest hot-weather mistake cyclists make is riding in the heat without preparation,” says Stacy Sims, Ph.D., a performance physiologist. If you don’t acclimate to hot-weather riding, you won’t reap as many benefits from your workout, and you’ll increase both your perceived effort and risk of injury. Ride early or late in the day when temperatures are the coolest, and use your down time to get used to the heat. PROTECT YOUR SKIN //…

THE INSTAGRAM POST WAS PROVOCATIVE, NO DOUBT. But also, Justin Williams is the kind of person who can’t resist the opportunity to talk a little shit. The caption on the photo posted by Criterium Nation announcing that sprinter Danny Estevez was joining Best Buddies Racing read: Williams, who cofounded the rival powerhouse team L39ION of Los Angeles in 2019 along with his youngest brother, Cory, hopped into the replies almost instantly: “It. Changes. Nothing.” Best Buddies rider Travis McCabe did not appreciate Williams’s audacity, and let it be known. What followed was a bizarrely specific thread 100 comments deep in which McCabe accused Williams of misrepresenting his achievements by wearing the Stars and Stripes jersey, and Williams accused McCabe of, essentially, whining about obscure distinctions that no one cares about,…

I JUST LIKE TO MAKE COOL THINGS. I WANT TO HAVE AN IDEA AND BUILD IT INTO A THING, WHETHER IT’S A PIECE OF FURNITURE OR A BICYCLE. DANIELLE SCHÖN HAS been making things since she was a kid. Her mom kept the bottom half of their kitchen pantry stocked with markers, glue, and construction paper, and pretty soon she was sending her creative kid to a neighbor’s house to learn how to sew—little bags first, then teddy bears and clothes. “I grew up with a single mother, so she was adamant about me learning how to do things myself, like, ‘If you learn how to sew, you don’t have to pay someone to fix your pants,’” says Schön, 32. “I remember being in the driveway and she’s showing me…

▶ SHORT RIDES Ride Duration: 1 hour or less Primary Concern: Fluid replenishment What to Drink: Plain water or a LOW-CARB, electrolyte hydration drink What to Eat: Most people start with enough stored energy for a 60-minute workout, but carry a banana just in case you need a boost. ▶ MEDIUM-LENGTH RIDES Ride Duration: 1 to 3 hours Primary Concern: Carbohydrate replenishment What to Drink: 2 bottles of low-carb, electrolyte hydration drinks, at least What to Eat: Aim to consume about 30 to 60 grams of carbs per hour from whole foods or ride snacks. ▶ LONG RIDES Ride Duration: 3 hours or more Primary Concern: Carbohydrate and electrolyte replenishment; avoiding food boredom or palette fatigue What to Drink: 1 bottle of low-carb, electrolyte hydration drink per hour What to…

PRICE: $6,999 / WEIGHT: 26.4 LB (M) / CLASS: 1 / MAXIMUM TORQUE: 40NM / BATTERY SIZE: 250WH IF A 3T Exploro RaceMax Boost slipped by, you might not even notice it’s an e-bike. That’s because 3T packaged the Boost’s e-bike components into the same carbon frame as the unpowered Exploro RaceMax. Only the oversize rear hub and the glowing button on the top tube give this bike away. Like the Cairn E-Adventure in this issue, this 3T is not an e-bike for the rider who wants to shoot up steep climbs at pro-racer speeds with minimal effort. This is a class-1 e-bike with a lower-powered (40Nm max torque) Mahle X35 hub motor. But lower power means a smaller and lighter motor and battery, which are some of the reasons…

PRICE: $999 / WEIGHT: 49.4 LB (MIDSTEP) / CLASS: 2 / MAXIMUM TORQUE: 50NM / BATTERY SIZE: 504WH THE MOST AFFORDABLE e-bike in Rad Power’s collection right now—and one of the most affordable e-bikes currently on the market—is the Rad-Mission 1, a city bike with commuter potential. For $999 you get a stripped down singlespeed that moves along at 20 mph with a throttle to help you get up to speed or to the top of punchy hills. The 27.5 x 1.95-inch-wide Kenda Kontact tires are slightly narrower than the 2-inch or wider tires we typically see on commuter e-bikes, but they were wide enough to feel speedy and provide comfort on pavement and bumpy bike paths. Aside from integrated lights and a bell, the RadMission remains fairly simple, which…

CLASS / Every e-bike falls into one of three classes. A class-1 e-bike tops out at 20 mph and has only pedal assist. Add a throttle, and a class-1 e-bike becomes a class-2. A class-3 e-bike’s pedal assist tops out at 28 mph. If a class-3 e-bike has a throttle, the throttle assist can’t exceed 20 mph. TORQUE / Measured in newton-meters (or Nm), torque is a rotational measurement of force—and the number to pay attention to when you want an idea of an e-bike motor’s output. More torque means more power off the line and more boost to your pedaling. The heavier the bike, the more torque it needs. Lighter road bikes typically have 30 to 40Nm of torque, trail and cargo models have at least 80Nm, and most…

PRICE: $4,152 / WEIGHT: 34.7 LB (M) / CLASS: 1 / MAXIMUM TORQUE: 55NM / BATTERY SIZE: 252WH IF YOU WANT a powerful and quick e-bike for keeping up with your buddies or getting to the top of a climb sweat-free, the Cairn E-Adventure isn’t it. This is a different sort of e-bike. This drop-bar bike wows with its versatility. It has fender mounts, rack mounts, dynamo routing, and three-pack mounts on each fork leg for attaching extra water bottle cages, cargo cages, or Cairn’s Range Extension Pack that lets you carry an extra battery for longer rides. The E-Adventure is available with 650b or 700c wheels, and maximum tire widths are 55mm and 45mm, respectively. The bike puts you in an endurance riding position—not race low, and not touring…