I don’t record anything so the only good metric I have is:
- Bikepacking trips: 7
My loose goal is to do one a month. One trip was two nights so I could call it 8 and that’s pretty good considering the endless winter we had. 6 of the trips were in the Black Rock desert, and then we snuck in one last one in the Pine Nuts.
I got to ride bikes in Japan for a week so that’s worth something.
Next, a tale in numbers:
- Frames built: 1
- Crank lengths tried: 6
- New saddles: 6
- Frames in the queue for 2024: 3-5
This story starts back with a very progressive hardtail frame I built where I exaggerated everything. I never clicked with it since I don’t have the right type of dumb terrain here. I cut off the head tube and reattached it to reign in the reach and head tube but it still wasn’t working. It sat until I got the singlespeed bug again so I built it up but set up the bars really short and tall and the bike was kind of fun for once. One other irritating aspect of the geometry popped up: the super steep seat tube meant my XC saddle hit the back of my thighs when I climbed out of the saddle. Solution: the WTB Koda.
The Koda is the first saddle I put any time on that has any kind of cutout action. I’ve always ridden very traditional saddles and haven’t had any comfort problems with them. But dang this saddle felt great! I noticed I could ride with my back flatter or something. I bought another and put it on the only frame I built this year, the latest iteration of my gravel bike, which flirted with a steepish seat angle to open my hips.
Around this time I discovered a cadre of bike fitters that were bored at the beginning of the pandemic and started podcasts. Their approaches to fitting was so much more than trying to fit numbers and was deeply based on what the body was doing. And all of them - Colby Pearce, Greg Choat, Chris Balser, and Neil Stansbury, swore by those SMP saddles. They explained how the SMP supports your pubic bone and lets you rotate your pelvis forwards. On one long gravel ride it then clicked that I had spent the last 35 years of riding rolling my hips back to try to unweight my soft tissue and sit on my sit bones. The Koda gave me room to get a straighter back and sit slighly forwards of my sit bones, but I wanted more, so that led to some SQLabs with the funky step (better), and then I capitulated and started grabbing SMPs and I ain’t going back even though they’re ugly and expensive.
Meanwhile, as part of the podcast binge I also kept hearing that saddles are chronically too high and riders can lose control of their feet across the bottom of the stroke, so I started experimenting and paying close attention and what do you know, my left foot wasn’t staying in contact and I was compensating with my right rectus femoris to “kick” the pedals across the dead spot. That overworked rec fem has been a chronic problem and now I know why. So my saddle came down 2cm probably by the end. My hips were super stable and planted and climbing power felt way better.
Of course it didn’t stop there. 2023 was the year of Short Cranks. Everyone kept talking about going shorter. But I’m pretty tall, and even the 20% rule which runs shorter than other equations puts me on 175s, which is what I ran everywhere except the singlespeed which had 180s. Back in the Golden Age of Singlespeed, I was sold on 180s, but at about that time Jeff Jones was blogging on going shorter. The general physics of it all suggests its all ratios so if you drop your crank length you can drop your gear to keep the force the same and your cadence goes up a little to compensate. So I did that and ran 170s with the same gain ratio for a year, and that year sucked. Climbing was much harder. I figured that the higher cadence meant you had to do more core work stabilizing from one power stroke to the other and that ended up wasting extra energy.
In the following years, I’d try 170s on my geared bikes every now and then but always hated them, something just felt wrong. But this year not only could I not escape the message, the numbers for what constituted short had shifted. It’s undeniable that 5mm out of 175mm is a tiny percentage and the short-crank-aware fitters were recommending you drop 10mm to really notice things. And after the lesson of “maybe you shouldn’t have tried a cutout saddle sooner even though you think you don’t need it” I figured I should give short cranks a second chance.
So I binged on eBay and AliExpress and added 165s, 160s, and 155s to the mix. I started with the 165s on my trail bike and they were… pretty good? Maybe the 170s were too close to the 175s, while the 165s were 1 gear’s worth of change on the cassette keeping the general feel the same? The biggest thing I noticed is that climbing loose stuff it seemed like I was making more, smaller “bets” on traction. I then tried the 160s and the 155s, but they felt too weird. While the 165s disappeared after 10 minutes, the shorter cranks felt unnervingly short.
In all this crankset swapping, my bikepacking bike ended up without cranks. I tossed on the 180s, figuring they’d be good for low cadence noodling around in the desert, but now the 180s felt like jumping over hurdles. I had trip coming up in a few days so I put on the 160s instead. This trip was a rendezvous at “Meteor Camp”, an annual meteor shower campout in the Black Rock. The other bikepackers met up in the morning to ride out, but I didn’t want to sit around in the heat all day so I rode out just after sunset. Riding across the flat playa in the dark there’s not much outside stimulus so there’s lots of room to listen to your body, and surprisingly it felt GOOD. I was flying and my legs just wouldn’t fatigue. The 160s felt normal, even natural. These same cranks felt dumb a week ago, and this is the part of the story where bikes were ruined for me and I’ve never been happier.
You see, I built the bikepacking frame with a 71 degree seat angle so you could be upright and balanced. This was counter to my gravel frames that had 74ish seat angles so I could get over the pedals and open up my hips. With the 160s I also opened up my hip angle. With the SMP I could flatten my back into the extra hip space, and I room to run the saddle slightly low to get good power and foot control without it it feeling “low” across the top of the stroke.
Thanks to my podcast crash course I had a good idea what was going on - I was using my glutes - a nice big durable muscle - now conveniently getting preloaded by my low flat rotated back. Pedaling wasn’t pushing with my quads so much as just thinking about moving my knees down. On the next trip, two days with bigger miles and elevations, I again felt like I could pedal all day. I kept pedaling away from my trip partner even though we’re usually well matched. I asked him at one point if he was feeling OK, and he quizzically replied “what do you mean, we’re making great time”.
Next question was how this could work on my gravel bike. I put the 155s on in place of 175s and it felt kind of dumb for an hour, but in scootching around something promising was there if I could get the position right. Based on the bikepacking bike I knew I had to move back and luckily the SMP has massive rails so it got slammed back and I dropped the stem length 2cm. The short cranks started to “click” as I fined-tuned things but there was a new problem: the bike now handled like shit with my weight slammed back. The bike was designed around a much more forwards position and didn’t have enough weight on the front end.
While riding it I was brainstorming how I could keep the weight distribution and stem length the same on a theoretical new frame with a slacker seat angle, when I realized if I could move the bottom bracket forwards I would get a slacker seat angle without significantly changing my weight distribution. That led to this:
Two months later: no regrets. Still riding it, still loving it.
I took it up a local climb that previous to the modifications I would have ridden on 175s with a 38 ring and 11-46 cassette. With the 155s, I never got around to dropping the front ring to compensate for the shorter cranks, plus the only cassette I had in the box is an 11-42. In other words, a 20% loss in leverage. I went up the climb and it felt like one of the easiest efforts I’ve ever put it on it.
I’m not sure I can go back. But now that means all my other frames have seat tube angles that feel too steep and quad-dominant. So I guess that means new fatbike, trail, and gravel frames for 2024. You keep learning, I guess.
So it’s been a “hollow bone” year. I’ve been riding bikes for almost 40 years, building frames for 20, arguing with bike nerds on the internet since USENET, visited titanium mills deep in China, and this year I feel like I’ve had to throw it all out. Bike geometry now is tiresome, I roll my eyes about every little 1/2 degree change. What’s interesting is the rider. And 2023 has been quite the ride.