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We’re all familiar with the five stages of grief:
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
Well, the weather sucks here, and this is what I’ve been experiencing since the Great Apocalyptic Death Blizzard of Two Thousand Twenty and Six arrived this past weekend:
Denial: “It’s not gonna snow that much, they get this stuff wrong all the time.”
Anger: “It’s still snowing? This is BULLSHIT. What the hell happened to ‘climate change?’ According to Streetsblog it was never going to snow again!”
Bargaining: “I’m not getting a fat bike.”
Now I’m stuck between the fourth and fifth stages, those being Depression (“This sucks, life sucks, I hate it here”), and Acceptance (“Fuck it, I’m getting a fat bike”), jumping around on the Cassette of Emotion like an under-tensioned derailleur as I struggle in vain to adjust my mental barrel adjuster. Look, what do you want from me? Last time I checked it was six (6) degrees in American Freedom Units:
Plus there’s like a foot and a half of snow everywhere, and it’s not melting or getting washed away by rain anytime soon:
This means the best case scenario for the coming days is freezing out on the road for as long as I can stand it (if you pretend hard enough you can actually convince yourself that road salt is the Strade Bianche), interspersed with long periods of staring deep into the chasm of my own psyche. Is it not being able to ride that I dread so much? Or is it having to face myself? Do I simply love riding for riding’s sake? Or do I spend so much time riding because I’m desperately avoiding introspection and frantically fleeing from some fundamental truth that I’m unwilling and unable to confront? Sure, I tell myself that as I ride I’m reflecting and meditating and contemplating and all the rest of it, but maybe I’m just rationalizing my own escapism, blissed out on exercise-induced hormones and thus no better than the drunk passed out on the couch or the junkie on the nod. Maybe if I take some time off riding I’ll not only move into the “acceptance” phase but also get something done for once–you know, something actually important that has nothing to do with bikes, like financial planning or home improvement or grooming all those neglected body parts.
Either that, or maybe I should just get on a plane and go somewhere warm until May. Yeah, that sounds a lot better. I wonder what bike I should bring…
Speaking of barrel adjusters, if you really can’t stand them there’s always electronic shifting:
If I wasn’t depressed enough before, now I have to contend with the fact that I’ve dedicated my entire life to defending mechanical shifting from the electronic onslaught, and yet here’s some guy who without even trying has made perhaps the best case against electronic shifting that I’ve ever read:
Well, it was bound to happen to me eventually. My AXS battery died during a mountain bike ride, and I didn’t have a spare with me. With my derailleur stuck in second gear and a flat, ten-mile bike path ride home, I was stuck.
If only I could switch gears one more time, from second gear to something more reasonable, like ninth or tenth, I would make it home at a reasonable pace. Paul didn’t have a battery on his bike, and neither did Chris, who we happened to run into on the road just outside the trails. I only needed to borrow an AXS battery for a minute!
Ah yes, if only there were a bicycle drivetrain that was able to shift without any batteries at all. It would be like a perpetual motion machine! Sadly I don’t think we’ll ever see anything like that in our lifetimes.
And yes, I invented the concept of mechanical shifting all by myself, just like the author singlehandedly invented the term “MacGyver:”
Growing up, I was really into the TV show MacGyver, where the show’s titular character got himself out of every jam using whatever simple items he found around him. This was my chance to be just like MacGyver.
That’s pretty clever of him, I can see “MacGyver” really catching on as a verb.
Anyway, after figuring out how to power a derailleur with the world’s most annoying type of battery, he determines that (surprise!) it’s not practical:
Clearly, the better solution for bicycle components that are useless without batteries is…more more bicycle components that require batteries:
If you’re running a RockShox Reverb AXS dropper post, then you already have a backup AXS battery on your bike, which you could borrow to shift the bike into a proper gear. Or vice versa, if the dropper battery runs out and your post is stuck in the wrong position. I didn’t test the 9V trick on an AXS dropper post, but I imagine it would work too.
Imagine a battery-powered derailleur ruining your day and concluding that you also need a battery-powered seatpost. Amazing.
But I suppose it’s the consumer’s instinct to double down on foolish purchases that keeps the bicycle industry moving forward…though even that has limits:
Gravaa may sound like a gravel-specific version of Strava, but it’s actually a hub that automatically adjusts your tire pressure, and their bankruptcy is sad news indeed:
Here’s what happened:
So, we were a bit surprised to hear that Gravaa recently filed for bankruptcy. Unfortunately, it seems that just because something is a good idea and performs as intended doesn’t mean it’s destined for commercial success. While the Gravaa system has enjoyed publicity from its partnership with Team Visma Lease-a-Bike, the aforementioned victories, and has been on the market and available to consumers, it sounds like sales volume wasn’t quite high enough to keep the brand afloat.
In a statement from Gravaa’s Commercial Director, John Zopfi, he said, “To truly scale, two critical elements remained: a full tubeless setup and a lower price point. The tubeless setup was planned for launch in Q1. The lower price could only be achieved through volume. To reach volume, we needed to scale up. To scale up, we needed capital and firm commitments from potential volume customers.”
And here’s a Corporate-to-English translation of Commercial Director John Zopfi’s comments:
Nobody wanted to pay for our completely unnecessary product.
That’s too bad, because I really wanted to be able to use my hub battery when my derailleur battery dies.
