Originally Posted by
TMonk
I'm gonna present a dissenting opinion and state that I no longer enjoy riding SS/fixed on open road or trail. I sold my Wabi about 6 months ago as well for this reason, big sad. My background is a competitive road and track cyclist of 15 years that flirts with dirt sometimes, although nearly all of my MTB riding is purely recreational.
For me, I just don't enjoy having the terrain be the deciding factor in my effort. I like to use gears to be in control of my output and shift up or down to suit the cadence and power that I wish to produce at the time. I get the whole-body arguments above, and riding SS/FG "in the wild" is a good way to do that. I take care of that stuff with some strength and core exercises that I do at home, off the bike.
I started riding fixed in a more urban capacity in college and began road racing shortly after that. After all this time, my SS/FG riding may be limited to track and that is OK with me. I do still enjoy the culture, aesthetic and general vibe of SS/FG riding outside of track racing, and understand the sentiments above. It's just not for me. I am an elite level road racer and my opinion is that riding SS/FG on open road and trail is too hard! Y'all are badasses.
I rode my last fix gear Cycle Oregon two months ago. A week of 450 miles, 30,000' of climbing. I changed gear ratios a lot but this was my Peter Mooney with its standard late '80s horizontal Campy dropouts. I'm 69 years old and have know for more than a decade I cannot and should not even try to do the climbs and descents I used to do on 42-17. The bike of my avatar photo has such a long dropout I can (and have) run cogs from 12 to 24. For the Mooney, I made a triple 1/8" crankset, 46-42-36 and set up a two-sided hub with 21-17 on one side and whatever tiny cog I felt like that day. (And sometimes carried 24 also.)
So it can be argued my fix gear ride wasn't "pure". But I did have to stop and cool down every time I changed gears so it was now free ride. And it was hard. Two of the seven days were hard to the bone, days 5 and 7. I was totally done after. Riding to use my new found form? I wanted no part of getting on a bike and forced myself to go for a few rides to not have my muscles and joints freeze up. (I also wanted to/needed to rest up my groin pull I got trying to lug my downhill gear up a small hill back in June trying to boost my strength. Spent the next two months doing the balancing act of resting the groin pull and riding the required training including hard fix gear hills. I don't think I could have pulled this off much better but it took its toll.)
I wasn't given the gift of a body that could be an elite racer. Raced three seasons. Ended as a 2 and I could have gotten better but not a lot (though I could have gotten a lot smarter!) Now, had Cat 2 3-week mountain stage races existed, that would have been an achievable podium. GC would be a long shot but mountain? A challenge I would have loved.
Instead, I have ridden road fix gears ever since those racing days with the road deciding my effort slowly tapering off on the really hard climbs as I aged until I had my avatar built 11 years ago. Fell back in love with the fix gear. I now have three (and rarely ride my workhorse winter/rain/city one ratio only bike. Many of my rides now are flattish and I run two cogs a tooth apart. That love is still there, even if I'm aging. And those two rides? My old Peter Mooney which is completely at its best as a fix gear and the ti TiCycles which is a high end 1980s race bike for a fictional world that never invented gears. Two sweet (and quite different!) rides.