livedarklions

There's a tendency to lump hybrids together like they're all for casual path riding, but the fitness category really is a good road bike flat bar setup.
The FX 3 I had had a really far forward body position for a flat bar. I didn't find maintaining the body position over distance difficult at all. The only real problem for distance was the lack of alternative hand positions.

tomato coupe

Ummmm ... that is what Kingston is talking about. His 3x setup does this better than his 2x setup when he's riding 400k at a 25 kph average.

indyfabz

Thanks. I once risked a lot to put myself in a position that panned out like I hoped it would and allowed me to take a lot of time off and delve into the touring world in ‘99 and ‘00. Then I got my former job back and drifted away from the activity for a long time as I returned to a more conventional lifestyle, eventually picking it back up again in ‘08 after nothing but road riding (including some supported tours). The pendulum has definitely swung back towards loaded touring. These days, I try to take one two-week tour, one one-week tour and three or four long weekend trips every year. But I still find time to ride my super fly, custom ti road machine with a 2x.

BTW…Being a regular contributor to the Addiction thread and the Touring forum tends to inflate one’s post count. The latter often results in a lot of follow up questions about subjects such as routes and logistics.

tomato coupe

For the same reason they can't understand that other people ride at different speeds in different conditions -- they can't see outside their own little bubble.

livedarklions

I feel like you were making your point well right up until the "noodling around" thing which seems to denigrate other kinds of riding.

Honest question-- why does an interval require a specific gear? Can't you run yourself ragged in just about any gear? It'll just be at different speeds. Not trying to argue with you, I just don't get that one.

SpeedyBlueBiker

Yes, much easier to ride at a very slow pace than try to wrestle a fully loaded touring bike/mountain bike/etc up a steep unpaved incline. Especially more difficult if you are wearing some type of cleated bike shoe.

livedarklions

Also, the motors are definitely not standard issue, so one can have a completely different way of approaching the same terrain. As Maelochs notes, he might ride the same terrain differently on consecutive days.

hubcyclist

question wasn’t for me but I’ll answer. Intervals can require specific gears, like if I’m doing a workout where I’m trying to average 265w on an interval, I may sometimes find one gear requires me to spin way faster than I really want to to get to the target power, so a bit too easy of a gear, but the next higher gear on my 8 speed road bike could have me with a lower cadence than I like to maintain. It’s not always, but sometimes there’s a desire to have a tighter range to dial in the right combo of power and cadence.

indyfabz

I pulled muscles in my foot back in September while pushing up a steep section of paved road. About.62 miles that averaged over 12%. I was near the end of a two-week tour and didn’t have the legs at that point. I was wearing shoes with recessed SPD cleats. I did not push the entire .62 mules but still messed up my foot. Too much potential traffic to “deliver the paper.” Pushing a loaded bike really sucks.

WhyFi

A lot of people that train do polarized training and spend most of their time on a bike noodling around (80/20, is very common). I'm a fantastic and frequent noodler and take no offense to my statement.

As far as running yourself ragged in any gear, but at different speeds... no, not quite. Assuming flat terrain and consistent position, traveling at a certain speed is going to require a specific amount of power regardless of gearing and cadence, whether that's high torque and low cadence or low torque and high cadence or anywhere in between. The important this is that if you change the speed, you change the power requirements and are no longer hitting the prescribed interval.

While lower intensity intervals (sweet spot/quasi-noodling) can give you a lot of leeway in selecting a balance between torque and cadence, intervals at/above threshold can, and often should, by design, tax your system as a whole, musculature and cardio, to a point close to failure. Imagine a flat ground speed that's doable but challenging for you to hold for 5 minutes... and then do it 5 times in a row with a minute of rest between each effort. By the middle of the third effort, you should be absolutely preoccupied with monitoring and debating whether your legs hurt more than your lungs burn, and that's where tight gearing comes in. If you can actually go to a cog that's either two teeth smaller or two teeth larger, and still complete the series of intervals, then you're probably going too easy and you need to up the intensity.

grindher

High end hybrid?

Maelochs

Yes .... same difficulty I noticed on my aggressively set-up Bridgestone (which was considered an MTB back in the day, but would now be considered a "hybrid.")

The hand position is the Only thing making a flat-bar bike, per se, harder to ride on really long rides. Otherwise it is no different than a drop-bar bike.

And no, not everyone who buys a hybrid rides less than 30 miles at a clip. You and I think also Canklecat both did really long rides on hybrids .... but again, you would be exceptions to the norm. Not every hybrid has tall riser bars, a sofa saddle, flat plastic pedals, and a basket in front .... or a radio, a cup-holder on the bars, streamers, whatever. Some are used for serious urban commuting, where low-travel shocks and and a slightly more upright stance improve performance and safety. But I maintain my claim that Most hybrid buyers are not looking for peak performance or long distance.

I think the language used to market these bikes and the fact that manufacturers never stress how light the bikes are, shows that the manufacturers pretty much know the general audience for the product. "Comfort" and "a wide range of gears to handle any terrain" are generally marketing terms associated only with hybrid bikes and luxury SUVs.

IMO.

HTupolev

Tight gear spacing isn't about staying within a narrow cadence range. It's about being able to fine-tune your torque and cadence to whatever your legs currently want. You can leverage that to maintain constant cadence within a narrow range of variation, but nobody actually rides like this except for newbies who are staring at their cadence sensor because an "expert" rider they know told them to hold a certain cadence.

Actually...

...group rides are a great example of where multiple gears are useful because they allow you to change cadence. Even when gradually rotating through a steady paceline on the flats, it's usually beneficial to have slightly lower gearing during a pull (slightly increase cadence when you have to increase power so that you don't need to increase your pedaling torque very much) and slightly higher gearing when in the draft (improve recovery by reducing the amount of effort being spent turning the legs in circles).

It was often too big for the guys as well, not that they'd admit to it.

When was that?

Here are scans of a couple of advertisements for derailleur systems, from before the first world war, featuring big cogs of more than 30 teeth:
https://www.disraeligears.co.uk/site...11_scan_2.html
https://www.disraeligears.co.uk/site...l_d_arlay.html
Here's a bicycle from 1947 featuring a double crankset with chainrings of 40-24 or thereabouts:
https://janheine.files.wordpress.com...sech1147_0.jpg

wolfchild

It doesn't require any specific gear and it doesn't require multiple gears...Intervals can be done on a singlespeed or fixed gear and you can choose whatever gear ratio you want..

GhostRider62

Honest questions?

1. Have you ever trained for competitive cycling races or events?

2. Have you done any research on training for cycling?

When you say "ragged", I take it that you have zero experience. Yet, others here have a lot of training experience and you challenge them. Here is my explanation.

Let's use the 1x 12 speed cassette. 10, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 24, 28, 32, 38, and 44T. Shifting between the 11 to the 13 is around 18% change. In those gears and on the flats, almost all of the resistance to be overcome is the wind and the power to increase speed rises to the cubic of power. This means the effective differential between the 11 and 13 cog is much, much higher and more noticeable than a mere 18% due to aerodynamic drag. WRT to physiology, certain muscle types and training effects are more effective at certain cadences. At noodle speeds, the wind and frictional forces are about equal and for those who ride in the 10-15 mph range, you just can't understand what I am saying.

Maelochs

So .... I guess we have confirmed that the road 1x group is useless---except as a thread-starter .....

PeteHski

It depends how narrow you really "need" your road gearing to be. Somehow I manage to do all my interval training at specific power and cadence with both a compact double 2x11 and a 1x12 MTB. I'm about 90% sold on a road 1x13 at this point. I'm going to simulate it on my trainer over winter and see how I feel. I'm not foreseeing a problem to be honest. My only slight concern is the wider spacing at the mid-lower end of the cassette, but it doesn't bother me on my 1x MTB.

Maelochs

Lol ..... you don't ever need to worry about getting stabbed if you can always miss the point like that ... .....

I was just joking.

I wouldn't eve go for a road 1x because I am not a strong climber and even though I live in Flatahoma, there are ripples which require me to work a little .... and the jumps are too big for comfort.

Interval training isn't the issue. It is hills, wind, and the benefits I personally get from having more gear options.

PeteHski

LOL, I was 50/50 about whether or not you were joking!

For sure 1x is not for everyone on the road. But it is getting more feasible as new options trickle on to the market (like 1x13). Coming from a strong MTB background I've really come to appreciate the benefits of a 1x drivetrain and so I'm naturally keen to go that way on my road bike. But only if it works. FDs are nowhere near as much of a burden on road bikes as they were on MTBs.

As for 3x. Dead to me.

GhostRider62

Yes, 1x13 for everyone. How many cyclists can afford that bill of sale.

I'm converting one of my bikes to 12 speed etap and it is probably going to run me close to $4k

Maelochs

For $4K I would buy a bike that had it and swap the drive trains.

Jeff Neese

Sugino produces some very nice triples. I have the XD600 on two of my bikes.

livedarklions

My quibble with you is that you think the demand for the hybrids is shaping the marketing, and I think you're underestimating the extent that it's the other way around. The really low end producers seized on the "hybrid" label to the extent that the label has become synonymous with low performance bikes and the quality companies fled the label.

The concept of a flat bar road bike is and always has been sound, there are people who want to ride fast and/or far who are more comfortable with a flat bar, and I don't think that number is small. You now have the same concept being marketed as "flat bar road bikes" and, basically, as commuter bikes.

Not sure what your point was with this anyway. All I said is you really can't adequately describe the rise and fall of the demand for triples without discussing the rise and fall of the hybrid. What does that have to do with "peak performance or long distance?" News flash- the vast majority of all bicycle buyers aren't really interested in peak performance or long distance. It's a bf bias to write such people out of the conversation.

​​​​​​

badger1

Incorrect.

GhostRider62

Wow....show me a link. Closest I found was a former pro bike (not too bashed up) for $6500. Also, I don't buy the low end stuff because it wears out with heavy miles or heavy loads.