It's All About The Bike

I just finished a pretty good book by Robert Penn It's All About The Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness On Two Wheels. The title plays off Lance Armstrong's book.

I say it's a pretty good book and if you ask me later I might say it's even better. It did leave me wanting more. I don't know if that's because it could have been written better or it was written so subtly that I wanted to read more of it.

In any case, Penn constructed the book around an interesting premise. Namely, he goes about building his dream bike one component at a time. For example, he employs a well-respected English handmade builder to construct the frame, then uses that experience as an opportunity to give a little history of frame making. He goes to California and rides with the inventors of the mountain bike as he discusses wheel construction. He visits a German tire factory and so on.

The two main things I took away from the book regarded steel frames and wheel choice.

As I suspected, steel is really the best platform for a bicycle frame. My cromoly Nishiki Colorado mountain bike was comfortable all day long, and mind you back in the '90s nobody had ever heard of front suspension. I'm still dubious about the need for front suspension, but then I guess I'm just Old School. Then there was the Schwinn Continental that got me through high school and most of college. The ubiquitous ten-speed. Black with gold lettering. Shifters on the top tube. Drop bars. The real deal. God I would give anything to have that bike back. I have no idea what happened to it. It's probably somewhere in Columbia, Mo., or - perish the thought - in a Boone County landfill. There were bikes before that, most notably a Schwinn Stingray with banana seat that saw a lot of action on the dirt trails behind The Barstow School when it was still a bean field, but none were a sexy and memorable as that Continental.

Someday I might buy a dream bike - a sleek carbon fiber race bike - but for everyday riding and touring my next steeds will be steel. Aluminum has its merits, but steel is the real thing.

The other thing I took away was the importance of decent, correctly configured wheels. Wheels and tires are the single most important decision one has to make in order to have the bike they want and need and will ride for hour after hour, day after day, and still be happy. I'm a big guy. I am a Clydesdale. I need 36 spokes on my rear wheel and I probably need those spokes built in a three-cross pattern. Currently I have a two-cross, 32 spoke set-up and it goes out of true almost weekly. Of course losing weight will help, but, I'll always need a little something extra back there.

This is the set-up I've come up with:

• Tires: Continental GP4000S. Either 23mm or 25mm.
• Rims DT Swiss TK540 36h rear/32h front. I am not at the point I need sleek wheels.
• Spokes: Three-cross rear, two cross front.