Finally.. she rides!
After a stack of confusion surrounding Mavic freehubs mating to Shimano cassettes (fscking proprietary wheels needed a ?2.50 spacer!), two weeks of a stinkin’ snotty cold (the saga continues), an MRI, too much work and some house-hunting, the Ribble was finally on the road today!!
Immediately noticeable: I’ve been riding fixed gear for the last few months, but I know that on this bike, I can coast. The result is a very odd feeling of waiting for the pedals to kick you into your pedal stroke.. but they don’t. The handling is quite a bit different too, as I’m going from 54cm top-tube with 80mm stem track bike to a 58cm top-tube with 100mm stem road bike. The bars are heaps chunkier and overall it feels like I’ve moved from a VW Golf to a Land Rover – the bike just feels “big”.
The gears were not adjusted this morning so I dropped the chain and suffered a bit of clicking and slow changes but tonight I spent some time in the bike room at work tweaking the gears and on the way home the shifting was crisp perfection!
It was odd but when riding through peak hour on the road bike I was much more cautious than on the fixie. I actually missed the ability to slow the bike down with my legs. “What’s this? I have to use the brakes??”
Perhaps it was tonight’s rain or perhaps it’s because I’m babying a new(ish) bike but I felt much more comfortable lane-splitting and sh1t on the track bike – maybe the Ribble’s wider bars put me off or the apparent ‘loss of control’ without leg brakes, or the fact I’m riding SPD-SL again and not SPD?
Big thanks to my lovely Mum for sending my beautiful black carbon SPD-SL shoes over.
Speaking of shoes, the stiff soles of the road shoes (I’ve been riding my old Nike MTB SPDs for 18 months) combined with the much stiffer frame and freshness of the setup made for a blast of a ride once out of W1/W2 traffic hell. This bike feels so damn solid and just rockets along! I’m sure it’s like when a climber gets a new, lighter, bike – I had the same feeling of speed, power and efficiency on the flat.. nothing was going to waste. Woo! Not long now and I’ll probably be getting my arse handed to me by some hardened pommie racer types..
