offtrail.guru

The last time my wife and I traveled was in October 2017. We drove to Nice to meet an American friend who happened to spend a few days there. We used the trip to Nice to visit a bunch of wineries in the Rhône Valley. On the way back, we crossed the border into Italy for a winery tour through the Piedmont region. A drive across the Great St Bernard pass brought us back to Switzerland. We have not spent any vacations abroad or within Switzerland since. Seeing how one natural disaster is following the next on our ever-hotter planet, who can still travel with a good conscience today? Travel by air or by car is a luxury only a few on this planet can even afford. It’s a First World luxury and not a necessity. For a healthier planet and the future of generations to come, we should honestly do without.

As climate change is lengthening summers and making them frighteningly hotter, summers for cyclists or anyone else exercising outdoors, for that matter, are already getting a lot shorter. The two heatwaves that hit Switzerland's northern half shortened my 2023 summer cycling already by a whole month in which I was off the bike. In those four weeks, I didn’t exercise at all and spent little time outdoors. I only caught a bit of fresh air, if one can even call it "fresh" when I sat under our sun shades on the balcony with my laptop and a cold Lagunitas IPA. Instead of hitting the road or climbing trails, weekends were spent inside watching Netflix or Apple TV.

With a fleet of six bikes, of which three are surface-agnostic SUBs, commonly better known as gravel, all-road, or adventure bikes, I didn’t need another one this year. But when I first spotted the Marin Gestalt X10 last November, I knew I had to get one. The bike is slacker than my FortyFour mountain bikes, with a 67.5º head angle. Reach is 63mm longer than my Nordest Albarda and 68mm longer than my Volagi Viaje. The Gestalt’s wheelbase is 95mm greater than the Nordest and an enormous 124mm more than the Volagi. It’s a massively different bike. And that’s the reason I bought one. Some time down the road, I’d love to design the perfect SUB frame for myself. It only makes sense to go down that path with years of cycling under one’s belt, which I have, and countless hours spent on a wide range of bikes. And that one can never have enough.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it - If something is reasonably successful or effective, there is no need to change it. German speakers would say “Bewährtes soll man nicht verändern.” When it comes to cycling, most of us often stick to that. We ride something, like it, and we’re therefore rarely willing to change it. I have for a long time ridden the same type of road bike. There were incremental changes such as more gears and lighter and more aero frames, but in the grand scheme of things, these improvements weren’t all that world-shattering. That changed with my first Volagi Viaje. I started exploring things outside what is considered a “road bike.”

The bikes I ride on pavement or gravel are more than road, all-road, or gravel bikes. They are efficient, practical, surface-agnostic bikes that bridge the functionality gap between road and off-road. In this post, I want to look at the geometry of the bikes I have ridden in the last nine years.