My commute was 25 miles each way, 1400 feet (426m) of ascent each way, with no transit option. Last winter, a surprise blizzard rolled in during the week. My ride home took me 2.5 hours, rather than my usual 1:40, but I managed to stay upright the whole ride despite riding on slicks. Fixies and foul weather, better together!
Fixie people are special sort of cyclists 😅
That’s one way to put it. I tend to use much less kind language to describe my own… bike quirks. :D
Don’t want to be rude but I’d probably agree lmao
Slipping around on a fixie is very fun… never dealt with ice though… only mud on 23c
I can’t suffer even pavement with 23c, my comfort zone starts at 2.2" width
Would it be bragging to say that I ride a saddle with zero padding? :D Most of my tires are 32mm or smaller, although I prefer around 35mm. My gravel build is in progress, and that’s going to have super plush 40mm tires.
Two ways of no padding for your saddle: material that gives (Brooks leather, rubber, etc) or you have a rock for a butt.
You have my respect, crazy person :D
I’m running 120/140mm travel, 2.4" tires AND padded shorts on my trail bike for all day rides
It is single speed though, so I do kinda get the masochistic urges
I picked up a set of Schwalbe Snow Stud tires for winter. They are excellent.
1:40 back and forth with a fixie every day ? Damn.
Climbs like a mountain lion, descends like a brick. My average speed over distance was 1.9 MPH faster on the fixie than on my geared road bike, even with the severely capped top speed. Also a lot cheaper to maintain given the 250 miles per week.
I’ve been fixie-curious for a while now but haven’t jumped on board yet because I only really have space for one bike. I’ve never ridden a fixie but it seems like a lot of fun. I like my gears and I use my bike for everything from commuting to long distance to short bikepacking overnights so the gears are very nice. But I don’t know, there’s something about fixies that just calls to me.
I was a hater since I gave up my training wheels at four years old. “Bicycles can coast?!”
On my bike rides home from work, I would frequently stop in at the LBS a few blocks from my house and have a pint with them. Then in 2009, the bike shop got in the new model of the Kona Paddy Wagon, and I thought it was sexy AF; too bad it was a fixie. The shop manager offered to buy my next beer if I gave the fixie a try, but I was determined to continue being contemptuous. So just to placate them, I went for a spin.
I wasn’t even out of the parking lot, and I knew I was buying this bike. I paid for it on the spot, and one of them employees offered to drop it off for. I was hooked.
Fixies are indeed fun. The simplicity, to me, is the bicycle distilled to its purest form. If one’s rides involve a lot of foul weather commuting, a fixie seriously reduces maintenance cost and time. I also like my gears, 3x9 being my absolute favorite. If my road bike can’t have ridiculous gear range with a 17 gear-inch wall climber, it ain’t no bike of mine! But a fixie is something different.
The inertia carries the drivetrain over top dead center. So climbing huge hills becomes waaaay easier than one might imagine. It might take a bit of iteration to get your gearing dialed for your terrain and to optimize skip patches. But then you’re dialed.
I have used my fixie for brevets up to 400km, credit card tours, and even two ultralight bike tours. Most days, I have to carry too much work and errand stuff to fit on a road bike, so I’m usually on my cargo bike these days.
You’re really making it sound tempting, I may have to just get one and send it
Fixiers are just built different, I guess.
Make sure to melt all that off and regrease the chain before rust sets in!
I went through two chains and a set of rotors this winter due to ice and salt.
Psssh. That chain got nothing and liked it! :D Okay, in all honesty, I would clean and lube the chain when it started making noise. But I would run it down until the chainring and cog were nubbins. Then swap in some new cheap replacement bits every two years or so.
Ice, sand, and salt separately are magical kryptonite to bike bits. Together, they are an anti-bicycle Voltron. There’s a very popular trail where I live and the surface is mostly a super fine rock dust that absolutely chews up bicycles. It’s so uncannily destructive that it defies comprehension.
Salt, ice, and unsealed bottom bracket: creaking every 2-3 weeks!
Cartridge bottom brackets FTW. Shimano no longer makes the UN-54/UN-55, but that was my goto for a very long time. Costs about $16USD and lasts forever. One of my bikes had over 100000 miles/160000km on a single UN-54. That bike saw it all: flooding (immersion), salt, ice, rain, neglect, and “Star Wars Ep 1.” It was still smooth and solid when I sold that bike.
I learned the hard way this winter to store my bike indoors instead of in my barn so that the ice can melt between uses. I don’t think I’ll go through parts as quickly next year now that I’ve got a better game plan.
Last winter was so much easier because we didn’t have stretches of months at a time below freezing, and weeks at a time below saline freezing.
That’s an awesome picture. Did all the ice built up on the spokes affect things?
Thanks! Not nearly as much as I would have suspected. Sure, the rim brakes were useless, but that’s a non-issue on a fixie. There was absolutely no touching the front brake in those conditions anyway. And the drivetrain just grinds up whatever gets in there. I expected at least one fender to get packed up, but I suspect the slicks also made a nothing burger of that.
Does it require lot of leg strength to keep your speed in check while descending 426m, especially if you can’t touch the brake levers? What if the lactate sets in, does the bike just spin your legs until they tear off?
My fixie has brakes, so for me, less strength than JRA. On my snowy ride, stopping the cranks took no effort at all. But keeping the wheels turning acts as a kind of traction control: if the cranks suddenly require less effort, that tells me there’s an icy patch under the snow and I need to be extra careful. That surprise blizzard was my very first snow commute where I didn’t fall. It was also my first time doing a snow ride on my fixie. Not getting a bunch of speed in the first place helps a bunch.
Now, if you’re asking about riding in dry conditions, let 'er rip. I can spin comfortably up to 135 RPM, and have gone up to ~150 RPM with A LOT of pucker. Usually, when descents got to 135, I would take my feet out of the pedals, which is its own kind of bad idea.
More or less…
Ideally you should be resisting with your legs on downhills to control your speed before it gets to that point though
