Measuring

I used to have a cyclocomputer, a not very fancy one. It told me how slow I was going. It gave me my average lack of speed, my top slowness and the paltry total distance I’d covered. I hated it.

Of course when I first affixed its magnet and wired its sensor, I was excited. So this is what 25mph feels like. So that’s how far it is from my house to the end of my second water bottle. All this new information was fascinating. I used it to formulate boasts to friends about how much further I was riding than they were and how much faster I had climbed this hill or descended that one. I used it to measure my progress from the chilly beginnings of spring to the stiff breezes of leaf strewn autumn. And on some level, I just accepted that this was part of the equipment, part of the way you rode a bike.

Last summer, Wired told me about the boom in personal metrics measurement. Suddenly this trend that cycling has been following for years was spreading and “booming.” People loved and felt inspired by statistics. And with the proliferation of devices from Garmin and others that would quantify your work in dozens of different ways and allow you to make bar charts and graphs and multicolored pie representations of your everyday grind, who could blame them?

Why generate sweat when you can generate stats?

One day, about two years after I’d purchased my first such device, I was struggling into a headwind up a false flat staring down at its digital readout. 14.1 mph. Grunt. Groan. 14.2 mph. Muttered curses. 14.3 mph. Pain. Strain. Incredulity. 14.1 mph. Back and forth like this for a few minutes, all the time with my head down, all the time bouncing between 14.1 and 14.3 mph, in other words, working hard for no real gain with my head down and a growing frustration.

At some point, I had a revelation. I reached down, unplugged the computer and slid it forward out of its bracket, depositing it in a jersey pocket, before lifting my head, seeing both the forest AND the trees and riding off on my merry, if deeply fatigued, way.

I realized in that moment that I had, at some point over the preceding years, ceased to ride my bicycle. I had begun to ride my computer, and, in the end, it had ended up riding me. I had stopped collecting experiences on my bike and resorted only to collecting statistics. Perhaps worst of all, I had stopped seeing where I was going. I was the computer. The computer was me.

Computers don’t ride bicycles. They compute.

It was shocking to me how much more I enjoyed riding once I stopped measuring my rides. I became more aware of my form and position on the bike. I live in a beautiful part of the country, and I began to see it. I got faster, if not in actual digital terms, then certainly in my heart, because I felt faster. I swore then to reaffix my computer only after deep and careful thought about what doing so would get me.

I’m not sure where that thing went. I think it’s in a box in the garage.

Obviously, I understand why professionals use these tools. They earn their living by generating large numbers. They tune their rides by percentage of max heart rate or by speed intervals or by sustaining specific efforts for specific periods of time. And of course, the tools have become more and more sophisticated. The simple measurements I was taking years ago don’t complete the basic functions on today’s most basic units. There are GPS and power meters. There is software to chart progress (or lack thereof) over days/weeks/months/years.

Clearly, racing cyclists of every category who want to get better will want to measure their workouts and most of them do. I can see that even casual cyclists take some great satisfaction from the accumulation of data. I might just live in that odd middle space where I am neither casual in my cycling, nor very much interested in racing. I suppose though, it matters what and whom you are racing.

A zen master once said, “When you are drinking tea, only drink tea,” and, for me, this applies to the bicycle as well. When I am riding my bike, I try only to ride my bike. I don’t concern myself with speed, fitness or progress. Those things are elusive. They come and go. When I ride, I become fit. I progress. I go fast. Except when I ride myself right out of fitness, speed and progress. The form dips and swerves. The consequences of my riding change and shift, but the riding is always there.

For me, measurement started as a curious and entertaining diversion, but ended as an obstacle. Somewhere along the fault line of the pro-hobbyist divide, technology and science have interceded. Those who wish to race, if not professionally, then certainly as the pros do, have followed them down the statistical path. It is, perhaps, a hobby within the hobby, neither bad nor good, but simply another thing you can do with your bicycle.

I’ve left it far behind now. Occasionally I wonder exactly how fast I’m going, but the thought passes. I’m going fast enough.

FSA K-Wing Handlebar

I’ll get the unpleasant bit out of the way. FSA claims this bar weighs 215g. Mine weighed closer to, well exactly, 242g.

But I don’t care.

I’ll admit the first time I saw the K-Wing it looked as ridiculous as Kiss’ stage outfits do today. I mean, a riser bar for the road? What gives?

Then one day its beauty clicked. I realized the K-Wing is a deep-drop bar that isn’t. The mistake I commonly see in setting up the K-Wing is by positioning it so the bar top is at the same height as the previous bar. Wrong!

What makes the K-Wing so great is the ability to position the drops at the same height as other bars (thus making the levers the same height) which ultimately places the bar top a full centimeter higher than it would be otherwise. The result: You sit up higher while climbing while needing fewer spacers below the stem. Your bike looks more PRO in profile.

I’m not one to get too hung up on the look of a bike; I’ll flip a stem upside down if it’ll give me the fit I seek, but there is much to be said for a bike that looks elegant.

I will admit I’ve struggled to reconcile the fact that the switch from aluminum to carbon fiber as the raw material caused prices to quadruple while cutting lifespan to strictly single-serve. Crash it: Replace it. So yes, I struggle with more expensive and greater fragility. But then I get back on a bike with an aluminum bar and even with cork tape I wonder who turned off the comfort. I don’t have carpal tunnel, but I don’t want to get it either. The vibration damping that comes with carbon fiber increases comfort so noticeably it’s a wonder we didn’t make the switch sooner.

The first time I rode a carbon fiber bar I felt like a soon-to-be addict trying crack for the first time: “Where have you been all my life?”

The internal cable routing is—I won’t lie—a pain in the kiester to deal with and the tight bends can reduce braking and shifting performance if you’re not careful. I keep a special cable around to aid with the routing when I replace housings. But the liability posed by price ($229) and limited lifespan are more than overcome in my opinion by the deep drop that doesn’t require increased flexibility.

I hope this bar is never discontinued.