![]() While it’s still common to see double or even triple chainrings on road bikes, MTBs and gravel setups have moved pretty decisively toward 1x setups. With more bike companies playing in the gravel space and more riders looking to join the party, there’s no shortage of choices for building up your gravel rig’s drivetrain. If all this sounds more complicated than you want it to be, you might keep it real simple and have a good time riding gravel on a road bike with wide tire clearance or a vintage MTB outfitted with our Corner Bar. You won’t cramp up as easily, and your weight will be better distributed for handling tricky sections. This makes them less aerodynamic than a road bike, but that’s fine. Gravel bikes also have a shorter reach and a more upright riding position. The bottom bracket is usually lower too, dropping the center of gravity and further improving stability. With that out of the way, here’s a high-level look at some of the features that could make your gravel experience more pleasurable.ĭesigned to provide stability on uneven terrain, handle loose descents, and navigate obstacles like ruts and bumps and rocks, gravel bikes have a slightly longer wheelbase and slacker head angle than the average road bike. And if you ride out to some rural country road with John Denver piped through the speakers and you come back home covered in dirt and grime, you did it on a gravel bike. If you tie a string to a stick and catch a few crappies, it’s a fishing pole. If you wear an old Slayer t-shirt to a wedding, it’s formal wear. We have some other thoughts on the subject, so pour yourself a glass of cool tap water and settle in while we unravel gravel.Įvery Bike Is a Gravel Bike When You Ride it on Gravel After all, not too long ago humanoids were performing gravel recon on whatever MTBs and cross bikes they had on hand - and they were having a good time. As a result, anyone feeling bored with blacktop tours and tidy mountain loops has a whole new terrain to investigate - and the tools to do it.īut if you’re tired of sharing the road with a bunch of cars, sick of stopping at every red light on your route, or just hungry for new scenery, you really don’t need the fastest or fanciest gravel road bike you can find you can give it a shot with whatever ya got. Are gravel bikes good on the road, you ask? Designed to withstand ruts, peanut butter mud, and rocky roads, yes, they perform efficiently on plain-ass vanilla roads too. In all honesty, they’re some of the most versatile drop-bar bikes available. Whether you call them gravel platforms, all-road bikes, mixed-terrain specialists, or adventure rigs, they’re built to be faster than an MTB and tougher than a standard road bike. We weren’t trying to create some new category with it we just wanted to test some boundaries and make a bike suited for the kind of riding we were into.Įquipment has since evolved to better handle the abuses inherent to riding on gravel. Introduced in the early aughts (and since retired), Pacer was really the first bike of its kind - road geo, curly bars, decidedly wide tire clearance. ![]() Take this blog from 2015 for a spin if you want. Anything else was a shortcut, a detour, or an afterthought.Īt Surly, however, we’ve always been drawn to overlooked thoroughfares and strange diversions. For a long time, you either rode your road bike on the road or your trail bike on the trail. ![]() You haven’t really talked to him since that final inspection went sideways, but there he is in your Facebook feed, riding the rolling hills of rural Idaho and Oklahoma with hundreds of spandexed strangers.īut gravel wasn’t always the prize pig at the county fair. Everyone’s riding gravel these days - your cousins, your coworker who pickles their own vegetables, even the realtor who sold you your first house.
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