Gravel / Gravé / Gnarmac / Groad / ATB

Yeah, this was good also.

I love this guy. Great find

Not watched the tubeless rant yet - saving it for an afternoon treat - but 'ride your gravel bike to go find yourself at Lake Me' is a mirror that very few of us here (myself included) are willing to look into.

While I am a cynical bastard, I'm also a stickler for accuracy, and there are quite a few gravel roads in the South, and even in Kent, where that chap in the video is from.

I mean, none of them are more than about 500m, but they do exist.

Personally I bought my gravel bike for London's famous Cobble Monster (RIP) 2019 though.

actually I find myself every time I buy a new bike, everything re-adjusts and I have a fresh perspective to life

There's a reason you don't see much boomer, gen xer, and millennial video content. The reason is that they're bad at it.

This guy is great, there is a lot to like about what he says and of course I LOVE that he slagged off tubeless and gravelkings in the same video. But he hugely undermines his credibility when he said he doesn't patch his tubes.

He is of course the Platonic ideal of not only why drivers hate cyclists, but also why cyclists hate other cyclists.

Dude is painfully accurate. British gravel is terrible, takes a lot of work to plot a decent route.

However, there is huge satisfaction when you lace together a great route.

I have an absolutely fantastic, 85% offroad, South Downs gravel route that I ride on my mountain bike.

Think he'll make a great presenter for the show about bikes the Top Gear creators make when they realise their demographic has moved on. It felt very similar to someone "telling it like it is" about electric cars or complaining about "latte sipping hipsters".

Sometimes I feel a little bit silly riding a salsa fargo with 29 2.25 tires on dutch cycling paths. There is no gravel anywhere close to me so most of the time I am cycling on tarmac. But I would argue that a gravel bike is more fun to ride then a road bike, definitely more comfortable and also shifts the focus from going fast to simply having a good time on your bicycle.

"If they're tubeless ready, they are unready tires"

edit: oh it gets better...

It's a twisted reality where "gravel bikes" are considered the weird, specialist, impossible upstart conjured up by marketing, whereas road race bikes are totally normal and good

It's a twisted reality where subjective preferences are elevated to God-given objective truths.

I have an absolutely fantastic, 85% offroad, South Downs gravel route that I ride on my mountain bike.

Can you post a link? Cheers

This video has radicalised me. I am no longer capable of nuance.

WIP, short but there's some lovely bits of bridleway in there.

wtf is a peter's field ?

The Santa Fe of Hampshire.

A couple of days ago I did a mixed surface ride than included dirt, gravel, tarmac both smooth and less smooth. Gravel bike was perfect for it. The chap in the video makes some good points and some of it was a bit funny but at least half of it is over-laboured and annoying.

A Fargo is not a gravel bike though.

Part of that is on my old school's driveway. Absolutely corking spot, the gravel roads round there are beautiful

This is very funny.

The bit at the beginning (i didnt get that far in) where he was basically just saying "it's just a bike, call it a bike' I agree with well enough. But surely the machines marketed as gravel bikes are really just practical road bikes that suit normal people's purposes. Comfortable, fine to ride down a towpath/farm road, options with more nimble geometry if you want it, etc. All the reasons that anytime someone who isn't really a cyclist round my way (Sussex) asked advice on a road bike, I tell them to buy a Croix De Fer. [pre geometry change]