Originally Posted by
Lou627
I remembered this guy's off hand (due to the obscure title) although he's rather vague about his trip
http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/?...c_id=3646&v=1U.
This is not of much value for a road biker but these guys did it pretty quick on recumbents
http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/?...c_id=1202&v=Fo
200 a day never crossed my mind as realistic, but im sticking by a cheap racing bike holding up. I pushed that thing pretty hard, riding 60-100 mile days for week or two at a time, and setting up camp in town for a week or two and using it as my transport when in town. Didnt have one problem, not even a broken spoke (i know it was mostly luck).
Thanks for the links. They are a bit of a disappointment since the one only seems to address what they ate and the other is about recumbents. Recumbents are fine, but I consider them a different sport and am not personally interested in them.
I was kind of hoping to hear about someone doing 200 miles per day average. Barring that a journal with 100 mile days and some detail about the bike and the trip would be nice.
I think we actually agree on most of this issue. I think a racing bike can hold up especially for very lightly loaded touring and more so if it has a reasonable spoke count. Lots of folks have ridden road bikes across the country. I think it gets more and more questionable as the spoke counts get lower and lower. If you have 16 spoke wheels you better not carry much. If you have 32 or 36 spoke wheels there is a lot less worry there. When talking modern road bikes I tend to think of 24 rear and 20 front and I wouldn't want to load a bike like that down much and ride across the country. OTOH, I wouldn't have any qualms at all about my 1990ish road bike with 36 spoke wheels making it there fine with any reasonable load. The stock gearing would be woefully inadequate though.
What I thought was a stretch was the 200 mile per day average. I think it is possible, but it really wouldn't be a tour in the usual sense and would have more in common with Randoneering. 100 mile day averages are definitely possible. I think that even a normal 57 year old like myself could do that, if I was really motivated to, trained hard, and packed light. It might not even be that hard for a credit card type tour. I thus far have been more attracted to a camping and cooking type tour, but who knows? I just might do something like that myself at some point.
BTW: What kind of spoke count did your wheels have.