Originally Posted by
The Octopus
400K (250 miles) this Saturday -- doubling the longest distance to date and keeping the bike set up the same. This route has something like 16K of climbing on it, including one hill that I'm certain I'll have to walk. We'll see how it goes. More data to follow!
Completed a 400K (254 miles) on Saturday on the fixie. It took 20:15 from start to finish and included 15,100 of climbing. I didn't have to walk anything. Everything feels great today -- no knee pain at all. Some leg soreness, but no more than had I ridden the event on a geared bike.
In addition to the challenge of doubling my longest distance on a fixed gear bike, this ride added the challenge of trying to ride with others in hilly terrain. I found it to be a real challenge in the big hills -- I'd just play leap-frog with the guys on geared bikes, passing them on the climbs and getting passed on the descents. In moderate terrain it was easy to keep a common pace. Similarly, the flats were no problem except when the group wanted to whip it a bit and I wished I had a taller gear to keep the pace with less effort.
So that's over 1,000 miles on the fixie in the first month I've ever ridden a fixed-gear bike. (This is deep in the don't-try-this-at-home category.) The biggest take-away from all that is how much fun it is riding the fixie. It's tough to explain; I just feel more "connected" to the bike and the road and the terrain around me. Physically it's not all that much different than riding a bike with gears. (If there were much of a difference, there's no way I could go from never, ever, having ridden a fixed-gear bike to doing this kind of volume in 30 days.) Once you teach yourself to think about starting and stopping differently, and you stop reaching for the shifters, then it's all the same. My take on the knee-pain thing is that folks who suffer from it either have fit issues or are using their legs to slow the bike or are not smooth or in control on the descents. The impact on the parts that touch the bike (feet, butt, hands) is much more severe than on a geared bike. But, ironically, on a hilly course you spend more time out of the saddle than you would on a geared bike so that impact is felt more on the "easier," flatter routes than on the ones that involve a lot of climbing.
The next big fixed long-distance project will be a big one later this month. Stay tuned for details.