horatio 

I realize this varies by region, but I'm curious as to whether the routes typically chosen for brevets expose riders to a significant variety of road surface conditions. Are really poor roads avoided, or included for variety? I plan to join some rando rides next year, and I'd appreciate some feedback from more experienced riders.

CliftonGK1

The Seattle Randos route owners like to keep us on our toes, it seems, so the roads vary quite a bit. Some routes are almost all smooth asphalt. Others are a mix of that and chip seal. Sometimes routes include sections of the local paved multi-use paths. We had a 300k over the summer with 10 miles of loose gravel over hardpack washboard dirt. There's a 200k permanent we have with 14 miles of gravel/dirt road.

The pre-ride info from the organizers should tell you if there are any road conditions that you need to be wary of. Like our 300k warned people about the gravel, and not to use anything smaller than 28mm tires.

Carbonfiberboy 

PNW. Around here it's hilly roads, the hillier, the better. Fair bit of crummy pavement, but mostly good. Occasionally a few miles of unexpected loose gravel, which is quite challenging for those running 23c. But that's the idea: challenging. The most common setup is carbon or ti bike, OpenPro wheels, 23c tires. Some folks run pretty much all out race bikes, some custom steel 650B rando bikes. Most common problem to DNF is probably heat exhaustion, but sometimes raining and 33° will drop a couple of people. Very occasionally equipment failure like crank falls off. Never the road AFAIK. There are rare brevets or permanents with long sections of gravel, but those are announced ahead of time. Fat rims and tires then for most folks, although some do them on their regular race bikes.

Machka 

In Manitoba the roads chosen are the paved ones ... and there aren't very many paved roads in Manitoba. We're randonneurs with time limits ... we don't want to be dealing with gravel!! The organisers do try to keep cyclists off the main highways (TransCanada and 75, in particular) as much as possible, and will try very hard to select lightly travelled roads. Manitoba is flat, but the routes will try to include as many hills as possible.

In Alberta there is a lot more selection for paved roads, and most of the roads have decent shoulders, so most of the time the roads are pretty good. I was a route organiser for my part of Alberta and I tried my best to select lightly travelled roads and especially lightly travelled roads with decent shoulders. And of course, paved and relatively hilly.

The only reason to send riders on gravel sections would be if there was construction and the gravel section was only a few metres long ... and even so, as organiser, I drove or cycled my routes quite frequently, and I frequently checked the construction schedule for my area, to ensure that my riders would not be faced with much in the way of gravel, dirt track detours, or sections of nasty construction. One year I had to reroute a good portion of my 600K because of construction ... but that's how it goes sometimes. Ride organisers need to take care of their riders!!

Checking and rechecking my routes also helped ensure that my route instructions were correct and that I wasn't sending someone down a road that leads nowhere just because Google maps says it should go somewhere, or because there has been construction and the area has changed configuration. (This, incidentally, is something that really annoys me about randonneuring events ... organisers who created a route back in 1999 and haven't bothered to update their route sheets as things change or as errors are discovered!!)


Here in Australia, they have a variety of different rides ... there are some rides for mountain bikers, some rides mostly on MUPs, and some rides on the road. If the ride is a road ride, but has a gravel section, they will announce it. The rides here are usually very hilly, of course, but they will announce if the ride is particularly flat.


As for paved road surfaces ... I don't care what I ride on, and I've ridden on a lot of different surfaces, as long as it is paved. When we ride the distances we do, we are going to encounter all sorts of different surfaces ... especially when organisers have to take into consideration things like shoulder width, traffic density, and regularly located services. I don't know of any organisers who will deliberately include a chipcrete road just to annoy the cyclists ... instead it is probably the lesser evil. Either the chipcrete road with practically no traffic or the smooth road with no shoulders and logging trucks going by every 10 minutes. Good organisers will design routes with cyclist's safety and well-being first and foremost in their minds.


Edit: This is a collection of photos taken on my various audax/randonneuring events around the world ... there are a number of road photos within the sets:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/1430288...7625053749265/

seenloitering

I'm in Ontario. On the last Brevet I was on I encountered mostly asphalt, but also dirt, gravel, portage, and sidewalk. Sidewalk! Some asphalt was smooth, some pretty rough, and one road was puckered and ripping opening as if a river had run under it. It's not the usual, but it happens.

bobbycorno

Hereabouts, ain't no such thing as "typical" road conditions on a brevet. Everything from fresh new asphalt to two-inch-deep golfball gravel. Terrain varies from pool table flat to 20+% gradients. Best to be prepared for literally anything. Which is why I favor 35mm tires and LOW gears.

SP
Bend, OR

noteon 

The New Jersey brevets I've done have been suburban and rural, almost entirely paved.

The paving is of widely varying quality, but no more than a few dozen feet of dirt or gravel at a time.

StephenH

Around here, it's variable, but you can usually find out beforehand, too. The last brevet I did had some gravel roads, some fresh-gravel-on-old-pavement roads, some bad pavement, etc., but was still 90% good pavement, and I think that's the first brevet I've done that had that much bad road surface in it. It's pretty much a given that any route around here will have chipseal, so people don't worry about it. But most of the routes are just on paved rural FM roads, and roughness, other than chipseal, isn't a real issue. Ask beforehand, and you should be fine.

horatio 

Thanks for all the comments. How about the roads chosen for PBP, for those of you who have been there? One of my all-time fantasies has been to enter and finish PBP.

Machka 

I think they aim to choose roads that are fairly quiet, but I did notice that at commuting times (morning and dinnertime) the roads filled up with vehicles.

As for surfaces ... they were pretty typical French roads. Some smooth pavement, some patched pavement, and some cobblestone.

StephenH

Just curious- is PBP always pretty much the same route, or intentionally changed each year like RAGBRAI?

Machka 

Pretty much the same with a few variations depending on what they've managed to line up for services along the way.

unterhausen

you would think that any rational RBA would warn people well in advance if there were gravel roads on a brevet. However, I don't see how you can avoid some potholes, which would suggest larger tires if you are going to ride in the dark.

thebulls

Sometimes gravel appears where there used to be a surfaced road. On one 600Km, a road was "deleted" by construction crews just days before the start -- we all had to figure out a detour. On last year's Dart, I took a wrong turn and road a mile on gravel road rather than turn around and go the "correct" way (this sort of thing is allowed on Darts and Fleches as long as you stiill ride the required mileage). And there's always the chance of fresh chipseal with deep and loose gravel. So whether the RBA tells you there is gravel or not, I think it's good practice to ride a bike with tires that are suitable for riding safely in gravel. It's just part of randonneuring, from my perspective.

horatio 

I would think tires are a critical part of the equation, and from what I've read, 28mm is about the narrowest tire most posters here are recommending. I also read that all types of bikes are ridden in brevets. Does anyone routinely use 25mm tires? If so, how do they handle the various road surfaces?

Mark W

I typically ride 25 mm tires, and haven't had any significant problems with them. We get a lot of chip seal, which isn't the greatest, but I haven't had any major issues. Probably our worst road was mud for several miles; the county was working on it and ground it up a couple of days before the brevet. None of us had any fun on that bit, but we all made it through. I did have to stop and dig the caked on mud out from between my tire and the fender once or twice, though.

The worst conditions I've seen at PBP was toward the end in 1999, where we hit a stretch of loose gravel towards the end. They had someone out with a light warning us, but it was pretty dicey at 3 in the morning.

Other than that most of the roads seemed pretty decent. They did have some chip seal, but they use a smaller rock than is typical in many areas of the US.

Mark W

unterhausen

I ride 25mm, but I see a lot of 23 and even some 19mm tires on brevets. I would say the number of people with 25mm or larger tires are in a distinct minority. 25mm is plenty big for most road conditions. I ride on gravel with no issues on my 25mm tires. I have thought about going larger for more pothole resistance.

Machka 

I've done all my randonneuring, in several different countries on many different road surfaces, on 23s or 25s.

I just avoid the rides that say there's a gravel section in the ride description.

Rowan

I used to ride sizes ranging from 32C down to 25C when using my old Fuji Touring. But since going to my Merlin CF, the tyre options have narrowed considerably simply because of the narrowness of the rear chainstays at the BB... so it is 23C with 25C possibly at a tight squeeze.

However, I do run the 23s at only 80psi, and this has a substantial influence on ride comfort. I ran the tyres at 95psi on a metric century on Sunday, and the roads weren't exactly tabletop smooth -- and I felt the bumps more than when running 80psi. The lower pressure doesn't seem to carry much of a speed penalty, but anything below that pressure, and I feel like I am starting to struggle a little bit.

I have ridden the bike on loose gravel surfaces and it's not pleasant, not so much for the difficulty of tyres handling the surface, but the dinging of the frame with rocks.

I'd say that when flagship events such as PBP, LEL, Last Chance, Rocky Mountain and others incorporate gravel roads in their routes, then ride organisers can follow carte blanche. Until then, they are are just being plain devious for no good reason in their route planning. I would avoid their events.

By the way, the worst roads I expereinced on a 1200 were during the last BMB -- the ruts and ice heaves in the bitumen were horrendous. Then there was the newly paved, billaird-table-smooth section at night in rain that absolutely sucked any light away from in front of me.

The next worst roads were in New South Wales -- if ever there is an Australian state that has neglected maintenance of its rural roads infrastructure, NSW is it -- my butt was sore for days after one randonnee in the southern parts because of the patching, potholes, heaves, cracks and shoddy seal when they were widened.

thebulls

Last year's Granite Anvil 1200 out of Toronto included many miles of "unintentional" gravel. Apparently the week before the ride start, road construction turned many miles of blacktop into gravel.

We have several brevets in our area that include short sections of gravel roads (the longest is about two miles). I think that those are some of the most fun sections of those brevets. Something a little different than the same old blacktop. More challenging, less traffic, more scenic. I ride on 700x30 or 700x32 tires, which are kind of OK on gravel, though I'd prefer to be on even wider tires if we did a lot of riding on gravel. Randonneuring is a sport that started out on gravel roads, so I think a certain amount of gravel is fair game in our sport. But I agree that it needs to be "advertised" so that people on narrow-tired bikes have a chance to decide to avoid those brevets. I've ridden 700x23's on gravel and I think that is quite scary. We usually point out any significant gravel in the ride description. The cue sheets are also posted before events, and those definitely call out any gravel. To the point that one recent brevet called out a gravel section a couple miles after a turn, and I was waiting for it and waiting for it and then finally hit it and was over it in about thirty sections. The gravel was in a little construction zone that was only about fifty feet long. Disappointing!

Your other comment about the BMB roads in 2006 -- I sure remember those well. On the third night I was just riding at maximum speed, right down the center of the road since I could barely see the road surface under half an inch of rain, hoping I wouldn't hit a pothole without seeing it. Scary.

Nick

skiffrun

In North Carolina, all the brevets are intended to be on asphalt or concrete roads. Sometimes a road has recently been repaved, and some are known as Bumpass Rd or Bumpass Highway. Sometimes the chip seal is crumbling so fast that one can see the difference in just the couple weeks between brevets; esp. if there is serious housing development construction or nearby road destruction / reconstruction occuring.

In central NC, it appears that tough road surfaces (not including dirt or gravel) are sometimes taken for granted -- who'd want to do an epic length brevet if there were no issues to deal with? -- but routes get changed when car traffic becomes intolerable.

Oh, and quite a people ride 23 mm tires.

StephenH

I would like to point out that some of our tougher riders seem to relish bad roads, along with pot holes, dogs, etc. So it's not a "bad" route because it has bad roads or gravel roads or whatever- that is, provided you know what you're getting into. Springing surprises on people is not a good idea if you can help it.

Homeyba

Bad road is a relative term. It's just what you are used to. I have 2 miles of dirt road (including about 1/8 mile of 15%grade) from my house to the nearest paved road. I ride it all the time on 23 and 25mm tires. It's not a big deal for me. The only time (usually) that I don't ride it is when it's raining becuse the bike really becomes a mess. If you're not used to riding bad or gravel roads they can be scary but if you ride them all the time they aren't a big deal.

Machka 

Exactly. Occasionally it may happen that a small part of a road is torn up a day or two before an event, and that's life sometimes

But ... a ride organiser should make every effort to find out what sort of construction is planned for the area where the ride will be held. In Alberta, they published a 5-year construction plan, so you could look up most of the roads. I work for my local shire council now, and in the next couple weeks the summer road construction plan should be finalised. A ride organiser could make an inquiry to the shire offices to find out which roads are targetted and may possibly also get an idea of when they might undergo construction.

And if a ride organiser wants to run an event with extended portions of gravel roads, that's fine. They are probably nicer routes in many ways because of lighter traffic etc.

If you go to the Audax Australia website, you'll see how they handle the unpaved routes: https://audax.org.au/public/index.php...per&Itemid=176
Under "Type" ou can choose road, dirt, rail trail/bike path, and a couple other options. So if you are interested in riding "dirt" you can narrow the choices with that selection. But if you'd prefer to ride "road" you can narrow the choices with that selection.