Fixed gear touring
 

Planning to tour part of EuroVelo route 5 from my home in London through France, Belgium and Luxembourg this summer. I am quite keen to complete the trip on my fixed gear bike, I am not entirely sure if this is a ludicrous idea as I have never done any long distance cycling on a fixed gear bike.

Just wondering if anyone has toured fixed gear and could offer some advice for ideal ratio for touring, etc.. I am planning to put in 50+ miles per day, how difficult is this going to be?

Insane idea :)

i think your crazy also in a nice way, like you will have big problems climbing but even more so decending especially some of the cols.but each to there own.

I agree with antokelly on this -- the descents will be the toughest part. For the climbs you can always get off and walk. I suppose you could for steep descents as well, but, ugh!

Do you have front and rear brakes on your fixie? If so, perhaps you could at least put on a freewheel and do the tour single speed rather than fixed.

That said, I'm sure you can do it either way -- just listen to your body and rest / set your pace as needed. As many have pointed out in previous threads, you don't need to follow conventional wisdom: people have toured successfully on just about everything.

A single speed freewheel will make the decent, down the hills more pleasant.

I would never give up the recovery allowed by coasting down a hill,
after working hard to get to the pass.

Discover.... buy a bunch of sprockets and find Your best ratio,
or on your multi-speed bike leave it in 1 ratio for a week , and see what it's like.
and get shoes you can walk in.

I hate mileage goal based touring, I just ride for a fair amount of time,
then stop wherever that puts me.

on my multi speed bike :rolleyes:

I would make sure you have both front and rear brakes for the downhills, to help your knees with the extra weight. Again it depends on your experience as a fixed gear bicycle rider. :)

Is it possible? Yes of course it is, but would I do it? No. More power to you if you really want to, but like a few others have said, a single speed would be a more casual way to go for the down hills. If you are going to do it on a fixie though, please use brakes! With the weight of your gear and the hills you will experience, you will either have a heck of a hard time keeping in control (or not exploding your knees) without brakes. I have a fixie with brakes, and yeah I am not cool for having them, but I can stop before I hit things.

As for your gearing dilemma, have you thought about running a compact double with a Surly dingle cog in the back? This would give you a much wider range of gearing for long climbs and such. Let us know how it all works out.

If you're not riding in a flat or pretty flat place, I can't imagine how it would not suck. But this thread has been made before and all the arguments had.

Exactly what is the point of this post in the Touring forum? Nobody here that I know rides a fixie when touring. For lots of good reasons.

The op is perfectly capable of deciding for himself what would be required for HIM to do it. Nobody else can do that. No common sense involved with this idea. Sort of like cycling to the South Pole. It's the challenge thing.

PM user Sixty Fiver and do a search of the Fixed/SS forum. Lots of info there.

This thread may also have some useful information about longer distance fixed gear riding.

http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...d-Gear-Century

Cool idea. After reading a few posts on this forum, I think you are going to get at least a 70% negative response to anything asking about single speed bikes, I don't get it???

In the early days of the Tour de France, the riders had a 47T to 50T on the front and a 15T or 16T on one side and a 19T or 20T on the other side of their rear wheel. I think they did about 250 miles in a single day on a very heavy bike.

If you want to do this i would suggest:

- Flip flop hub

- 2 brakes, front and rear

- Gear the fixed side low for flats and climbs

- Use freewheel on descents

I tour on a geared bike, but commute fixed, and seattle ain't flat. You get used to the hills, but it's always the downhill that tires me out.

I've had a pannier grocery load of about 30 pounds, and front and rear brakes really helped slowing down coming down the hills, highly recommended.

What I like about riding fixed is that it forces me to push myself harder than i would on a geared bike. I power up hills and take it slow on flats, it's a hell of a workout, but I don't think I could do it day after day on a tour with a load.

Has the OP toured on a geared bike? Loaded touring is very different from riding around town or day rides, and even if you're in good enough shape to push a fixie up (and more importantly, down) nasty hills, it's a very different story to do it with a heavy load on you.

I am not the best person to respond to this question, as my experience with fixies is limited to a single ride to the end of the block and back. And that was 35 years ago.

The only reason I can think of to tour on a fixie is to challenge oneself. But I find the kind of touring that I do is challenging enough -- even on a purpose-built touring bicycle.

Lugging 10 (or 20, 30, or more kg) up and down hills all day is something I don't mind doing on a tour; but only because my bike is designed to be comfortable and versatile under grueling conditions.

I really can't get over the amount of crap that is posted on this subject by people who have never toured fixed, or even ridden fixed.

I've toured from England, through northern France and Belgium and did 400km of PBP2007, then did some more touring across to Nancy and back to England. It was lots of fun, and I didn't have to worry about maintenance issues despite some wet weather during PBP. Come to think of it, I didn't even have to worry about whether I should be changing gears -- just deciding whether to stand or not up inclines.

I toured with my normal geared bike set-up-- ie, rear rack, two moderately large panniers, three-person tent over the rack (I toured with Machka), and a medium-sized handlebar bag. We were away for around three weeks. Oh, and I also broke in a new Brooks B17 that I bought in London.

I used a 39x17 set-up, had brakes front and rear, and had no problems up or down most hills. The only one that had me off and walking was about 10% looking for a campsite late in the day. It was the steepest, extended hill on the trip, and I made it three-quarters of the way to the top before just hopping off to walk and wait for Machka.

If the OP rides fixed a lot, he can probably go a bit higher in the gearing, say 42X16, but for me the 39x17 was a good compromise. I continued to ride fixed in the year afterwards, doing a century-a-month series, and my 50km round-trip shopping trips with the dual panniers on the back. It made me a stronger and fitter rider.

The bike, a Shogun 400 lugged steel frame, has bullhorn bars, aero brake levers, and Velocity Aero 36H wheels which have proved to be virtually bulletproof. The rear hub is a Velocity singled-sided fixed hub (so there was no cheating with a freewheel or lower gear on the other side). The bike is currently decommissioned, but it about to get a makeover and put back into service because it is fun to ride loaded or not. Plus I need to get a bit stronger and fitter than I am now.

By the way, I was no more weary after a day's touring on the fixed as I was four years earlier touring many of the same areas on my geared Fuji Touring.

get a s3x internal fixed gear hub and save your knees and the walking.

so Rowan yourself and machka will be touring on fix wheels from now on .

Are you incapable of reading English?

Good job Rowan of setting us straight about fixie touring. Maybe not the challenge most of us think. Well, the younger of us anyway. I go to granny on a 6% grade when loaded, so have a hard time fathoming how anyone could do that with much higher, certainly not a 39x17.

i agree, but i don't think i would phrase it like that. most posts are heartfelt advice.

anyway, whenever i am attempting something i'm not sure about i try to gain a little experience first. so, in this case i would attempt a local one day ride that simulates what i anticipate a typical day's ride would entail on the tour. then evaluate my experience and make any modifications necessary. a second and possibly a third trial may well be in order. each, in turn, resembling the tour more closely.

this is the Mary Poppins approach. in fact, there may well have been a song in the movie about this... i can't remember.

Riding fixed is quite different from riding a geared bicycle. Have you ever ridden a spin bike?

Nope.

I was skeptical about fixed gear bicycles too because I didn't understand them.

And then I rode a spin bike (which is a fixed gear) ... and I understood.

Riding a fixed gear is not like if you were told you could only use one gear on your geared bike. That's what I thought it was like in the beginning, and I suspect that's what a lot of people think. But it's quite different.

I hope you will elaborate on what you find to be so special about fixed gear. After thirty years of using fixed gear bikes as part of my normal training routine, I don't find riding them to be much different than doing restricted gear training. Perhaps this is because I never have any of my fixed gear bikes set up with a ration of over 2:1, and often go as low as 1.5:1.