It was chilly this past weekend, so I stuck mostly to the trails:
Including a trip to the forbidding Trails Behind The Mall on an Industry Standard Gravelling Appliance:
In my ongoing search for the Spirit of Gravel I have already come to embrace the gravel lunch GRVL LNCH, but you’ll be pleased to learn that I’ve discovered something even more delightfully pretentious:
Gravel reading GRVL RDNG!
As I mentioned, I recently took delivery of the latest volumes in Richard Sachs’s “Arrange Disorder” series. Comprised of short passages and easy to carry in a handlebar bag, they’re ideal for mid-ride mental snacking. Just pull up a nice piece of gneiss…
[I have no idea if that’s actually gneiss, I’m not a geology Fred.]
…then sit down and read a few pages:
And yes, I’m aware of the irony inherent in carrying a book by a one-at-a-time bicycle maker whilst riding an Industry Standard Gravelling Appliance. It’s like uncorking a bottle of fine wine while dining at McDonald’s. But GRVL RDNG isn’t about what bike you’re riding; it’s about what book you’re reading.
Just be sure to use proper technique, or you could hurt yourself:
Stroking your beard thoughtfully is particularly important, and if you don’t already have a beard, I highly suggest ordering one and carrying it with you:
That way you can just put it on when the urge to read overtakes you–along with your Woolen Reading Gloves, of course:
The beard is also helpful for blending in at gravel-oriented cycling events, and the rubber dots on the gloves will help you turn the pages without resorting to finger-licking.
This raises an important question:
Is turning paper pages the friction shifting of the literary world?
Well, no. Friction shifting would be reading from a scroll:
Whereas turning the paper pages of a book is more like indexed shifting:
[Reading and sex are the two activities most often depicted in positions that may look good in photos but would be extremely uncomfortable in real life.]
And yes, e-readers are like electronic shifting:
However, there’s a crucial difference in that an e-reader lets you carry thousands and thousands of books on a device the size of a single Richard Sachs volume. This means that conceivably you could take your entire library with you the next time you go gravel reading GRVL RDNG, whereas doing it with printed books would look like this and require some sort of e-assist cargo bike at the very least:
And yes, unlike a printed book an e-reader can run out of juice, but unlike an electronic shifter if this happens 50 miles into your ride it’s not really that big a deal.
Meanwhile, an electronic shifting system does exactly the same thing as a mechanical shifting system, only it requires a battery. So it’s more like a book with actual pages that you still have to charge:
And what’s the point of that?
Speaking of the Industry Standard Gravelling Appliance, I finally caved and put the derailleur cable through the hole:
Clearly complex cable routing is a fundamental part of the gravel experience, though as far as I can tell the point of it is simply to convince you to abandon mechanical shifting by making installation about 100 times more difficult than it needs to be.