Blériot

In which the author writes about his favorite bicycle.

It’s July 2020, and a fair amount has happened in the world since my last post back on March first. The southeastern United States – where I live – is the epicenter of a global pandemic. Organized randonneuring is on hold, long group rides don’t make a hell of a lot of sense, and I haven’t been doing many rides I’d want to write about. At present I’m not doing anything too “adventurous” or distances that would require a store stop. For myself, in the summer heat, that includes anything over about 50 miles.

Another big change: In early June, Sheila and I moved from Houston, Texas to Tallahassee, Florida for her graduate studies. As a cyclist, I’m happy about the move because now I have some hills to climb, I can go for a ride in the country without driving for an hour first, and, best of all, it is beautiful around here:

Writing about recreational cycling feels a bit superfluous to me when the nation is consumed with more important things, like Black Lives Matter. I was happy to see this on a recent morning ride before work:

Painting “Black Lives Matter” in huge letters at the intersection of Gaines Street and Railroad Avenue may be a largely symbolic gesture by a city that has a long way to go in dealing with racial injustice and police brutality, but at the very least it is not a gesture that would have been made in the American South that I grew up in.

But cycling is what I came here to write about, and that is what I will do. Since I haven’t done any real “epic” rides lately, I’m going to spend the rest of this catch-up post writing about my favorite bike. I’m not much of a gearhead and can barely remember how many teeth my chainrings have, but we’ll give this a shot and see how it goes…

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Back in October, 2009, I wanted a new bicycle. I had recently gone through a divorce and was living a debauched bachelor lifestyle in a one-room garage apartment in Austin, Texas. I had gotten into cycling via the Thursday Night Social Ride, a beer-swilling rolling party that took over the streets à la Critical Mass but tried to be kinder to auto traffic and usually ended up at a bar.

My first social ride included seeing a beautiful young woman execute a perfect topless swan dive from the board at Barton Springs, just after the group had bombed en masse down Robert E. Lee Road Azie Morton Road to Zilker Park at an unsafe speed and mostly sans-helmet. The experience convinced my newly-free-range self of the virtues of cycling, even after the friend who brought me along for the ride cheerily confessed to peeing in the pool as we stood together in the shallows.

My social ride bike (and only bike at that time) was a 2008 Schwinn Madison, a product of the “fixie boom” of the late aughts. It didn’t take long to decide that riding fixed-gear on Austin’s hills with a bunch of drunks was not my thing, so I flipped the rear wheel to convert the bike to coasting-friendly single-speed, as it remains to this day (although some other things have changed):

It didn’t take long before I developed an ambition to do some longer rides, which led to some odd experiments like loaded-track-bike camping:

So what I really needed was a bike with gears, a bike ready for the Texas Hill Country, a bike that could haul 50 pounds of supplies over Mount Bonnell if need be. I didn’t know much about bikes at the time (and still don’t know all that much for that matter), so I talked to my friend Jeff Newberry, who seemed to know everything worth knowing about bicycles.

Jeff is a man of deep enthusiasms and obsessions, and at that time he was (and still is) very into randonneuring and French constructeur bicycles. Therefore, he loaned me a well-thumbed stack of Bicycle Quarterly back-issues and suggested that I buy a used Rivendell Blériot he saw on eBay for about $1,250. That seemed expensive to me, but I had extra money from the post-divorce house sale and wanted to reward myself for quitting smoking for the third or fourth time. I went ahead and splurged on the bike because Jeff said it was good and would probably fit me, and also because it looked really cool. I didn’t know the first thing about 650b vs. 700c wheels, what “trail” was, or any of the other arcana promoted by Jan Heine in Bicycle Quarterly. I just bought the thing and hoped for the best.

As it turned out, Jeff was right and the Blériot was just about perfect. I rode it around Austin for many years, and when I finally took the plunge into brevets of 100, 200, 300, 400, and even 600 kilometers, the Blériot hung right in there with me, with a few small changes over time.

You can read the seller’s original description and specs for the bike by clicking the thingy below:

Blériot 2020: Things I’ve changed

The current state of the Blériot is the result of an extended exercise in problem-solving as distances got longer and physical stress took its toll on my aging frame. Every change I’ve made to this bike was done for what I thought was a good reason at the time, and usually after getting confused and consulting Jeff Newberry first.

Pedals

The Blériot came from the seller with rat-trap-style MKS Touring pedals, which my feet did not like at all. I swapped them out for a set of MKS Lambda pedals (branded as “Grip King” pedals by Rivendell). At the time, I was an adherent of Grant Petersen’s “Shoes Ruse” line of thinking, which actually makes tons of sense if most of your rides are under about 30 miles and not all that fast. At that 30 mile mark, even the nice wide Grip Kings started to make my feet hurt so I started scouting for other options.

The cheapest “other option” I found was a pair of Shimano SPD pedals that that a guy down the street was selling for five bucks at a yard sale. Each pedal had a clipless binding on one side and a flat platform on the other. The yard-sale pedals had already been on a tour across the continental United States, so they were a little beat up but still worked fine. I then went down to REI, bought some SPD cleats and inexpensive cycling shoes, and was in business for clipless pedaling.

After a few minor disasters, these pedals worked out great for longer rides, and I could still use the flat side with regular shoes on my way to the grocery store. They’re still on the bike and working fine.

Fenders

I was riding home after a few beers at a friend’s house one dark Austin summer night when the Blériot’s plastic front fender snapped in two pieces right in front of the fork crown. Notice in the first Blériot photo above how the seller mounted the light directly on the plastic fender, where it was free to vibrate until it broke the fender? Don’t do that.

A month or so later, Jeff accidentally ordered two sets of fluted aluminum fenders for his girlfriend’s Blériot, so I bought the surplus pair from him. They are still on the bike, slightly banged up now but none the worse for wear.

Lighting

A few years ago I noticed that the Lumotec headlight that shipped with the Blériot could no longer be switched off – if the front wheel with its generator hub was rolling, the light was shining. I partially disassembled the light to see if I could fix it, but couldn’t figure out how the switch worked.

I then proceeded to put the headlight back together the wrong way. I hit a bump in the pre-dawn darkness while cycling to the start of a Hill Country Randonneurs 300k brevet, and the bolt holding a large part to the top fell out and went bouncing down the street into obscurity. The ride began at a convenience store, so I bought a roll of duct tape and rigged the light back together. Three years later, the light is still on all the time and still wrapped with duct tape.

Because the Lumotec isn’t really bright enough for my comfort and it doesn’t make sense to ride long distances at night without a backup light, I added a battery-powered Cygolite and usually run them in tandem on dark nights. I bought the Cygolite because all the other Austin-area randonneurs seemed to have them and we could share the (proprietary, expensive) batteries when necessary.

Saddle

The Blériot shipped with a narrow Brooks B-17 that was just too narrow for me, so I immediately sold it to a friend and swapped it out for the regular B-17 seen in the Schwinn Madison photos above. This Brooks seemed anatomically appropriate until I rode a 600k brevet on it, which was followed by two days of alarming numbness. Sufficiently alarmed, I replaced it with a numbness-preventing Rivet Pearl saddle and the old blown-out Brooks was relegated to light commuting duty on the Schwinn.

Luggage

Back when I had the aluminum fenders installed, I installed the Nitto front rack with the intent of carrying things someday. The rack then served as an expensive headlight mount for several years, while I carried things like groceries in a pair of rear panniers. When I started randonneuring, I soon saw the value of having a big bag up front where I could reach things I wanted to get at easily during the ride, things like

• Snacks
• Extra clothing layers
• Sunscreen
• Ibuprofen
• Sports drink powder

Therefore I bought a decaleur and a (very) well-used Berthoud handlebar bag from Jeff Newberry. The bag looked like it had been through one too many trips to Brest and back, but I hosed out the caked-on performance-enhancing powders and lord knows what else, and it’s served admirably (if also a bit leakily, frumpily, and slumpily) for several years now. I’m planning to replace it with a shiny and more-waterproof new bag soon though.

Soon after buying the handlebar bag, I purchased an inexpensive trunk bag for things I hoped I wouldn’t need during a ride:

• Spare tubes
• Spare tire
• Pump
• Tools
• Rain gear
• Other un-fun things

Computer

It’s nice to have something tell you where to make the turns on unfamiliar rides, and this Wahoo Elemnt Bolt does the trick as well as any other Garmin-like device and at a reasonable price. It has enough battery life for a 200k and sometimes for a 300k. I bring a portable recharger along for the long rides. On familiar routes I sometimes leave this at home or switched off because it’s easy to find myself squinting at a tiny screen instead of having the outdoor fun I had planned on.

Tires

The second-biggest upgrade I made to this bike was going from randomly-selected, too-heavy 38mm tires to fancy Compass/Réne Herse 42mm extra-light tires. These make a whole world of difference as far as how this bike feels to ride on all sorts of roads, but especially on the coarse country chipseal that dominates Texas randonneuring routes. The relatively low pressures I run the tires at (about 42 PSI front, 48 PSI rear) seems to help with avoiding punctures. I might also take the whole thing tubeless whenever it’s time for a new wheelset.

Fit

I had a professional fit done at the Peddler bike shop in Austin after a particularly miserable, windy, cramp-ridden 200k. Part of the fit included replacing the too-long 120mm Nitto stem with a 90mm Nitto stem I scored at a garage sale. Having the bike actually fit me correctly (including adding an insert to my left shoe) turned out to be the biggest upgrade I could have made to it.

Miscellaneous

• The weird orange bar tape is an experiment with silicone tape to avoid hand pain. The tape feels nice but doesn’t absorb sweat at all, so I find gloves to be kinda mandatory with it. The wrap is sloppy because it’s a pandemic-style DIY job and I don’t wrap handlebars often. I also accidentally ripped a small chunk off the right brake lever hood when installing that at the same time.
• The gearing is the same as when I bought it but the Biopace chainring is long gone. This area of the bike still needs some work IMO, and it’s an opinion I only arrived at after riding quite a few miles. I think the big chainring is slightly too big and the steps aren’t close together enough in the “non-granny” range of the cassette.
• I switched the bar-end shifter for the rear derailleur from pure friction to indexed after too many bad shifts.
• I stuck a piece of black electrical tape on the bike to avoid chain slap damage right after I bought it. The tape is still there and has endured many a slap.
• Jaws was never my scene and I don’t like Star Wars.