In fact, it’s time to go beyond that, and admit that my very life – in the form of my health – depends on bicycling.
For the past week I’ve been suffering, because a support strut broke on the seat of my recumbent:
It's aluminum, so it cracked all the way across instantly. Steel would have cracked and bent slowly. This increased risk is the price we pay for lighter frames.
With no immediate replacement, I’ve been forced – FORCED I tell you – to ride my “upright” bicycle again. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the upright. It’s an old Bridgestone frame customized into a good touring bike, and I’ve taken it on many rides including a brief tour of Tasmania:
… But it’s not my recumbent. It’s not that speedy, panoramic experience I’ve grown used to, where every joint is perfectly at ease. And that little difference is making me cycle a little less. And with that, I suffer. Wailing; gnashing of teeth, et cetera!
Words to live by??
My mood is more down. My work goes slower. My sleep is more restless. My appetite no longer matches my exercise level, so I’m gaining weight. It’s all going just a little bit crap, because I can’t hop on my favorite bike. That’s a pretty big deal. And it’s a state of things that I should recognize.
So, fine. I’m a bicycling nut. Even though I don’t own any lycra clothing.
Outrage is now a mechanism to drive ad traffic. Like fear used to sell papers, now it’s outrage to deliver page views. The product is you, staking out your position in the middle of the mob, where you can feel safe. But the only way to win is not to play.
Did someone just say something stupid? Now it’s here on your screen, and you have a tiny chance of saying something back to the author. How dare they say something so stupid where you, and others, can go read it. It might reach other people – not the stupid author, not you, not your fellow angry commenters, but some potential other third party that is gullible or equally stupid – and reinforce their stupidity. You must stop it! You have to drown it out in recrimination and mockery or sarcastic politeness! Quick, the chance to strike a blow against some stupid words that are on your screen is passing with every second, as the replies stack up and the crowd grows. Swing your fist before the target is obscured beneath other fists!
Whom do you blame for the stupid thing on your screen? The person you don’t really know, who said it somewhere, at some point, a hundred or a thousand miles away? Or the chain of people who picked it up, and eagerly carried it all the way over to you and stuck it in your face? The chain is mostly anonymous. Hard to grasp. Ephemeral. And some of them are your friends – can you blame them? So much easier to accept their target as a gift and join in with the attack. An amusing and victimless crime — well, except for the victim, naturally, but whatever.
He always, always deserves it – not just the snarky ripostes, but the insults, the crank calls, the petitions for firing and destitution, the fraud and vandalism and trespassing. And hey – you didn’t want it to go that far, you just left a comment, and passed it on. … Which is exactly how and why it came to the attention of the worst actors in the mob.
The only way to win is not to play.
Did you ever stop to think that the person who wrote the stupid thing did not intend you – or anyone – to be the audience? Perhaps you think that doesn’t matter? Should everything said behind closed doors be sanitized for a global audience? That’s an impossible standard. But as long as it’s not you being held to it, it’s a fair one. Let the games begin.
The next time you feel the urge to ‘Like’ or comment under some political screed on Facebook, ask yourself what it will actually accomplish. Ask if the political screed changed your mind. Did it? No. It either made you agree, or disagree and chuck an angry comment beneath it. Either way you’ve just given it another little push, causing this waste of your time to perpetuate further into a waste of someone else’s, and more time on Facebook in general. A little scrap of your life is gone – gone! For nothing! Some electrons moved; that’s it! – and meanwhile, Facebook earned a little money from an advertiser by sticking an ad on the corner of your screen. You have just been rage-baited. You have just been used.
You have just contributed to the using of others, including your friends and family.
Remember the conspiracy theorists on the liberal fringe ten years ago, who liked to scream “wake up, sheeple”? Well there’s no conspiracy required here. Just the extension of marketing tactics into social networking technology. We’re all wide awake; our only failure is in failing to understand that our online activity is now subject to such heavy filtering and interference that our political arguments and virulent “public” shamings are almost entirely self-referential, like yelling “booo, hiss” at the rich oligarch on a movie screen after we’ve wordlessly paid 15 bucks to get inside the theatre. In our enthusiasm for what’s on the screen, we forget that everyone around us is already a customer, viewing something constructed by others to gather an audience: Rage is cathartic. You’ll pay for catharsis, and the net is designed to deliver.
Money talks. And money can also silence.
Where I live, the core of modern liberal culture spent the last 30 years haughtily mocking conservatives for being manipulated by fear of other religions, distrust of foreigners, and blind aggressive patriotism. “My country, right or wrong.” It was a convenient stereotype. Now the same liberals that dealt such mockery in the previous generation are in thrall to armchair political “activism” and abusive online culture wars, happily abandoning common sense and common courtesy for the chance to extoll the superiority of their barely-tested morals. The stereotypes they mocked 30 years ago are even less true today, yet their jeering is louder than ever, because an entire economic system has built up around exploiting their self-righteousness. They vent their rage inside a gigantic circus tent (replete with easy scapegoats and strawmen), constructed to reward them with a feeling of progressive accomplishment, while companies sell tickets at the door. This is the new middle-class pastime. This is the new Sunday Night Football. And it means about as much.
When you’re online hunting for a product, presenting the right search result to you is worth a nice chunk of money. But when you’re online because you’re following a compulsion to “make your voice heard”, that’s a whole lot more time online, during which you can be distracted by anything – because you’re not looking for anything in particular, except validation. An ad thrown at you just as you’re finding that validation is worth a lot to an advertiser. How many times have you finished making your comment, or airing your fetid complaint, or satisfying your righteousness, and sent your eyes wandering around the screen for the next thing to explore, while those happy chemicals are still percolating in your brain?
The product is you, delivered to the ads, with an open mind, ready to celebrate.
Turn off. Tune out. Drop the connection. Go outside. Change the real world. Forget this fake one.
When I’m not doing tight maneuvers, I rest my arms way up on the handlebars. That means I position the handlebars way closer than normal.
To get the same setup on my new bike, I had to get a longer steering riser tube. After much discussion with Zach, we concluded that the easiest thing to do was ask Bacchetta to send us a riser tube meant for their Bella long-wheelbase bike. That worked beautifully except it was too long. So, it was time for another crude do-it-yourself adventure:
Marking how much I need to saw off.
This is a pipe cutting tool. You stick it on a pipe and spin it around. Pretty smart design!
Bacchetta’s handlebars are now really wide, like most other recumbent designs. It’s like steering a plow. Does this mean I have to get used to them?
Nah. I can just swap handlebars.
New bike in front, old bike in back. The alignment is almost the same. Now to swap the handlebars...
New bike, old handlebars. To keep the new shifters and brakes I had to swap them between bars, which meant removing the bar grips. They are very sticky. I'm still struggling with the one on the right!
Bacchetta’s seats no longer include the eyelets for directly attaching an under-seat rack. Does this mean I have to give mine up?
Nah. I can just swap seats and keep using my old one.
New version of recurve seat on the left, old seat on the right. Note the attachment point on the old seat for an under-seat rack.
Look at that crusty old thing! But it’s so comfortable…
The bolts connecting the support struts to the seat of a Bacchetta recumbent, after 20 years of use.
Top set: 20 years old. Bottom set: brand-new.
While I’m moving parts around, I might as well replace that worn out seat clamp on the old bike with a nice new one…
20-year-old seat clamp on the left, brand new seat clamp on the right. The design has evolved!
I can’t transfer the stickers from my old frame, but I can put equivalents on the new one:
Chococat in the lead!
Doin’ a lot of work on this bike… Things are starting to get messy!
You know what? I’m putting my arms on the same bars, and putting my butt on the same seat, so I’m basically riding the same bike. This bike isn’t “Valoria II”, it’s still just “Valoria”, but fancier.
It is a relatively lightweight bolt together rack with a lot of adjustability. So not ideal for loaded touring but people have used it for that purpose. The weight rating is 25 kg.
It’s a pretty snazzy, minimalist-looking rack. (By the way, I found what looks like the generic version of it for about half as much money.) It took a very long time to assemble and position properly since I wanted it as high as possible off the ground. It also has some flex to it, which might not be a good thing. They say you want a rack to be as stiff as possible.
Could I really rely on this skinny little thing to carry 50 pounds over bumpy roads?
I went in search of other options. It was going to be an especially difficult search because of the weird positioning of the rack mount points on my 2016 Giro frame. They were sandwiched between the mounts for the seat struts and the disc brakes:
That is not much room to work with. The fact that I had to use spacers to fit Bacchetta’s own rack is an embarrassment. Would any other rack have struts narrow enough to fit without spacers? Is the distance between the rack arms going to be a problem?
This was my go-to choice, except for the weight. I’ve always toured with an aluminum rack and found them plenty dependable. Heck, my frame is aluminum now. Moving to a steel rack seems kind of backwards.
This was my second choice, except I would be giving up the handle. It’s hard to overstate how useful a rack handle is for moving the Giro around in tight spaces. Also, the light mount on this rack is a total afterthought, and their load rating seems really out of wack. Did they actually test that?
Not quite European-style light mount (RedLite only)
Stupid proprietary mounting strip along the top
This would have been perfect except for that mounting plate. I wish Topeak would sell a good rack without that plate, but they apparently want to compel you to use only their bags.
This is Blackburn’s more upscale offering. I had an idea that the articulated mounting arms would fit inside that narrow gap around the mount points on the Giro … but when I got a closer look they were too thick. Mounting this rack would require spacers just like the rest.
Interesting to see what Ortlieb wants to contribute to the rack market. Looks like they just want to make something that has their QL3 mounting system directly integrated. Good for them. Unfortunately the amount of reinforcement around the mount points makes them too big to fit on my frame without long spacers – long enough to widen the rack all the way beyond the top of the bolts that hold my seat struts in place. That’s an awful lot of extra strain on a rack.
When considering the Tubus racks I found this photo from The Touring Store very helpful:
The base weight of this fancy rack is astonishingly low, but once you add in the mounting hardware it moves up and becomes merely impressive. Tubus has discontinued this rack but you can still find it around. I think it’s mostly good for bragging rights. The weight difference between this and an aluminum rack with the same capacity is less than the weight of a good-sized sandwich.
Even lighter than the Tubus Carry, this was the flagship Tubus rack for a while, and it’s easy to see why. Titanium is a very sexy material and the rack design is almost perfect. Sadly, Tubus discontinued it. I would track one of these down and use it except there is a slightly better, and more road-tested option…
This is a newer revision of the same rack I have on my Bridgestone upright bike. It has two differences: A better shape for the mount points, and a carrying handle. 40 kilograms of load capacity (88 pounds) is plenty, and the frame design is very stiff. It’s also much lighter than the Surly, and doesn’t need an adapter to mount a European-style tail light.
The Tubus Cargo is my choice.
The space between the rack mounting holes on the Giro frame, including the thickness of the frame itself, is exactly 150mm. That happens to be in the middle of the width tolerance for the Tubus Cargo:
This means I can put spacers on either side – up to a centimeter each – without compromising the rack.
Also, notice the way the mount points project inward, like the ends of a clamp. That gives me plenty of clearance around the bolt heads that stick out on the seat struts.
This is important because the rack ends are pretty wide:
If I didn’t have that extra space, I’d run into those bolts for sure.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s a gallery showing how it turned out:
It's quite sturdy and I can't detect any flex in it, unlike the standard rack which flexed alarmingly with bags on it.
It's close, but the rack manages to leave space for both the disc brake assembly and the various bolt heads around it.
These are actually the arms from the standard Bacchetta adjustable rack. I liked the fit a little better. The arms that come with the Tubus work fine though.
Closeup of the spacers I needed to fit the rack to the frame.
The aluminum spacer I used – visible in the fourth photo – came from Amazon. I know I paid too much for them but it was just too convenient to throw them in with some household goods in another order.
It only took a few test rides to know that I was dealing with a much, much better rack than the standard Bacchetta one. After a few months, during which I loaded it up with a huge pile of gear and sailed around Oakland for hours at a time, I was convinced that I’d made the right choice. The handle was perfect, the weight was low, the capacity was high, and the brake light mounted easily.
In the meantime, the Tubus rack that I’d put on my upright bike nearly ten years ago continued to be a workhorse. Just last week I used it to transport a truck battery across town.
I’ve found that a front fender on a recumbent is essential, but a rear fender is not. There are two details that make this true for me that might not apply to other people though:
I have a frame bag on the back of my seat that blocks water and dirt from flying through the seat and wetting my back.
I use waterproof panniers and cover the top of the rack with a waterproof bag.
This arrangement more-or-less does what a fender would do anyway.
Me:
The fender set that comes with the Giro-20 is fine, but I only need the front fender. Is there a way to leave the back one out?
Zach:
They only sell the fenders as a front and rear set for $45. If you just want a front fender, Planet Bike offers a similar front fender that is sold individually for about half that price. Also you can get a German SKS front fender from HP Velotechnik for $18.
Me:
The SKS looks exactly like the one on my Giro!
Zach:
There’s a reason for that: The fenders Bacchetta offers are Taiwanese copies of the SKS fenders.