Gravel Culture: Gravelly algebra – G = N-1
Posted By Gravel Union
On 17 November 2020
There’s a hackneyed phrase used in cycling which is “How many bikes do I need? N+1” where N is supposed to be number of bikes you currently own. What if owning a gravel bike meant you could actually have N-1 instead? Olly digs out his old school books and a calculator and goes in search of the answer.
During the course of this summer, for a number of inconsequential reasons, I ended up using my gravel bike everywhere – gravel rides, half-gravel/half-road rides, on MTB trails and on ‘proper’ road rides. You would have thought that it would have been a compromise for quite a lot of that – too slow and draggy on the road and too rigid for MTB trails for example? But actually, it rocked! It made me question whether I actually needed separate bikes for different disciplines – was it possible that a gravel bike was great (even if not perfect) for everything?
Does having one bike which can do everything sound like an unachievable utopia? Seeing as the team at Gravel Union work in the gravel cycling world we’re probably a bit biased, so we thought we could do some simple web research, outside of our little ‘gravel bubble’, to see whether our hypothesis that a gravel bike can do everything was actually true.
As part of a recent promotion on Gravel Union, we sent a sponsored advert to Facebook members who we thought would be interested in gravel riding. As part of the advert, we asked them what they thought of gravel riding as a genre and the results were hilarious and eye-opening in equal measures. Here’s some of the (anonymised) highlights to our question:
• There's always a need for another bike no matter how many you have. Them's the rules [sic]
• In the good old days, before marketing took over, one bike did everything
• Love my gravel bike! It’s a significant upgrade to my MTB and rides well on our pot holed roads. Nicer relaxed riding position compared to my old road bike
• Buy a road bike and stick 38mm tyres on it sorted