Bike refresh

Earlier this year I wrote that I wasn’t going to buy a new gravel bike and was just going to ride the Midnight Special all year. Haha, I guess that didn’t work out the way I planned as I ended up replacing nearly every bike we own this summer. So, four new bikes for us this year, which can be viewed as a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you feel about bikes (or budgets).

I sold my road bike (Look 585), my Midnight Special, and both of our mountain bikes (Co-op DRT 2.1). To make up for those emotional losses I bought a Trek Checkpoint gravel bike and Trek Roscoe 8 hardtails for both Heidi and myself. I don’t have any plans to buy a new road bike and have just been using the Checkpoint for any road rides I do. I’m mainly just doing road stuff for fun/fitness (i.e., no group rides) and it’s been working well for that. As for the fourth bike, I picked up a Salsa Fargo and have been using that mainly for bikepacking.

Trek Checkpoint

Salsa Fargo

This refresh was long overdue as my beloved Look was nearly 20 years old and needed some work that was going to cost more than I wanted to spend on it. I don’t know exactly how many miles I put on it over those years, but I’m confident it was well over 50,000. So many training and club rides as well as centuries and double centuries. I spent so many hours on that thing it was kind of hard to see it go. But as they say, “Onwards and upwards….”

I was also sad to get rid of the Midnight Special, as I really liked that bike. I had mainly bought it for gravel riding, but for the type of gravel routes I do on a regular basis, it just wasn’t the right bike. The Checkpoint is so much lighter and has a lot better geometry, which is much more confidence-inspiring on the loose stuff. The Midnight Special was a bit of a deathtrap on steep gravel descents and there are plenty of those in the Boise foothills/mountains. Maybe someday I’ll splurge and get a steel road bike….

Our mountain bikes were seven years old, which I guess is getting up there in age. The real issue more than their age, though, was that they were 27.5+ and we really wanted more modern 29ers. So that’s what we got with the Roscoes, which have proven to be lots of fun so far.

I’ve been wanting a steel dropbar MTB for bikepacking for a while so when REI had the Fargo on sale this summer I decided to pull the trigger on that. The Salsa Fargo is kind of the OG dropbar MTB and it’s probably my favorite bike at the moment. I’m planning on writing more about my new bikepacking setup so I’ll save the details of that for my next post.

None of these are high-end bikes, which is how I prefer to roll these days. I mean, they’re all really solid bikes, but they aren’t terribly expensive/fancy. No carbon frames, no carbon wheels, no electronic shifting. I’m sure in the future I’ll buy a bike with electronic shifting, but I haven’t yet. Not spending a fortune for bikes is nice because, well, obviously it’s cheaper to refresh them when the time comes. Cheaper bikes also aren’t so “precious” that you’re afraid to actually use them. And after a few years when you do inevitably sell them for a loss the amount of money we’re talking about isn’t that great to cause much heartburn.

So a pretty big fail in the yearly plan, but not one I regret. We’ve already put them to good use and have a bunch of miles on all of them. Here’s to a lot more miles in the coming years.