Long time no blog once again, so let’s start with the latest. Lots of bicycling in last years and in the spring I started to look for a replacement bike, just for sake of trying something new. At first, options ranged from plain carbon road bike to cyclocross and I was having hard time to deciding what I needed. While thinking the matter through it came obvious that – if anything – I’ll need a new commuting bike as that’s what I’ll mostly do, cycle to work and back.
Having tried some of the new aluminium frames I decided that there are now only two possible options to go for a frame – steel or carbon. The new lightweight aluminium frames don’t seem robust enough as they’re made so light that they’re all doomed to fail. Also I feel a bit uneasy of carbon frame but after trying it I could go for a one (but not the cheapest.)
Using the bike for all weather and during winter I’ll also wanted to have disc brakes and also mudguards (+enough spacing for winter tyres) and rack mounts are mandatory. Last item kind of reduces the possible carbon frame options.
At this point there were some good steel frame models from Charge, Pelago, Salsa, Singular and Surly. I also really liked the new Kuningaskulkuri model from Helkama bicycles, but it is lacking frame size options and brakes so I just couldn’t go for it.
Then a question of a drivetrain. Derailleurs I know and there are plenty of nice options available from at least three big manufacturers. But after I saw Rohloff Speedhub for a first time (must have been about 10 years ago), I’ve always wanted to try one. To this day I haven’t gotten over the price to purchase one but now Shimano has made an tempting attempt on oil lubricated IGH – Alfine 11. Here’s also a link to Shimano commercial video in youtube. It’s obviously not Rohloff but the pricetag is less than 1/3 of one and there has been quite a lot of positive ratings for this in the Internet forums so that was a very tempting option. Folks have used these in different MTB builds so the hub should survive plenty of abuse.
And then one day while browsing, I saw that Charge bikes had a perfect looking bike for me. It had steel frame and Alfine 11 hub as drivetrain. Only thing I had to compromise with it was that this model had a flat handlebar. It is not a big issue as I already purchased a set of aerobars for my previous bicycle and being using flat bar for ages I do like the riding comfort.
So here it is, almost fresh from the package. Charge Mixer 11. All steel frame, fork and fenders. Hydraulic disc brakes. It still needs a lamp and perhaps a hub dynamo to power the lights. Also I need to get those aerobars fitted but otherwise all components start to be in place. Also it will get a fully closed chainguard once I find a model that fits my current cogs.

 
First impressions:
I’ve now only done 100km on this so it’s too early to say anything else but the first impressions and feelings. I like the looks and overall feel of the bike. Frame is very robust and hydraulic brakes are nothing less than awesome! Hub gears seems to work as expected, it’s quiet and shifts nicely once the cable is adjusted properly. Took couple of iterations for me to get it right, even there are alignment marks on the hub, the correct alignment seems to be a bit off from that.
Equipped with 39T cog in front and 20T cog in rear the gear range seems to suit my needs as is. The low end could perhaps be a bit lower for steepest climbs (haven’t tried it yet, but I know where to go to see if it’s actually low enough) – and in the other end going downhill I can shift to the highest gear and it has been enough for now.
Only gripe for now is that the Alfine trigger shifter feels very cheap (as it is). I’d expected a bit more, but if it doesn’t last, it’s easy to change for a better one. Also as I’ve used solely derailleur type gears for my life, shifting takes some time to get used to. It’s very nice that you can shift while not moving (traffic lights etc) so that’s clear improvement but then shifting under load needs more consideration. Hub does shift but noiseless downshift under load seems much easier with derailleur than with this. For now it seems like a con, but perhaps I’ll learn how to do it with this also.
Only time will tell if this does last. Let’s come back to that after winter.

This is related to some morning coffee talks ages ago, where an ex-colleague of mine was pondering whether bicycling is an efficient way of traveling or not… Well, figures. Kinda tricky to measure and what to compare it to?
Anyway, as I’ve kept some track of my biking for the past year (gps + Endomondo) and even occasionally used garmin forerunner with hrm to see how much Garmin calculated calories differ from the ones approximated with Endomondo – here are some calculations.
So for the past year (July to July), I’ve tracked 2786,87 km and used 5d:16h:25m time as ”Cycling, transport”, which makes average speed 20,43 km/h. That is mostly bicycling to/from work. It includes riding in all kinds of weather conditions and with two kinds of bike (hybrid for ”summer” season and MTB for winter.) It also includes some extra payload for most of the trips (extra clothes, food, parcels from post… you name it.) Disclaimer;  my riding most certainly is not from the most efficient end of the spectrum, more from the comfort end. So there would be plenty of room for improvement in that sense.
Anyway, Endomondo calculated calorie consumption for that travel is 92745 kcal – which on the other hand is 388 045 080 joules. 1 liter of gasoline contains roughly 35 MJ of energy, so one year worth of biking has consumed and amount of energy that equals to 11,08l of gasoline.
So, is it much? If you compare it to driving a car, it’s nothing. If compared to the most efficient gasoline powered vehicles – say ones in Eco-marathon – it’s off the scale, I’m defeated! World record is 0,026388 l/100km whereas I would have consumed 0,4l / 100 km of imaginary fuel with my bike. Oh dear, why did I have to calculate this… 😀
But that cannot be the whole truth. First, Endomondo has quite a bit of overhead. At the time of writing I don’t have my notes on this, but If I remember correctly – Endomondo shows constantly at least 10% more burned calories than what my forerunner shows (and somehow I believe it to be more accurate – as it has the heart rate information available.) I might actually be tempted to re-check this in the next few days. Also – as I do this mostly to keep myself fit – the speed and riding geometry are not efficiency optimized in any sense. If I sometimes get my hands on a good road bike, I might check this again from efficiency point of view.
As I started to write this, I googled for bicycling efficiency and came across this article Human power which has a nice chart of approximated calorie consumption / km / person – in which the cyclist is less than 50kcal/km. Endomondo agrees with that, ~520-540kcal for 13,5km.
According to Wikipedia article on Bicycle performance, energy expenditure when cycling is generally 1.62 kJ/(km∙kg). So to compare to that we would get 388045,08 kJ/(2786,87 km*90kg) = 1,547 kJ / (km*kg). That is approximated rider weight only, if we add 15kg for bike + equipment, the expenditure is 1,326 kJ / (km*kg). Which is at least better than generally used figures!
But my point, compared to any commercially available gasoline powered transport, I think cycling and cyclist wins 🙂

Much of updates missing from this page, so let’s continue with something I was going to write here already during winter, but have somehow forgotten…
Life’s been pretty much all work and no play for the past months, my only real ”hobby” being cycling to work and back – but an important achievement for the year was that I managed to extend the bicycling season almost through the whole winter season! In this case ”almost” was caused by a nasty flu I caught in February, so I missed almost a whole month of winter biking. Also some heavy snowing combined with poor maintenance of roads and mandatory work trips made me use car or bus in couple of occasions – perhaps in coming up winter I’ll have time to make a set of documentary images about how bad the conditions can be.
Distance from my home to work is 14km, which makes round-trip of 28km. Also terrain is quite varying as there’s roughly 80m altitude difference on my biking route and logged elevation towards work is over 160m! I’ve never done such a long and regular biking trips before on winter season – mainly because clothing is quite a challenge for such a varying temperatures and weather. Second important factor was that my hybrid bike that I use during summer, is pain to use in snowy environment. During this winter, I’ve logged ~1200km of bicycling from November to March so excluding February it makes average of 100km/week. Yay for my self, but goal for next winter can only be to make the average higher 🙂
Clothing was actually much easier to arrange than I thought, a set of sports underwear combined with good wind-proof outer layer served me well down to -10 degrees… Colder than that it just means more layers or thicker jacket.
But on to the bicycles, to overcome the limits of my hybrid bike, I equipped my MTB for winter season with some spiked winter tires (and SPD pedals). Succesful approach in a sense, that amount of snow wasn’t an issue anymore. Only time becomes now a limiting factor, on a very bad conditions it would take more than double the time to get to work, so it was not practical anymore… Did a one little test run (~2km) after a heavy snowing, logged average speed of 7km/h, so I turned back and took a bus.

Spiked winter tire

So, as topic hints it, I am now on my way transforming into a barefooted runner – because I couldn’t find anymore a new running shoe to my preference.
A little background for this:
About two years back I started to witness odd foot problems, after only a few kilometers of running, my soles (or metatarsus) started to hurt. First I thought this was just caused by excessive training, but as it turned out, problems re arrived immediately even after some time off from running. Second guess for the cause was shoes – so I got myself a new pair but that didn’t help much either, it got better, but the pain still existed and came back after running for a while.
At the time, I was using some heavily shock absorbed (and very supportive) running shoes – as they were supposed to be ”the best”. As this episode caused almost a two months pause in running, I had plenty of time to read through Internet and various forums where I came up some interesting topics about similar issues. It was suggested in couple of threads (sorry, cannot find them anymore, so no reference) that similar pain had been caused by too supportive shoes – and because of that, muscles in soles were supposedly in a bad shape and that is why running would cause excessive stress – and thus the pain.
This seemed like a right conclusion so I got myself a pair of running shoes with very little shock absorption (only in heel), laced them loose (so the muscles in soles would have to actively work while walking) and started to experiment how it would turn out. It was suggested also that stepping with forefoot (or mid-foot) would be better style of running with mildly cushioned shoe, so I started to try that out at the same time.  Needless to say, the transformation was not instant nor fast, as this stresses muscle groups that had almost never been used before. I started with combined walking / jogging (stepping with forefoot) exercises with loosely laced shoes and it seemed that the pain would stay away.
(Note: Ofcourse this was partly caused by the fact that I was at the time also able to run more than before, because I was in a better shape overall due to active training.)

So on this road I still am, and now would have been time to find a new pair of shoes. I went through all the major large sports stores in region, and found only couple of pairs that would actually meet the specs, and found no pair that would fit! So it seems that only thing you can now get in the form of traditional running shoe, is a heavily shock absorbed model. During this hunt for the new shoes, I of course tried out number of different options and only thing I can say of these is that even walking in them makes me seasick due to the wobbly/jelly feel. Also, the shock absorption layers bend so much, that I’d quite surely break my ankle if I’d happen to land my feet in a bit of wrong position (uneven surface, jump, whatever).
Being desperate, and as I had seen some ads about these minimalist shoes, I decided I could try these out – it was anyway closer to what I had than any of the shock absorbed models I had tried. Even got a nice deal (Stockmann happened to have couple of pairs on discount), so I paid around 50euros for a pair of Merrell TraiGlove(s).

First impressions after only a ~10km of running – these are PERFECT! They fit awesomely, are insanely light and are rugged enough so I don’t have to watch my steps too carefully. I have never used running shoes without a sock before, and could still go barefooted in these without getting a blister. Cannot say yet if this was an ultimate running shoe for me or not – I’ll know that in few weeks after I’ve used them  a little bit more.
It seems there has been quite much of a hype or something around this minimalist shoe approach, mostly some nonsense that is it faster to run in such a way or not. Believe what you want to, in general there seems to be way too little of scientific studies of either. But what I want to underline from my own experience is that not pampering your legs unnecessarily can be good. Also I think there’s a long evolution behind how human feet is constructed, so that should also support the barefoot approach. I don’t race, so speed doesn’t matter. I run for my own enjoyment – and keeping myself in a shape.
I don’t run on tarmac (I hate it!), so my favourite track is gravel/sand roads or paths in varying terrain. If you have a similar place to run on – I highly recommend trying these out.