Colorado Mountain Road Test - SRAM eTap Electronic Shifting

Introduction

So, this post will be a bit unusual. I did a Colorado mountain ride with my friend Pete recently that wasn’t quite epic or disastrous enough to warrant its own post. (For epic click here; for disastrous click here.) Meanwhile, I’ve long wanted to blog about electronic shifting, but I’m not sure I care enough about it to devote a whole post to that, either. So here’s a combo: while telling you about a not-quite-epic ride, I’ll share my firsthand experience with top-end electronic shifting. If you care about neither, read on anyway, because I’ll cover food and booze too.

Executive summary

Fun ride, even though my rental bike’s SRAM Red eTap bit the wax tadpole.

Short version

Our pre-ride carbo-load dinner was exquisite. I rented a very high-end bicycle from a good shop. This bike had electronic shifting, which I was hoping to have some trouble with so I could bag on it, which I’m predisposed to do anyway. I did have some trouble, which proves that at least this brand of top-end electronic shifting is still a pointless expenditure. The ride was fun, hard, and involved a gorgeous dirt road. It wasn’t that epic, though, which is my friend Pete’s fault.

Long version

If you know me well, you know I’ll all about fast cars, fly women, and gold chains. Hmmm. Maybe that’s not quite right. I guess more accurately I’m all about fast bikes, fine literature, and saving money.  And when I go to Boulder, I’m all about time-honored traditions like eating pasta at The Gondolier and suffering through long bike rides. Here’s my plate at the Gondo:

Look, I know some wiseguy among you is going to say, “Those noodles are too thick and ropey and don’t appear to be made of semolina flour.” That may be true, but damn it, that’s not the point. These were good enough for me as a teenager when I went every week for all-u-can-eat, and they’re good enough now. Trust me, I know from good pasta.

And look at that beer! Dogfish Head 90-Minute IPA, one of my very favorite beers. (Before I conceived of this post, I snapped this photo for Beck’sting purposes, to make my pals jealous.)

That’s Pete in the background. He’s my favorite biking pal because he’s way faster than I am but doesn’t seem to hold it against me. He also susses out all the cool routes that invariably feature gobs of climbing and remote dirt roads.

For my rental bike I went to University Bicycles, affectionately known as UBikes, which is arguably the best shop in Boulder (though I also like Vecchio’s Bicicletteria quite a lot). Now, you might not know this, but Boulder is considered a very bike-y place. “Best shop in Boulder” is kind of like being “best brothel in Amsterdam.” (I’m actually not that wild about the comparison I just made, but I don’t have time to go fix it.) Anyway, one cool thing about UBikes is their collection of very cool old bikes like this one.

When I was 13 my friend Nico (also 13) loaned me, for about a year, a Cinelli road frame of similar vintage.  When I think back to how advanced Nico and I were, compared to the current crop of ho-hum teens, I start to sound like an old person.

Last time I rented a bike from UBikes for an epic ride, I waited too long and got a real pile of crap. This time I planned ahead and, almost two hours before the shop opened, reserved a Specialized Tarmac via their website. I got to the shop about ten minutes after they opened and they’d already put on the Look pedals I requested. As the salesman helped adjust the saddle for me, he sent another guy upstairs to “get the batteries.” Batteries? Huh? Oh, wow, this bike sported SRAM eTap electronic shifting! It works like this: there are only two buttons, one per lever. To get a smaller rear cog you tap the right. For a bigger cog you tap the left. To change chainrings you tap both buttons at once.

Is electronic shifting cool? No. I can say that now that I’ve tried it. I have always been tempted to say that without even trying it (kind of like how I can confidently say heroin isn’t cool even though I haven’t tried it, either), but until now I figured I better hold my tongue. Now I’ve tried it and, as I’ll get into later, it’s not foolproof (which of course it needs to be to have any benefit over traditional shifting).

Empirical arguments aside, I will now walk you through why electronic shifting is lame in principle. First, let’s ask the question, what makes a racing bike good? Number one, the bike has got to look cool. Number two, the bike has to go fast. Let’s evaluate eTap on that basis.

Does it look cool? No. Here’s proof.

That Cinelli I showed you a bit ago? That looked cool. Those SRAM derailleurs? With the big hunks of plastic-y material sticking off of them? Those don’t look cool. They look really bad. Now, I know aesthetics are a matter of personal taste, but that doesn’t mean there’s no right or wrong. If you like the look of these derailleurs you are either delusional or have no taste, and I no more respect your opinion than if you said plastic ketchup bottles look better than glass.

Now, speed is another matter. My Giant road bike might not look better than that old Cinelli I had, but overall the Giant is better because it’s faster. That is, the Giant will get me up hills faster, given the same power applied to the pedals, because it’s lighter than the late ‘60s Cinelli. Now, here’s how the whole “is it faster?” question applies to electronic shifting.

(The SRAM Red eTap rear derailleur weighs 239 grams; the SRAM Red traditional weighs 178 grams. The levers weigh about the same between the two types. Etc.)

I guess it could be argued that eTap is better because it’s more foolproof and/or more pleasurable to use. I’ll get to that later.

Just in case you give a shit, here’s the bike I rented.

Great bike. It rode really well … stiff, comfortable, handled well. My only complaint is that it seemed a bit heavier than my Giant. Hmm, I wonder why.

The saddle was pretty comfortable too, which was a relief. You just never know with a rental bike.

I have to question Specialized’s normally spot-on branding here, though. I mean, Toupé? Are you kidding me? Look, marketing guys: since you evidently didn’t grasp this, “Toupé” is one letter away from, and pronounced exactly the same as, toupée, the artificial hairpiece that insecure men wear, which is a front-runner for the most embarrassing product a man could buy. There’s a reason slapstick comedies so often feature a man’s humiliation at having his toupée  blow away or getting it snatched off his head. Given the prevalence of baldness amoung MAMILs (hardly the most glamorous ambassadors of the sport), this is astonishingly reckless branding. If they came out with a women’s version, would they call it the Merkin?

Since I seem to be finding fault with everything, I might as well complain that the helmet UBikes loaned me didn’t have a vent setup that gave me any way to stash my sunglasses. This really surprised me, since every helmet I’ve had in the last 20 years has had sunglasses-friendly vents. But thanks to the Toupé saddle, problem solved!

I finally understand why so many modern saddles have that giant hole in them. (By the way, the above picture provides the only photo evidence that I was actually on this ride. Look closely and you can almost tell what club I ride for.)

But enough about the gear and culture. It’s time to hit the open road! Here’s where we rode, starting from Pete’s house in Golden.

The reason this ride was so short is that although Pete and I both had the day off, he had a noon conference call. I already gave him a hard time about this, but you should pile on. E-mail me your scathing gibes and I’ll pass them along.

We started out by riding up Lookout Road, featured in the US Pro Challenge and, more recently, Phil Gaimon’s successful bid for the new Strava record. We didn’t end up going as fast as Phil. I guess we forgot to hammer. Oh well. We ride Lookout in less than twice Phil’s time, which isn’t bad.

If you’re looking for an open road, Colorado is a good place to start.

I don’t have a whole lot of photos of this ride because I forgot to bring my camera. Fortunately—check this out!—my phone has a camera built in! That sure came in handy.

There was a wonderful section of brand-new bike path for a ways. Then, after another climb, I helped Pete get a new personal record on the Floyd Hill descent. (Actually, we weren’t even thinking about trying to go fast, much less doing anything on Strava. And lest you think we’re daredevils, this was only good for 144th place.)

Alongside the road were some buffalo, or “buffler” in mountain-man parlance. I’m sure these creatures are more majestic when they’re not all fenced in.

The pedaling was hard. After Lookout we braved another Category 2 climb a bit over 7 miles long, taking us to about 8,700 feet above sea level.  That may not sound like much, but I donated blood recently. Also, I’m not very strong to begin with.

Okay, let’s get back to that shifting. First impression? Kind of nifty. It didn’t take long to get used to it (though a couple times, near intersections, I tapped the wrong button.) Once I got used to it, and the novelty wore off, I realized it’s not as fun as traditional shifting. I enjoy mechanisms. After all, we’re messing about with PCs, tablets, phones, and other electronic interfaces all day long. As more and more technologies are designed to be idiot-proof and as automated as possible, what’s left for us to do? I miss the stick shift on my old Volvo. Driving a stick is more fun than letting the car decide when to shift. (And operating the clutch of my old car was more fun than using Geartronic, the so-called “manumatic” transmission of my current Volvo.)

What’s wrong with today’s wealthy cyclists that they don’t want cable-type shifters, especially considering how good they’ve gotten? Why do all these dentists and stockbrokers enjoy being coddled with pushbuttons?

So much for eTap being more fun. So does it shift faster? No. Rear shifting has been practically instantaneous for many years so there is scant room for improvement there. And when shifting the front with eTap, there’s a tiny delay when you tap both buttons before you hear this little whirring noise and the motorized front derailleur moves the chain. Granted, this delay is unimportant; the main factor in response time was never in the lever to begin with—it’s dragging that chain up to the big ring, or nudging it to the little one without letting it fall. The SRAM red front derailleur does just fine, but no better than high-end cable-type front derailleurs.

The last chance for eTap to prove itself superior would be in the “foolproof” department. This is hard to test, of course.  I will concede that cable-type front shifting isn’t perfect; everybody throws his chain once in a while. That being said, one ride on eTap without a missed front shift wouldn’t mean anything. I might go weeks or months, maybe a year or more, without my bike’s front derailleur screwing up. So my only hope for hitting the trifecta—ugly, heavy, non-foolproof—would be eTap happening to screw up within the narrow timespan of my four-hour ride.

About 2/3 of the way into the ride, all the planets lined up. Pete and I reached a point where a steep downhill led right into a steep climb, and I wanted to keep as much momentum as possible. This meant big-ringing it until the very last second and then going for the little chainring. What a perfect testing ground for electronic shifting! You can see where we were, about 43 miles into the ride:

I bombed the downhill (leaving a bit of a gap between me and Pete so maybe I could surge by him triumphantly) and tapped the two buttons at just the right moment. And guess what? The fricking chain fell off! And here’s the really weird part: it came off the right side, as if it had overshot the big ring (which it had already been in) instead of the little one. WTF!?

Now, a defender of this eTap technology might be tempted to blame the rider. But that’s silly; there should be no way to get it to mis-shift. But wait, you might say, what if I had accidentally hit the two buttons twice instead of once? Well, I suppose it’s possible I did that, but electronics should be “smart” enough  to handle this kind of user error. That is, the system should ignore a second click if it comes a fraction of a second after the first one, since obviously nobody would want to shift onto the small chainring and right back to the large. Besides, I’m not a klutz—on an old Schwinn I had with no front derailleur (it had broken off) I used to shift by hand—so I’m 99.9% sure I tapped those buttons just once.

I will continue to play the devil’s advocate and entertain the possibility that the derailleur was poorly adjusted. But remember, this was a ~$6000 rental bike that gets tuned up after every ride. It was built and maintained by arguably the top bike shop in a bicycle mecca. If UBikes can’t get it right, clearly the tolerances of this system are too tight—i.e., it’s literally too high-maintenance—to be practical. I for one would not want to own a bike with such finicky shifting (if adjustment is indeed the problem).

Pete, looking back and seeing that I’d thrown my chain, said, “See you back in Golden,” and rode off. Now, when you throw you chain off the big ring on cable-type drivetrains, it’s easy enough to get it back going again—you click the little lever on the left side to move the front derailleur left, then lift up the back of the bike so the rear wheel is off the ground, give the cranks a turn or two, and you’re back in business. It is the same process every  time so you do it without having to really think. But what would I do here? I had no idea why the bike had mis-shifted, and therefore no idea what chainring the front derailleur thought it was in. I had to look closely at the derailleur before double-tapping again, so the failure of eTap was compounded.

In the final analysis, eTap absolutely does not shift faster, nor is it easier or more enjoyable to shift, nor is it (more) foolproof. To my great delight, electronic shifting turns out to be even shittier than I’d imagined.

To those of you who shelled out a lot of money for electronic shifting: don’t feel bad. I’m not trying to bag on you. It’s your bike and your business and you can still feel good about choosing electronic, and I would never expect you to second-guess your choice based on my brief experience with it. But your derailleurs are butt-ugly and your bike is heavy.

Our third major climb, Douglas Mountain Drive, is a Category 2, mostly dirt, with an average pitch of 9%. Very scenic as well.

Some of the sights were more amusing than beautiful. For example, this one:

What’s amusing about that, you ask? Well, look a little closer:

There are grills on both the upper and lower decks! Why would that be? Maybe it’s in case members of the family can’t get along. “Just for that, I’m going to barbecue tonight, and you’re not invited!” / “Okay, fine, I’ll go downstairs and have my own barbecue! I don’t need you!”

What a glorious early evening climb this was. Being dirt, and steep, it didn’t let us climb out of the saddle much. We settled in for some really nice suffering and an even nicer view.

Of course I couldn’t snap any more photos once the descending began. With the exception of a mile-long climb I don’t even remember, it was all downhill, for 15 miles, back to Pete’s place. Fittingly, my tale ends as it began: with a beer.

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2014 Epic Colorado Mountain Ride - Part 1

Introduction

If you’ve been following albertnet awhile, you may recall that I did a road trip with my family a year ago April to visit Boulder, my old hometown.  One goal of that trip was to do an epic ride with my friend Pete.  Alas, the drive out was marred by a massive blizzard that almost did us in, and all the mountain passes were closed throughout my visit.  Pete and I did a 40-mile flat ride among the snowfields but that was it.  I’ve vowed never again to drive to Boulder in the spring, and Pete and I hatched a scheme to do a 2-part, double-epic ride during August, when snow is much less likely.  Last week, we finally pulled it off.

Who is Pete?

The short answer is, Pete is a former professional bike racer whom I met in the 1985 Red Zinger Mini Classic, where—despite his costing me the overall victory—we became friends.  The long answer requires some background.  When I was a teenager my bedroom was an unfinished basement.  It was pretty dark down there, so I could sleep in good and late during the summer, at least in theory.  Unfortunately, Pete would invariably phone me up first thing in the morning.  I didn’t have an answering machine, nor would I pick up, so it became a battle of wills as I tried to fall back asleep while he let the phone ring and ring.  After like twenty minutes of this continuous ringing, I’d finally go upstairs, pick up the phone, and yell, “You bastard!”  He’d laugh, and then we’d go ride.  That tells you pretty much what you need to know about Pete.

Food

My bike pals and I like to send around e-mail race reports, which sometimes end up on our club’s blog.  My race reports—and also my ride reports, since I almost never race—tend to focus on the food.  Why is this?  Well, food and bike racing are tightly intertwined.  Do we eat to ride, or ride to eat?  Both.  Without massive consumption of starchy food, we’d never be able to finish the super-long rides we like to do.  And without the super-long rides, we’d all be too overweight to get around on our skinny-tired, über -light racing bikes, and/or we’d be embarrassed to ride them.

So, yeah, food.  Pete and I ate big the evening before our big ride.  We went to the Gondolier restaurant, a Boulder institution since 1960. In our teens we used to eat there every week because they had a Tues/Wed Spaghetti Special:  all you can eat, brought to the table, for $1.99. I always ate at least five plates, my record being seven.  Here’s what a plate of Gondo pasta looks like:

My wife has pointed out that watching me eat such vast quantities would be a disgusting spectacle if I weren’t so skinny.  How true this is.  The joke would wear thin if I had to pay for my overindulgence.  During this Boulder road trip, I went to Squeeze In, a celebrated diner in Sparks, Nevada.  There was a wait, and I had to stand around because the bench in the waiting area—which would have accommodated at least five cyclists—was filled by this giant tattooed guy and his wife.  The guy was interrogating the hostess about whether this was the place featured on some TV show, and whether his burger would be like on the show, with the cheese oozing out past the bun onto the plate.  (He gestured very precisely to illustrate this.)  The hostess replied, “I’m not sure if the cheese will do that, but if it doesn’t, just send your burger back and have the cook add a few more slices of cheese.  Don’t worry, we’ll do whatever it takes to make you totally stuffed.  We’ll roll you out of here on a damn gurney if that’s what you want.”  (Did she really say this?  Of course not.  But I’ll bet she was thinking it.)

Anyway, at the Gondo I had some garlicky rolls, three plates of pasta, and four slices of my brother’s large everything pizza.  This was definitely less than I used to eat as a teen, but I do have some fat reserves now, and anyway I’d had a big lunch.

Six Dark Thirty

Our ride would be something like 100 miles with over 10,000 feet of climbing.  That might not sound very hard, but Pete’s house in Golden is at about 6,000 feet elevation and we’d be climbing to an elevation of over 11,000 feet, twice, and finishing at around 9,000 feet.  That would give us a net elevation gain of about 3,000 feet.  We figured we’d better get an early start.  I set my alarm, which was a pity because I was crashing in Pete’s basement, which was nice and dark and would have been a great place to sleep in good and late, just to right an old wrong.

My alarm went off, I dragged myself out of bed, and I headed up the stairs, huffing and puffing because my sea-level lungs were ill equipped for the altitude.  There Pete was, slouching on the sofa, flipping me the bird.  He was ticked because his little daughter had climbed into bed with him at 1:30 a.m., following which he hadn’t slept well.  This came on top of several nights of very little sleep due to his occupation.  Of course none of this was my fault, but he could legitimately begrudge me all the sleep I’d been getting during my vacation.

Here we are, early in the ride, at the Red Rocks Amphitheater.  At least, I think that’s where we are in this photo.  To be honest, I know Pete said something about it but I wasn’t paying enough attention.

After Red Rocks we climbed Squaw Pass for like two hours straight.  We’d both had some knee trouble leading up to the ride but for now our knees (and legs) were behaving.  I clicked through the data screens on my bike computer and was thrilled to discover that we’d climbed for over 25 miles, meaning we must surely have broken the ride’s back … right? 

Well, not really.  I mentioned this impressive stat to Pete, who said, very casually, “I guess that means we’ve got about 30 more miles of climbing to go.”  Man, that really took the wind out of my sails.  I could almost hear my resolve hissing out of me, like air from a punctured raft.  Or was that my breathing?  Near the top of the pass we stopped for a breather.

 Pete is trying to smile, but you can see it’s faked.  Look in his eyes:  they tell the real story.  There is definitely suffering there.  You see, he forgot to train for this ride.  His longest ride of the year was 80 miles, his second-longest 50 miles.  And then there’s the sleep deprivation.

I wasn’t doing so hot either.  If you look closely you’ll see fear in my eyes, because I’d already drawn 100 miles worth of breaths in half that distance.

We descended to the Mount Evans visitor center at Echo Lake, which is about halfway up Mount Evans.  If we’d been real men we’d have taken a left and ridden to the summit, which at over 14,000 feet is the highest paved road in North America.  But since we know we aren’t real men—this is made embarrassingly evident by our compact cranksets—we had nothing to prove and stopped at the visitor center for Cokes and to get out of the rain, which had just started up in earnest.

We were in the visitor’s center awhile.  It was pouring rain and I went two rounds in the restroom.  I was tired enough that I found the noise of the high-powered hand dryer almost intolerably oppressive.  In the gift shop were all kinds of bumper stickers, t-shirts, and other stuff saying things like “I made it – Mount Evans, 14000 feet!”  I guess some people consider that making it all the way up there in a car is a pretty big deal.

Out on the porch I saw a middle-aged motorcyclist putting on waterproof rain pants.  To make conversation, I said, “I wish I had some of those.”  She retorted, “You should have brought some.  It rains all the time up here.  Are you from out of town or something?”  I allowed that I’d lived in California for a couple decades, and she snorted, “That’s what the weather report is for.”  I could have pointed out that any weather report that didn’t forecast possible thunderstorms at this altitude would be delusional, so actually the forecast was immaterial.  But that wasn’t the point. 

The point is, bike racer types don’t have saddlebags to carry all that gear, and we’re prepared to suffer accordingly.  I’ve been caught in plenty of rainstorms, and even snowstorms, without sissy waterproof pants.  I could have pointed out that I’m made of better stuff than she, that I don’t need a gasoline engine, and that what she might consider hazardous—e.g., a cold rain—is to me just a nuisance.  “At least your jacket is orange,” she said.  “Yep, it’s pretty visible,” I replied.  “No, that’s not what I meant,” she continued.  “I mean it’s orange like the Denver Broncos.”  Maybe my parents were right all along:  I shouldn’t talk to strangers.

The weather gods, as if to mock this motorcyclist, shone on Pete and me:  the rain stopped at the exact moment we climbed back on our bikes.  We had a sweet descent to Idaho Springs, getting a bit cold and wet before becoming warm and dry again, and then began our second long grind, this time up Berthoud Pass.  As we regained the higher elevations, the sky darkened again and we heard thunder.  We were getting close to the tree line, aka timberline, which (as you can see in this photo) looks a bit like male pattern baldness.

By the way, in addition to energy drink and gels, I ate a lot of Lara bars during this ride.  Not only are they yummy (or did they just seem yummy because I needed them so bad?), they pack more calories for their size and weight than other energy bars.  No, I’m not a weight freak, but when your jersey pockets are overstuffed, and you have like four bars in there, every bit helps.  (I am not sponsored by Lara bars or I’d be forbidden to tout them like this.)

I forgot to wear my Road ID bracelet, which was unfortunate because it seemed like any moment Pete might just ride away from me, leaving me for dead.  So I reminded him that his best protection against being struck by lightning would be to crouch low over his bike and ride right next to me, so I’d be the tallest object around.  People do get struck by lightning up here, so maybe I shouldn’t joke about it, and perhaps I should take the threat more seriously.  But compared to the threat of being run over, how serious is the lightning threat, really?  And what are we supposed to do, skip the ride entirely?  Stay home and ride the trainer?

I was breathing good and hard all the way up the climb, but at least it was that delicious-smelling air that you get before and after a rainstorm.  I was hit by about half a dozen raindrops before we made the summit of Berthoud Pass.  A friendly motorcyclist, who found it in herself not to chide us for our foolish lack of raingear, snapped this photo.

I would like to point out that Pete’s bike doesn’t actually have a giant sheepskin-covered saddle.  That’s just a rock in the background.  It’s also not the case that we deliberately set up the photo so as to be on opposite sides of the Continental Divide, as my wife had thought.  We’re not nearly that clever, especially when our brains are deprived of oxygen.

The point of this next photo is the sky, but it didn’t come out right.  I forgot my camera on this ride and had only my smartphone.  That’s why there are so few action shots:  it’s hard to handle the phone while riding and I’d hate to drop it.

So, yeah, we did finally get really rained on during our descent to Winter Park, but I didn’t mind.  After all, we’d defied the odds all day; we could have just as easily been rained on for hours.  Besides, we knew we’d have a hot shower waiting for us at the end.

Food, revisited

We chilled out in the condo for awhile.  (Actually, we warmed up.)  Outside, it rained steadily up until it was time to walk into town for dinner, at which point the rain stopped.  At a little brewpub Pete knew, we started our feast with nachos, which were terrible because of vulcanized faux-cheese goo, but it didn’t matter because we subsequently hit upon the pure genius of ordering both sliders and burgers. 

For a place with such crappy nachos, the sliders and burgers were delicious.  I ate all my fries and most of Pete’s.  And I broke my vow of temperance (undertaken to prepare for the upcoming Everest Challenge) because beer does such a nice job of relaxing tired muscles.  After all, this had been just a warm-up ride, to get us fit for the real ride two days later.  Visit albertnet again soon, because I’ll be posting that story next.  Here’s a little teaser though:  Pete showed me the Strava-generated Day 2 route on his phone beforehand, saying casually, “I think it’ll actually be a bit less than 170 miles.”

Update:  you can read about the Day 2 ride right here!

Stats and maps

Since I’m not on Strava and you wouldn’t be following me if I were, here are some statistics and a couple maps of our ride.  Most of these stats are from my bike computer, which understates the climbing due to its dependence on barometric pressure measurement, which isn’t very accurate when the weather is spotty. 

• 97.3 miles
• 6:18:40 ride time
• 15.0 mph average speed
• 73 rpm average cadence
• 10,581 feet cumulative elevation gain
• 49.6 miles total climbing
• 7,153 feet cumulative elevation drop
• 39.3 miles total descending