<< Continued from The Cycling Life: Tour de Pants.

As popular as fixies are becoming, you still can’t find them in most bike stores, at least not in Norfolk.

The market for them around here is pretty much restricted to Craigslist, where you can find one or two a day listed for sale. Most fixies are custom conversions, and the people selling them are hobbyists and enthusiasts trading up. The prices range from $200 to $500, usually, depending on the quality of the frame, wheels and components. I decided I didn’t want to spend a lot on a new bike, since I already had a road and a mountain bike. I also felt it would be more authentic if I made my own. So I trolled Craigslist not for a fixie, but for an old road bike that I could convert myself.

Forty dollars later I drove home from a rendezvous at a storage facility, hauling the world’s heaviest piece of shit bike and a sack full of remorse. The Western Flyer 10-speed was a bike from the ‘80s, assembled in Pennsylvania by ignorant trolls who had no regard for the weight of a frame or parts. I nearly cried as I wrestled the 50-pound monster into my basement, berating myself for buying an unsalvageable heap. I shuffled upstairs and admitted to my wife that I had just thrown away $40. 

A couple of days later I began the process of aggressively de-accessorizing the bike, which was spectacularly overburdened. I started with the gears, removing the front and rear derailleur, the shifters and cables. They dropped to the basement floor like a cast-off animal hide. I tackled the brakes next. Removing the levers from the handlebars was easy, but then I confronted one of the weirdest aspects of this bike—the rear wheel had a massive, two-pound steel disc attached to the hub. I’d never seen a bike with such a disc brake before. It looked like it had been engineered for a pickup truck rather than a bike.  I got the caliper off, which weighed a pound or so all by itself, and removed the wheel, but when I tried to remove the disc from the hub I hit a wall. It wouldn’t budge. Pounding with a screwdriver and a hammer only managed to strip away some metal without loosening the disc. Knocking uselessly at this piece of equipment, I felt like a caveman trying to repair a spaceship. I walked away from the bike again for a few days, once more convinced that I was a fool.

Liz’s fixie was a nice one. When she’d arrived at the beginning of the race, the guys had gathered round to admire her carbon handlebars, lifting it to feel the lightness of the frame. A fixie is definitely a fashion accessory, of a sort. But personal taste and odd-ball artistry tend to play a more important role in their assembly than in the design of bikes for the spandex set. Where a road-racer might be impressed by expensive componentry or a super-light frame, fixie hipsters give their bikes a gritty urban look. Two of the guys in the race had painted their frames bright orange, with lime green wheel rims. Battered black was the most common color. Liz, who crosses over from the road-racer scene to the fixie scene, brought a bike that was also a hybrid, as if someone had chopped the roof off a Ferrari.

When we got off the ferry we raced to the next checkpoint, the pedestrian bridge that connects Waterside to the garage on the other side of the street. After that, Liz and I went one way and Ben and Jay went the other. We wouldn’t run into them again until the end of the race. Liz is a more accomplished rider than I am but my gears were giving me an advantage. She let me set the pace and rode behind me as we hurried through the checkpoints. I found myself trying to avoid shifting as I rode, to try to simulate the fixie experience. But I’ve been riding with gears for so long that I naturally tend to shift up or down as needed, maximizing my power. There is no question that you can be more efficient with gears. You never struggle to get going from a dead stop—you just shift to a lower gear and pedal until you get moving fast enough to shift up. At high speeds you shift even higher so you don’t end up pedaling too fast. Gears give you the ability to regulate the power from the engine of your muscles.

After a couple days of cooling off I went back to look at the Western Flyer again and realized I’d been trying to turn the lock ring the wrong way. A couple of hits from the hammer/screwdriver in the other direction and it came loose. That crazy steel disc crashed to the floor a minute later. It was the kind of break-through that makes you feel like a genius when, in fact, you’ve merely stopped being an idiot. But it was the critical step. I sanded the brown paint off the frame, replaced the wheels, cut the drop-bars off my handlebars and turned them over to make a cow-horn. I went to the store to buy a single-gear cog and affixed it to the hub. When I put it all together I had my fixed-gear bike, an ugly, heavy, rugged thing that, nevertheless, seemed to me to contain just a little bit of awesome.

Technically, Ben arrived at the finish line first, but without his teammate Jay, who had fallen behind somewhere after the last check-point. So Liz and I won the Tour de Pants. We were sharing a beer and cooling our heads with a hose when the other teams arrived. Their decision to take the later ferry had slowed them down. Liz and I naturally attributed our win to our age and sagacity. There’s also the fact that I had gears, which probably should have disqualified me. But that won’t happen again. Next time I’ll be riding my own crazy, heavy, unfashionable fixed-gear monster. It’s a goofy bike, and may be hopelessly uncool, but even so, riding it I’ll feel more like I’m part of the bike culture scene. And we’ll see if I can win the next alleycat race when, like the rest of these guys, I’m riding without gears.