Don't Buy A Gravel Bike Before Watching This Video

oh my goodness morning trainiacs [Music] what i ended up doing there was a ftp vo2 max kind of building session four times eight minutes just above ftp two minutes rest in between see hard wow i did that on the gravel bike here now gravel biking has really only been around in the last three four years seriously but it is taking off i think it's gonna take over the world because it's so so versatile with a lot of people buying their first gravel bikes there's a lot of questions that people are asking online what's the difference between a gravel bike and a road bike how much faster is a road or triathlon bike versus a gravel bike can you use gravel bike for all of your training what type of gravel bike should you get and what features should you look for in a gravel bike well buying a bike might seem simple it can be one of the most expensive mistakes that you can make i know i made that 1600 mistake early on in my endurance sports career so if you watch this video to the end what i'm gonna go through are all of those questions what are the must-haves and the you know what don't worry about it with buying a gravel bike what should you be looking for so you don't make that mistake that i made many moons ago and my answer to a lot of those questions being someone who is known online as triathlon taren is really going to surprise you guarantee now you might be saying hey taryn it's really easy for you to say well you need a try bike and then you need a road bike and now you need a gravel bike because hey you are sponsored by canyon you get them for free well i'm actually gonna flip that on its head and say that if you can only afford one bike it should be a gravel bike not those other bikes what watch this video to the end and you'll find out why buying that bike your first bike or any bike is a really big decision because it's a lot of money and i made the mistake when i first got into road cycling and triathlon that i went you know what i'm not gonna do a whole lot of thinking about this i'm just gonna go in and buy an entry-level bike because i'm an entry-level person and that is actually how i made that 1600 mistake we'll go in here i'll explain how you should approach buying this bike or any bike let's talk about the differences between a gravel bike and a road bike because on the surface they're gonna look very very similar but they're designed for two slightly different things however you can duplicate the uses if you get the right gravel bike for starters the wheelbase of a gravel bike is going to be a little more slack a little bit more relaxed that means the back wheel and the front wheel are a little bit further from each other that's because on a road bike you need to be able to handle a little bit better it needs to be twitchy so that you can respond quicker whereas on a gravel bike you're typically not riding in a pack you're not doing really really sharp turns you want a little bit more comfort so that more slack geometry gives you that little bit of a smoother kind of ride and that smoother kind of ride is what a lot of the differences between a road bike and a gravel bike amount to a gravel bike is going to have a couple of comfort features to absorb that chatter on trails and gravel so for instance with the canyon grail here you can see that i've got a two level base bar you spend most of your time actually in here when you're just riding along and this is going to absorb some of the shock a really good gravel bike is going to have something to absorb that shock in the front end also a lot of gravel bikes are going to have some sort of feature on the grail here it's a bit of a split seat post that's going to absorb a little bit of the shock there so you're going to have a little bit less chatter up front here you're going to have a little bit less chatter there and then combine that with the other feature that's different is the tires these tires are kind of like in between a mountain bike tire and a road bike tire whereas most road bike tires max out at a clearance of around 28 millimeters wide this is actually a 40 millimeter wide tire and there's still clearance for even more you can get a really really big tire and what most people are doing when they start getting into gravel riding is similar to what they do with a mountain bike they make it tubeless and by making it tubeless you can put less psi into the tire and that's going to allow it to still run just as fast have just the same rolling resistance as a tire that's really really pumped up but it's going to be able to roll that bit smoother and give less of a shock to your body because the tire is just a little bit softer and more compliant overall it's designed for light trail work but that doesn't mean that you can't do other riding with this bike and that's where it gets super interesting now you might be saying well it's only really meant for light trails and there's more resistance and it's really just built for comfort and not speed so it's slower and it's designed for something that i'm not racing on and people may be thinking well like why would you buy a gravel bike well if you're thinking that you're not looking at it quite right yes it's designed for being slack and a little bit more comfortable so you can take this gravel bike and not just do gravel but you can do long bike packing endurance rides like huge adventures the vegan cyclist did a seven day bike packing trip and everything was mounted to this grail that he had you can also use this for road riding if you just switch out the wheels and instead of having to buy an entire new bike if you have the same gear ratio you still have the same set of brakes you just have a narrower tire and a wheel set that is designed more for road cycling we have lots of people that in our group ride they actually are riding a gravel bike for the road bikes so even though it's a little bit more slack it's not quite as responsive if you are a good rider and you have good bike handling skills and you know the people around you you can ride plenty fast on this now speaking of speed it is going to be slower but not drastically slow that ride that i did this morning i ended it just under an average of 30 kilometers an hour right around 18 miles an hour if i had done that on a suped up road bike probably would have been around 35 kilometers an hour somewhere around 21 miles an hour so you can still go fast on this and that's even with still these gravel specific tires so switch it out to road tires and i bet you it would be almost right up to that 34 kilometers an hour that i would see on a road bike the gear ratio is going to be different so that's why i would recommend having a full set of road wheels so you can get the right gear ratio if you want to ride this with rode now finally here's the really interesting thing because it is very similar to a road geometry you can theoretically slap a set of arrow bars on here and do a triathlon now when we start looking at a gravel bike that can be on gravel that it can be in trails and you can use it similar to a mountain bike you can swap out the wheels and do road riding on it you can then slap a set of arrow bars on it and do a triathlon now is it going to be ideally suited for absolutely all of these no it's a gravel bike it's built for gravel but you can set this up for all of those other different sports you can't say that for a try bike you can't say that for a road bike it just doesn't work with all of the tolerances and clearances and the setup of those bikes it doesn't allow them to be as versatile as this bike is this bike is anywhere like somebody said to me a couple of weeks ago well where do you ride a gravel bike anywhere you want bro so let's say you're bought in you're thinking about buying gravel bike what are the specific things that you need to look for when you are buying it number one you ideally want to make sure that the wheels are tubeless compatible taking out the tubes being able to run that lower psi is going to be way more comfortable than if you've got tubes in there you want to make sure that the handlebars and the seat have some sort of comfort feature built in it doesn't have to be the two-step or the split but in a lot of cases you're gonna want some sort of feature beyond just the low psi on your tubeless tires to get that chatter on the bike if you are looking at using this for a tri bike you want to make sure that the handlebar setup can accept a pair of clip-on aero bars this canyon grail doesn't actually really have that ability but the new grizzle canyon bike does have just a more traditional tube style drop bar and you can clip on to that as far as price point goes this is where i want to make sure that you don't end up in that situation where you're wasting a thousand fifteen hundred dollars i don't look at a gravel bike the same way that i look at a fat bike a fat bike i look at is like it is not meant for performance so you can go and buy an 800 fat bike and it's gonna do the same job essentially as a two three four thousand dollar fat bike albeit just not as fast and not as nice but because you're not using it for performance and in most cases people are just buying a fat bike just to get out in the winter hey 800 bucks it still gets you out whereas with a gravel bike you are probably going to want a little bit of performance you are going to maybe want to do some intervals you are maybe going to want to do some road riding on it you are maybe going to want to actually do some racing on or some group riding or do that triathlon so in that case i start looking at it from the standpoint of like what do you need how much do you need to spend to make sure that you are getting a good enough bike that it's going to perform well while not setting yourself up to lose a ton of money because of the depreciation of getting this super expensive bike and this is how i recommend that you approach all bike purchases generally speaking i recommend that people stay out of that sub 2 000 range for a bike that is built for performance the reason for that is because they depreciate a lot they depreciate for one because their group sets are entry level group sets and not a lot of people want to buy a used entry-level group set on the bike and they depreciate a lot because the vast majority of people that are getting into riding are buying those entry-level bikes and maybe giving them up more often than people who are dedicated to cycling so craigslist and kijiji's and ebays of the world are just flooded with used entry-level road bikes gravel bikes try bikes and that just drives down the price so when you buy that entry-level bike and you want to move up and on from it which everyone does i guarantee it you're going to be selling it for peanuts in my case i basically sold a 1500 bike for i think 400 bucks just 15 months later so the way that i would approach it is if you can buy a bike that is over two thousand dollars new and buy used for under two thousand dollars great what you wanna look for is a group set that is sram force or higher this is like shimano ultegra or higher so shimano ultegra shimano dura ace sram red sram force these are group sets and builds that are not that entry-level shram or shimano group set that is going to depreciate really really quickly so save your money where you can so you can spend a little bit extra on if you are going to clip on some aero bars or you don't have to do this but you can get yourself a pair of gravel cleats and shoes again you don't have to i rode for the first three months of this bike's lifespan in road shoes and was perfectly fine and if you do that you can save that money to get yourself a pair of road cycling wheels so definitely strongly consider getting a gravel bike it makes riding so much more enjoyable because you can get out you can explore you can do all different types of riding on this bike because it is so versatile you can still do all of your intervals and hard training on it like i did today i went and ripped intervals as if it was just a regular road bike and you know what gravel is my favorite color right now now depending on when you watch this our training app at app.mymotive.com might yet have it should be like beginning of july we're hoping the ability to actually put in specific road rides crit races cycling specific races enduro races grand fondos cycling races that are done with plans and these plans are done by dylan johnson the youtuber who we've had on our podcast and we work with to create those plans so really really good training so if you're seeing this after and you want some cycling specific training or triathlon training or run training it'll all be there at app.mymotive.com so gravel great n plus one bike or a great first bike have fun and uh if you aren't already subscribed hit the subscribe button below later trainiacs

Channel: Taren's MōTTIV Method

Views: 537,792

Keywords: triathlon, triathlete, triathlons, fitness, triathlon tips, triathlon training, triathlon taren, beginner triathlon training, beginner triathlon tips, beginner triathlete, triathlon training tips, triathlon (sport), beginner triathlon, triathlon for beginners, gravel bike, gravel bike vs road bike, best gravel bikes 2021, best gravel bikes, canyon grail, cycling, gravel bikes, gravel bike riding

Id: rJ-wpzU204c

Length: 13min 21sec (801 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 01 2021