Gravel for beginners, Ornot

We asked people on social media what the wanted to learn about gravel bikes and riding. It turns out that there are a lot of questions. We tried to cover the most important ones in this video.

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Gravel riding basics from our friends Caetie Ofiesh and Jake Stangle. Topics Covered:
– How to corner on loose gravel.
– What to carry in your seat bag.
– 650b vs 700c.
– Bike handling on dirt and loose surfaces.
– Descending steep terrain.
– How to spot poison oak.
– How to start on a steep loose hill.
– Trail etiquette.
– Choosing a line.
– Riding in the hoods vs in the drops.
– Do I need 1x or 2x?

Watching this video won’t make you a pro, but we hope that it’ll answer some basic questions for people interested in getting a gravel bike or riding gravel.

This was filmed on Mt. Tam which is just north of San Francisco. It’s also the “birthplace of mountain biking”. You may notice that some gravel bikes are approaching or surpassing what a typical rigid mountain bike used to be.

For info on trails and fire roads in Marin, be sure to join Marin Bicycle Coalition. Here is a link to their map!
https://www.marinbike.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Marin-Bike-Map-full.jpg

hey I’m Katie I live in San Francisco I ride and race with or not I ride all the bikes and I race some of those too I started riding dirt probably about five years ago and one of things I like about riding dirt is that you’re there’s always more to learn there we go hello I am Jake I love dogs especially this one here and over the past like almost decade I just kind of explored the marine trails and found them with dirt we’re here to kind of impart any knowledge we can help you guys with and hope you enjoy it welcome to kukuku trail so a couple things are really important for steep climbs that I think are a little bit counterintuitive and the main thing is that when you’re on a climb like this that’s like I don’t know agreed this is 15-20 percent you need to scoot your whole body forward on your bike you’re on your hoods but you’re kind of perched above them and the most important thing that you’re trying to do bring your weight forward because one of the biggest reasons you’re gonna have to ditch on the steep climb is because your front wheel starts waggling so one thing I really try to encourage people that are switching in a dirt is to think about your bike and your body has two separate kind of entities you are in a dance with your bike and just like any good dance partner sometimes you let your bike lead sometimes you lead the more you try to exert control over your bike the more things will go poorly sometimes you just need to let your bike kind of lead and do its thing these are my absolute favorite tires of all time the Victoria mess calls I really love it because as I ride out of the city from my house across the Golden Gate Bridge I have a really consistent Center tire tread pattern so I’m not dealing with like crazy lugs that slow me down when you pick tires you don’t think most about what you’re gonna be riding I ride a lot of Road mixed in with hard pack and some loose stuff so I pick a tire that’s pretty wide but has a pretty smooth center section and then a little bit of knob on side one of the most important things you can do for yourself is to get your braking done or most of your breaking down before you hit the corner and you’re slow exit fast second you’re out it’s pedal pedal pedal and get out of that corner fast and you’ll maintain much more speed overall I do this in two ways I have stuff in my bike wallet and that way it’s with me all the time no matter what ride I’m on and then I have specific stuff in each bikes saddlebag and here I’ve got lever tire and then buried under there I’ve got co2 and it Chuck and I have also with me at all times a pump and additionally I keep a patch kit multi-tool oh I’ve got a valve valve core singer and then I’ve got Dyna plugs oh I have my house keys I thought I forgot I’m not exciting safety pins hair tied credit card cash and my driver’s license choosing a line it’s generally something you do you’re kind of always visualizing you’re always planning ahead some surfaces are really awesome for climbing some are really not often what I’m definitely trying to avoid is stuff where like your tire is just gonna struggle you’re gonna spin out this kind of surface I remember a lot when I was first doing this grabbing a lot of rear brake because I was freaked out and wanted to slow down and then your rear end starts chef fishtail so there’s two things that you want to do here number one keep your weight back so that no matter what happens you can adjust to it and number two grab front and rear evenly if you are finding yourself in trouble in some way like you have too much speed or something’s not going right the best thing you can do again going back to this whole dance analogy is just to stay very loose very calm the second you freak out the second you scrab your brakes you’re gonna go down or you’re gonna like absorb a bump through your whole body you’ll get bucked off the question is one by verse to buy if you had no freaking idea what I’m talking one buy is what I have on this bike it means you have one chain ring in the front a lot of bikes in the past like say from four years ago working backwards had two trainings or even before that three I really like the one buy because it keeps things simple it’s less tough to break it’s less weight you just have a lot less chain slot there’s something called a clutch on the back of this derailleur which is super stiff which just helps the bike from just keeping the chain tension really strong number one these are your hoods because I have relatively small hands and I have relatively big hoods on this bike I actually do most of my riding in general in my hoods I tend to only get in my drops when in case you don’t know what poison hook looks like I’m standing next to a bunch of lovely beautiful boys note very very oily you can usually distinguish it because it’s quite shiny that’s all these awful oils you do not want to get on either your body or your bike very very very hard to start because it’s often loose it’s super steep what I personally like to do is to angle my bike on a 45 I clip in whatever kind of whatever my preference photos for me it’s my left and then this way you’re sitting you can get traction into your back wheel tic-tac my way up to climb we preferred to list you flat a lot less often when you do flat you’ve got this hope that it’ll seal up for you and all you have to do is add air or maybe you don’t even have to do that the number one reason to run to bliss though is that you can run lower pressure and you can run lower pressure without 650b references your tire diameter so it’s basically the height of your rim I really love 650b because basically as you can see especially in the back of my bike you can fit essentially a slightly wider tire into a frame then you can 700-seat ultimately the circumference of your tire is about the same between 650 and 700 C it’s kind of like you’re just trading rim for air I think it’s important to say like at a basic level you only need a couple things you need a bike that fits you a bike you can afford and then when it comes to dirt and gravel specifically you want to be that clear is like pretty big tires I would say like forty twos would be a good starting point so that you can comfortably run 40s plus or minus and then you want hydraulic disc brakes because it just makes such a big difference on your descending there is an organization here in Marin called Marin County bike coalition they’re phenomenal they have a trail map that you can either get as a PDF they also when you become a member they send you one like a physical copy it’s a trail map of every bike legal trail in Marin from the Golden Gate Bridge all the way up to Point Reyes player a station trail etiquette some basic things about trail etiquette it’s about being a nice person and it’s about being aware of the effect that your riding has on other people and vice versa and if you are the uphill rider you have right away if you’re the downhill rider you don’t have right-of-way yield to walkers pedestrians anyone that you need to yield to to maintain a safe circumstance call out if you’re gonna pass ding your bell and say something nice think of your entire ride as like one kind of Dancy experience it can be riding to the trails it can be anywhere you can just always be kind of messing around even in the city even on the trails whatever I’ve been doing especially in quarantine a ton of yoga and just thinking a lot about breathing and I just brought my yoga breathing techniques and also techniques I use in climbing to riding I just found that as you take really deep long breaths and let them like let it kind of fill your body especially like your lungs the your back I felt way calmer I felt way more poised I felt like I had a lot more ability to like think rationally and I ultimately rode better it really just helps not only to riding but the entire experience of what it’s like to be out in this beautiful place you