My wife has a Giant Devote which we bought with the intention for dual use in both road and touring.
The bike came with Maxxis ramblers which are very much towards the MTB end of gravel, which isn’t a use case for us – we have proper MTB’s that we use for single track rides. so they came straight off.
the road riding use case is 50-80 mile day ride loops from a fixed base (usually home) , 100% on good (for the UK!) roads. solo or pair riding, not group or club. We have switched the tyres to Conti GP5000 All season Tubeless 35 and she is loving them. The stock rims are Giant , 700c, 25mm inner width, alloy . We may change them to something a little bit narrower, carbon, lighter and faster for road use, whilst keeping the Conti GP5000’s on them.
The question is what to tyres run for touring – potentially setting up a second wheelset using the stock alloy rims. This would be running loaded with panniers, camping, 3-7 day durations, almost all road based, but bound to be some % of poorly paved and/or farm access unsurfaced roads to reach camp sites or other locations of interest. She is not keen to run a “bikepacking bags” style setup, more keen for a traditional rear pannier setup she has been used to a long time in the past, which the bike will do fine.
From the touring tyres market there seems to be a choice of only one: schwalbe marathon almotion as they appear to be the only tubeless marathons. concerned that they need a pretty high min PSI though so could feel very stiff. Also there is nothing between 40 (actually a 38c, perhaps a bit thin and needs 50 PSI min) and 50 (835g and perhaps a bit fat). the max the bike will take is a 50 so that may require no mudguards (not sure yet). This is not 1000 mile plus continental touring so not sure if we actually need to go for a marathon at all , but struggling to find anything else so am asking the collective….
I’m spending ages on [bicyclerollingresistance.com](https://bicyclerollingresistance.com), looking at the vast plethora of “road-oriented gravel tyres” thats out there, as those types of tyres are of course 90%+ tubeless, trying to deduce which are suitable for this use case – I’m just looking for “just enough tread to cope with small amount of dirt roads and not get wrecked”. Have looked at Goodyear County (tread looks ok but not widely reviewed, not on [brr.com](https://brr.com) so no idea what the numbers are), Specialised s-works Pathfinder, Pirellli allroad (looks good at first glance but cheaper compound and slow) , Pirelli gravel, and many others, but I’m struggling to find the unicorn with really high puncture resistance score and still reasonably low tarmac rolling resistance (which is what the Almotion does well on) with the right tread.
we are very keen to stay tubeless just to pre-empt that suggestion that may occur, we are converts to that particular religion 🙂 Also this is all UK based touring.
thanks!
by Ok-Shake2076