Specialized Cold Weather Kit

December 13, 2010

It’s not often (ever) that I put two items in the same review. I feel obligated to, this time, because after going through the outtakes from yet another bike-related product photo shoot in which I am wearing these two pieces, I realize that when it’s time to ride bikes and it’s not summer, I reach for these.

You have to understand – when Specialized gave me these to try out, it was at Crankworx last summer when temps were into the ’90s. The very sage Rachael Lambert told me she’d brought me cold weather gear because I was living in the northwest. It was a real scorcher that day so I was just kind of, “mmmhmmm….?” but I have to give props to Rachael and to Specialized for knowing what they are talking about. I’ve never once been uncomfortable in this gear, with the exception of a few days that got a tad bit warm. Going through my photo album, there is me in my Specialized gear, on a bike shoot, on a bike food shoot, on a bike TRAIL shoot…it’s starting to look like all my pictures were taken on the same day. My blog page looks really damn boring because I wear the same thing on every bike trip. So after seeing the hundreds of pictures I’ve got of me in this getup I have to share the joy with the readers. So I highly recommend to you the following:

Specialized Activate Jersey

My current jersey of choice (as I’ve made pretty clear). Light yet warm, full-zippered for versatility, and very sharp looking, the Activate Jersey accommodates temps from the mid-fifties way down into the thirties. Put a lightweight jacket on top and you’re good into the teens.

Specialized Therminal RBX Knicker

You WILL be warm in these. And they look great, feel great, and are just plain awesome. The entire front panel is made of some miracle fleece that is smooth and silky on the outside and fuzzy, cozy and warm on the inside. Quite by accident I wore these on the Mt. Baker Ride 542 Hill Climb this year – I say by accident because I’ve never done that kind of race so I had no idea what to wear. It was miserable, horrible, lousy terrible rainy weather – just a deluge – and freezing cold. But I had to ride 25 miles up a mountain so I knew I’d have some serious exertion to contend with. What to wear? “Oh what the heck, these are the only knickers I have that don’t have holes in them,” was my logic. Good thing for me I’m such a ragamuffin or I’d not ever realized how great these knicks are. They didn’t exactly keep my dry (NOTHING could have kept me dry) but they were perfectly warm. I got done with the race in AWE of these knickers. Ever since then they’ve been my default. Oh, and the chamois is good, but a little squirrely if you know what I mean. This problem might be alleviated with proper sizing – I always go a size up in bike pants – so perhaps they’re just a little big, hence the shifting. Honestly? The problem is this weird ridge that runs right down the middle of the chamois. I don’t like this ridge so much. It goes where it shouldn’t go. It’s tolerable, but sometimes I’m just left going….”er…?” after a ride. Interpret that how you will. I’m sure that chamois(es?) are personal so I’ll leave that final decision up to you. It never stops me from wearing my favorite knicks though.

So there you have it. My bike outfit. Forever and ever. Or at least until it gets hot again.

Specialized Safire Bike

September 20, 2010

The Background

I was lucky, I guess. My first “serious” bike shop – the one I bought my first high-end, full suspension MTB from – was a good one. I didn’t even really know that there was much of an issue with women and bike shops. After all, I had bought my bike from a shop that had always seemed to treat me fairly, kindly, and with respect. They had never talked down to me or ignored me or any of those things bike shops are known for. If I were not in possession of the direct-sales industry connections that I now benefit from, I would buy another bike from that shop and go well out of my way to do it. So I had a great experience and a good few years of happy go lucky cluelessness about the bike industry.

Since then I’ve learned that bike shops aren’t woman-friendly places for the most part. They don’t stock women’s gear, they don’t stock any women’s saddles but for the ubiquitous Terry butterfly, and if you’re female they will usually at best condescend to you, at worst ignore you, and usually try to rip you off for the cost of parts. I know what brake pads cost, bike shops, and it is NOT $60. So this unpleasant realization about bike shops kind of happened to coincide with the growth of Geargals, which meant that I was always swimming in demo gear and didn’t have to shop for stuff anyway. I also gained a bike wrench boyfriend, which solved the parts/labor overcharging problem (or did it? Hmmm). So, freed from the tedium of shopping, I stopped going to bike shops because I didn’t have to. I didn’t even think much about the whole thing except for once or twice when I had to shop for shorts.

Then one day I saw this article on bikehugger about women and bike shops, and its follow up articles. The accompanying comments made me, well, pissed off. A bunch of dudes basically saying there’s no problem and that if there is one it’s basically women’s fault. That type of thing makes me angry. You know, “Argh! Head Geargal Smash!” kind of angry. The dismissive “most bike shops can fit a small person” comment was the final straw. WOMEN ARE NOT JUST SMALL MEN. We ride differently, we have different centers of gravity, and different pressure point issues. Our hips are different, our legs are different, WE ARE DIFFERENT. Why didn’t anyone get it? Most men have no idea what it’s like to try to excel at a sport with equipment made just perfectly exactly not for their bodies. In bikes, women of my size aren’t even “caught” by the body weight curve that most shocks are optimized for. How can that not make a difference?

The crew over at Specialized were also affronted, and took the time to write a reply. For some reason, that reply didn’t garner nearly as much – or any, really – controversy. Like, zero comments after DOZENS of comments on the original article. Weird. But I was still interested that they were interested, and I proposed a special kind of bike test. Specialized has developed a “ground up” line of women’s bikes and I wanted to find out if it made that much of a difference. I proposed to ride the women’s bikes and then ride the comparable men’s model, and report on the difference. My idea was met with enthusiasm and I was invited to join the Specialized crew in Whistler for Crankworx, where I could try the bikes to my heart’s content.

The Test

Within ½ hour of my arrival in Whistler, I was met by Rachael Lambert from Specialized and checked into a hotel, my personal bike was stored, my car whisked away to a valet, and I was in my bike gear and ready to ride. I love these sorts of events because putting faces to the company image never fails to be an eye opener. All of a sudden the big corporate logo is a person or a group of people, smiling at me, talking to me, and going out for a beer with me, and Crankworx was no different. All of a sudden that big stylized “S” was a human, and she was ready to ride with me.

I was presented with a Specialized Safire bike, told we were headed off to ride with about five others: Rachael and Amy from Specialized, Tyler Maine and his wife Sara from pinkbike.com, and, confusingly enough, Rachael’s boyfriend Tyler. What are the odds of that? I don’t know about you, but meeting two people of the same name is more confusing to me than meeting two people of different names. If they have the same name I always think I’m forgetting something. But here I was, riding with two Tylers, feeling the pressure of remembering they were both named Tyler. I know, I have weird problems. The gist is, I was plonked onto the bike that had been quickly and efficiently fitted to me, and led down a path in the gorgeous Whistler weather.

Confession time: occasionally I have no idea what is going on around me. Sometimes I just don’t bother to get all the pertinent information and I just go with the flow, especially when traveling and, shamefully, even more especially when traveling for Geargals when others are making all the arrangements for me. As the boss lady of two companies I’m usually calling the shots; having someone else do it is the best vacation ever. So when Rachael said to Tyler “Do you want to go to cut your bars first?” I figured we had to go make some adjustments to Tyler’s bike and didn’t think much of it. It seemed like a weird and time consuming thing to have to do just after everyone had gotten ready to ride, but I was in travel mode and ready to accept whatever came my way. So off we went down a paved bike path, me imagining that we were going to stop at a bike shop to cut Tyler’s bars so that he would be better fitted to his bike. Then we swerved off onto rocky, rooty, technical singletrack. Strange, I thought to myself, to take this route to a bike shop, but flow-going as I was, just kept pedaling and enjoying the experience. After about 20 minutes we all stopped at an intersection to regroup and I saw the trail name on a placard: “Cut Yer Bars.” Oh.

You see, I wasn’t thinking much about what the plan was; for once others were at the helm so I could just think about the bike. I was riding a medium frame Safire, Specialized’s new five inch travel XC bike. It’s been a while (well, a few months at least; an ETERNITY for a gear tester) since I rode a new bike and I was very keen to finally feel the difference in a frame designed for women. Specialized has spent considerable engineering resources on developing and marketing a “ground-up” women’s bike; one that isn’t just a modified version of a men’s bike. This is the Safire, and there’s no “equivalent” men’s bike in the lineup. The Safire is the Safire and it stands on its own. Cool.

The first thing I noticed, and I mean the VERY FIRST thing, was that the suspension was quite frankly awesome. I really have a hard time tuning my suspension juuuuust right so I was elated to be bunny hopping around the parking lot with everything feeling perfect right out of the gate. chatted with Rachael about it, and she revealed that the shocks had been specially designed and tuned for the female rider. How is this different from the male rider, you might ask? Well, the average male rider is 180 lbs. All shocks have to perform with that weight as the most optimal; the middle of the bell curve so to speak. Well, I am 130 lbs. I am not even caught by the low end of the curve for a normal shock. I feel this, I really do. Suspensions are fussy for a rider without the oomph to compress them; they feel rigid and stiff, noncompliant and headstrong. I’m always fiddling with something, even on my personal bike which I consider to be one of the best on the market (which, full disclosure now, is not a Specialized. I had never ridden Specialized bikes until this trip). The Safire had a very welcoming suspension, one that worked the way it is supposed to. And I never really knew how it was supposed to work until riding the Safire. It really was just mind blowing.

With mind sufficiently blown, and bike budget also already blown for the year, I asked Rachael hopefully if I would be able to fit my personal bike with this miracle front fork and rear shock. Sadly, no; they were part of the Safire design and wouldn’t work with just any bike. Lesson one: ground-up really means ground-up. We set about touring around the Whistler singletrack. And this is when things started to get…less straightforward. The suspension kept performing perfectly. The rest of the bike was hit and miss. I didn’t fall in love immediately like so many others seem to have; that was apparent pretty quickly. My task, then, was to figure out why not.

As we made our way around Cut Yer Bars, I noticed that I couldn’t find a comfortable gear and I felt that my cadence was either way too high or I was pushing way too low of a gear; no middle ground. My legs felt like a hamster on a wheel. Finally a light went on and I figured out that the Safire was equipped with short 170cm cranks rather than the standard 175 cm cranks. Rachael told me that every component of the Safire is sized according to the frame size, so a size medium Safire (which is like a Small in a men’s frame) comes standard with 170cm cranks. Maybe many people wouldn’t have noticed, but I noticed. Why? Because I am pretty strong and use a lot of power and leverage as opposed to finesse. Now, I might get used to the smaller cranks if I use them for a while; they make sense. Or do they? What is so different about a 5’5” woman vs. a 5’5” man when it comes to cranks? Don’t women typically have longer legs and justify longer cranks? I mused whether it might not be a good idea for the bikes to be spec’ed according to the purchaser’s request. Would the average rider know the difference between cranks, or would he or she even know his or her preference? Would tons of dudes riding small frame bikes suddenly find epiphanic nirvana by trying smaller, more proportional cranks? No clue. I do have a clue, though, that if a bike manufacturer were to try it on dudes, the idea would be roundly rejected because dudes don’t like to face up to the fact that they are not all 6’2”. So, they tried it on the women’s line, instead. Perhaps women will be more open to that change. But it didn’t work for me; I like my longer cranks; but possibly only because I’m so used to them now.

So that’s one thing. On decently smooth singletrack and straightforward obstacles, the Safire was a star and I liked it. I couldn’t find anything I didn’t like about it until we rode a trail that seemed to mostly consist of rocks and ladders thrown together in a haphazard way (that’s Whistler XC for you). I could suddenly hardly ride anything. The front end of the Safire felt squirrely and rebellious, difficult to control and unpredictable. I started to struggle and wound up doing more walking than riding. After inexplicably stuffing the front wheel on nothing and performing a low-speed endo, I took the bailout route and headed back to the village, feeling dazed and wondering what had happened in the few short hours between leaving the parking lot on a tuned-suspension high and slinking home on a paved road on a bike that suddenly felt too small and toy-like. I longed for my beefy all-mountain rig, if only to save face and show my new companions that I wasn’t completely hopeless.

Thinking about it and still wincing from the ego blow, admittedly grasping for an excuse for my struggles, I noted the down-turned stem setup on the Safire and asked about it. My wounded pride was clamoring for attention so I don’t quite remember the answer about why it was set up that way, but I agreed to ride the bike again the next day with the stem reversed per my preference. I hoped for a different experience but didn’t feel hopeful that I would love the Safire any more, or any differently, than I already had experienced. The next day would tell.

In the meantime, I was lost in thought. What had I expected out of that first ride on the Safire? It’s hard to say. I live in a dream world of sports-related problems easily solvable by the best and newest gear solutions, so it’s tough for me to get out of that mindset when I dabble in the bike industry. Can a bike solve all my problems? When I was a beginner, yes, it could. Stepping up to a high end bike four years ago ramped up my riding like nothing else could. But now that I’ve been on a selection of high end bikes for a few years, the curve is much shallower. It’s down to personal preference and personal riding style, now, and I can’t expect a bike – any bike – to make a huge difference in my riding. It’s up to me to figure out what a bike is meant to do and evaluate how well it does it.

I retired to the social scene of Crankworx to visit with clients and to ruminate on the ride. I ended up spending the evening riding around aimlessly, jokingly, with a couple of long distance friends – rowdy, highly skilled freeriders. We rallied around the village, trying random stunts and goofing off, which, though fun, still had me mostly sulking to the side even on my dependable 6X6, too intimidated to ride even the skills park and too embarrassed to take a trip around the baby pump track. Maybe it was the difference in uniform: spandex-clad, clipped-in, cross-country me riding alongside armor-wearing, 9 inch travel bike riding, flat pedaled, full-face-helmeted them. Perhaps it had something to do with the constant cries of pain and emanating from my companions along with the accompanying broken bones (really!) and torn skin as they slid, fell, and scraped along the ladders and ramps, but nonetheless – I felt cowed after the ride on the Safire.

Was it the bike? Was it me? Was the women’s design not what I hoped? I’d no idea. All I could do was turn up the next day and ride bikes. So ride I did. Rachael had somehow found the time to swap the stem and have the bike ready and waiting the next morning, and off we went, just the two of us. A ways into the ride I confided that I was having trouble controlling the front end. It just would not stay grounded; it was maddening. I don’t mind a light front end but I couldn’t keep the wheel straight, either. Rachael immediately suggested dialing down the travel, which did help some. My all-or-nothing nature held me back from trusting the bike, though. On descents I squeaked in terror and unclipped when confronted by a ladder or switchback. I let Rachael drift ahead so she wouldn’t hear the telltale clip clop of my bike shoes on wood planks.

We chatted a bit about the bike setup and my thoughts about it. The bar was much, much skinnier than the one on my personal bike – I think probably six inches skinnier. That’s a big difference. Since I opt for speed and power as my weapons of choice while on a bike, it makes sense that I like the stability and more forgiving nature of a wider bar. It also stands to reason that after a season with a big bar, I wasn’t as tuned to the small controlled movements necessary to successfully run a narrower bar. Moving from a skinny bar to a wider bar is easy; going back is hard. No wonder I was afraid to try the ladders and skinnies; I couldn’t steer!

I had come to love and trust that dialed-for-me suspension, though, so I got cheap thrills out of drops and steep rolls. As long as it wasn’t life-threatening I could do it and did do it, all the while hoping that someone would see me unhesitatingly taking on steep inclines and rolling drops. The suspension never once let me down and I still think often about how specifically right it felt.

Next up I took out the closest comparable bike in the men’s/unisex lineup; the Camber. I am shamed to say that almost immediately I liked it better than the Safire. It felt taller, more stable, trustworthy, and repsonsive to pedal power. When in doubt, apply power and you will be saved: that is my motto. The Camber served me fairly well. No squirrelly diving around on this bike; I just felt better. It might really be because of the extra leverage afforded by the crank size I’m used to. It might have been the size of the frame fitting me a tad better, or the comforting wide bar on the Camber. It might have been just my confidence level – after taking a few hits on the Safire it was hard to trust it again, and easier to give a different bike a chance. Still, the suspension was a difference. It was good, on the Camber, but not as good as the Safire.

There’s nothing like riding a bike to assist with musing about bikes, so I jumped on an Era Comp Carbon and then an S-Works Epic 29er just to try that whole 29er thing. I rode the same trails I had ridden on the Safire and the Camber – but suddenly I was grinning ear to ear, zipping over obstacles without a second thought, and rolling over almost everything in my path. I admit I didn’t do the more ladder-intensive trails; I’ve had a few bad ladder experiences and when my confidence is shaken, I just avoid them. Off the ground = too high-consequence for someone whose mid-thirties body doesn’t rebound as well as it once did. Without the ladders in the picture, the Epic 29er was so much fun that I went around again, giggling the entire time. I rode the trail twice and reluctantly headed back only when I thought I’d stretched the allowable time limits for bike demos (which is something that, again, my first bike shop taught me gently: two weeks is a tad too long to keep a demo bike. Sorry about that, guys). I was pretty sold on the Epic, immediately, which brought me back to thinking about the Safire. Why wasn’t I as sold on it right away? Or rather, why did my feelings about it erode as the ride went on? Usually one gets to know a bike and becomes more confident as time goes on, but I found the opposite.

On the other hand, when I took the Specialized Ruby Expert – the women’s specific road bike in the line – out for a spin, I liked it immediately, much more than my own road bike. The Ruby seemed to fit me much better and I wasn’t as uncomfortable and squirmy as I am on my own road bike. I am pretty much saving up for a Ruby right now. Why did the Ruby work for me when the Safire didn’t?

I could ride those bikes for weeks, trying to work all this out. I did my best with the time I had at Crankworx – one of my friends commented that he thought no one else at Crankworx rode as much as I did in those two days – but I still wasn’t fully satisfied with the results of my test rides. There are just too many factors at play to draw any definitive conclusions. After two days on the Safire and some great moments and some awful moments, I think that there was a fundamental mismatch on some components of the bike in regards to my strengths, weaknesses, and riding style. And I wasn’t the only one with this general feeling about the Safire, either. I approached another woman at the demo who was just returning the bike, and she confided that she had the same issue with controlling the front end. “It just felt like it was going everywhere,” she said, clearly frustrated. “I couldn’t steer it and it felt too small.” Comforted somewhat that it wasn’t just my skill level at play, I thought long about my rides on the Safire. There’s no question that it’s a great bike in many respects. It’s fast, has a great suspension, is light and quick, and has a very comfortable standover (this last was not really illustrated to me until later on the first evening when I got back on my personal bike and promptly whacked my crotch on the top tube). On certain trails and under certain conditions, it would probably have been much more to my liking, which made me think: perhaps the trails I tried it on were just not suited to the bike? On an XC race-style trail, I might be singing a different tune. I can imagine that on buttery, smooth, fast singletrack, the Safire would be mighty quick and REALLY fun to ride. Switchbacks are pretty easy on it and it is a very responsive bike and very stable at speed. It’s the low speed obstacles that were tricky, at least under my taurine hands. I would love to see how it handles on true XC trails rather than the chutes-and-ladders nightmare of Whistler’s trails. I might never really know, because Whistler is just not the place to test an XC bike.

While I would jump at the chance to ride the Safire on my smoother XC trails at home, I need to finish this article someday so I’ve got to draw conclusions based on what I experienced on the Safire already. If I were shopping for an XC race bike, or one do-it-all or at least do-most-of-it bike, I would put the Safire on the list for consideration solely based on its incredible, made-for-me suspension. But the bigger question – was this bike a good WOMAN’S bike – was unanswered. For help, I turned to the internet, where surely scads of women have reviewed this bike. The first in-depth review I read was BY A DUDE who had bought the Safire for his girlfriend. She’s 5’2”, he’s 6’2”, so he never actually rode the bike, but he qualified himself to do the review by saying he has a perfectly good idea of how the bike rides because he’s ridden the Stumpjumper, “the same bike in gent’s form.” NO. No! This is the entire point of the Safire. There is no other bike in the Specialized line that is a “version” of the Safire. It’s its own bike, built and designed from the ground up. This reviewer took his girlfriend’s raves and applied them to the review – but also revealed that it was her first time on a full-suspension bike. This review had so many holes, I just couldn’t go with it. Seriously, sorry man, nothing personal, but you really have to RIDE a bike to review it.

Moving on, I stopped by MTBR to find a small handful of short reviews, all of them very good but none of them providing much detail. A few other stops revealed rudimentary reviews with no details about the riders themselves. The most valid review came straight from the mouth of the Queen of Pain herself, Rebecca Rusch, who told me that she thought the Safire was “a great bike.” In hindsight I wish I’d been able to discuss it more with her, but I wasn’t interviewing her about the Safire itself so I gave it a miss. But it’s pretty clear that she loves this bike and was stoked for me to have been able to test it so extensively. A video review on Girl Meets Bike professed love for the Safire, after an initial getting-to-know-you period on which the tester had to “learn to ride the bike in a way that pleased it and me.” What she meant by that, I don’t know, but perhaps she went through the same thing that I did, and had to find the right conditions under which the bike would perform as it was intended. I’ll give her a heads up on this article and maybe she’ll comment. Until then, I just have to guess – like I have to guess about every bike review I read. Is the reviewer experienced with other comparable bikes? Is it her first time on a full suspension bike or her first time on trails? What is she used to riding? How is the bike set up? Are there negatives to the bike that she didn’t comment on?

This last is a difficult one. When someone hands you a nice bike that they are clearly proud of and want to hear what you have to say, it’s quite difficult to be up front about any less-than-ideal experiences. This article has been quite tough to write because I can’t unequivocally say that the Safire is the best option out there for women. I can’t say that women’s geometry is necessarily any better for me than “regular” bike geometry. Bike geometry is so varied and individual preference so nuanced that it seems next to impossible to come up with a one-geometry-fits-all solution for ANY gender. I can unequivocally say that if other bike frames were fitted with the same optimized-for-women technology, most female riders would notice a huge difference right from the get-go. I am so used to constantly fiddling with rebound, air pressure, slow speed compression, blow-off compression, etc etc and still not having things dialed, that I was really astonished to be able to set the air pressure according to my weight and just ride away without having to think of it again. There is really something to women’s specific suspension, as well as the Brain technology. The other (non-women’s) Specialized bikes I tried had great suspension as well, though not as completely dialed-from-the-start as the Safire.

I can also say that women in general benefit greatly from Specialized’s efforts. Just acknowledging that the average woman is different from the average male is a huge step. Seeing the big Specialized Women trailer at trade shows is gratifying. Finally a company that wants women to ride bikes. Is Specialized just chasing the women’s market and women’s money by trying to appeal to the female masses, John McCain-style? Or do they really care? I don’t know about Specialized The Company. It’s a big company, what can I say? I’m sure there are people there who DON’T care. However, I CAN say for sure that the brains behind the women’s bikes really do care. They’ve had to compete strenuously for engineering and marketing resources within the company. And they have indeed come up with an engineering marvel. Added to a marketing scheme that tells women in no uncertain terms that they are important, it’s all quite genius. And being thought of as important – that is something that women who ride have long been looking for.