Why we love cyclotouring

The bicycle world tends to focus on racing. If you look at mainstream cycling news websites, you might think that cycling is a spectator sport centered around the big European races. These days, even gravel seems to focus more on professional racers than on the joys of exploring small roads off the beaten path.

Manufacturers also tend to focus on racing. When we visited the world’s biggest component maker in Japan years ago, I asked why the company wasn’t offering disc brakes for road bikes back then. “Because the UCI doesn’t allow them,” the global marketing manager told me. He went on to tell us about his trips to the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France, Sea Otter Classic, and I realized where this myopic view came from: Racing is easy to follow. Racing creates news. Cyclotouring is more difficult to discover.

Don’t get me wrong: I love racing. The feeling of my body working at its absolute maximum. The intense focus of an FKT ride. I also love watching pro racers, admiring their perfect form. But there’s more to cycling than racing. Many of my best memories on a bike came when there was no rush. In fact, many of my greatest adventures didn’t involve racing.

Adventures that don’t involve max heart rates are Natsuko’s specialty. The first time we met, we climbed up the 1,622 m (5,322 ft) Tsuchiyu Pass—and then visited an Onsen hot bath. When Natsuko realized that I enjoyed the hot springs, she organized a ride to her favorite, the centuries-old Houshi Onsen, the next time I visited Japan.

The weekend of our ride, a typhoon rolled into Japan. In pouring rain, we rode and hiked on the old road—a mere footpath—that wound down the mountain. We traversed rushing streams on narrow log bridges and finally arrived at the old inn after dark. There we learned that most visitors had canceled, not wanting to make the drive in these conditions. It meant we had the wonderful place almost to ourselves. Only a group of motorcyclists had also braved the elements. The hot bath felt especially nice that night.

Cyclotouring is often about discovery. As a young student, one of my first big tours was along the Baltic coast just after the Iron Curtain fell. It was a remarkable ride, discovering a part of my home country that had been forbidden all my life. I had read about this region in old children’s books. When I discovered these landscapes for myself, they were exactly as I had imagined, with empty tree-lined roads, small ancient villages, and old-charm vacations spots on the Baltic Sea. I met friendly people everywhere, who were relieved that the old totalitarian regime had finally crumbled, and who were curious about my trip.

Racing and touring are not mutually exclusive. Riders like Meaghan Hackinen and Adrien Liechti race (and win) the biggest bikepacking races. After a little rest at the finish, they continue to ride and explore the countries they are visiting, now at a more leisurely pace. For them, racing and touring aren’t opposites, but perfectly complement each other. In fact, Adrien Liechti and Sophie Jail toured half-way across Africa after finishing the epic Rhino Run bikepacking race—and created one of the most iconic Bicycle Quarterly covers in the process.

And then there are rides that aren’t big adventures at all. We don’t usually write about a ride to the local coffee shop, but that doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy it. There is something about riding a bike that makes every journey special. The hot baths at Hoshi Onsen wouldn’t have felt the same if we had arrived by tour bus. And I’d never met all the people I encountered on my ride along the Baltic Coast of East Germany if I had been traveling by car. And on our ride to the cafe, the smells and sounds of spring were in the air, making even this short trip memorable.

The bike industry’s disregard of touring extends to the bikes. Even when companies offer touring and bikepacking rigs, they don’t spend nearly as much effort on R&D as they do for their road, gravel and mountain bikes. Mainstream bikes are developed for racing, and anybody who doesn’t race is expected to make do.

I found out early on that this doesn’t always work. Back in college, I spent all my earnings from a job as a bike mechanic on the best touring bike I could imagine back then. (A healthy employee discount helped with paying for all the top-of-the-line parts.) I ordered a custom frame and equipped it with a mountain bike drivetrain, road bike components, and the best racks available back then. I even installed aerobars in my quest for a touring bike that would be as fast and fun as my race bike.

That bike carried me on memorable rides, but I also found that 25 mm tires aren’t sufficient when traveling for many miles on the (beautiful) cobblestone byways of East Germany. I had rear axles break. The flange of my top-of-the-line Campagnolo C-Record 40-hole hub crack—fortunately toward the end of my Baltic trip. And neither performance nor handling of that bike came anywhere close to that of my race bike.

Back then, those compromises were considered inevitable if you insisted on carrying a camping load, but we’ve never been deterred by what others consider ‘impossible.’Our love of cyclotouring means that we’ve perfected our bikes for non-competitive riding, too.

As the subtitle of our book The All-Road Bike Revolution says, this revolution isn’t just about making our bikes fast, but also about making them comfortable and reliable.

If somebody had told me during that trip along the Baltic that, a few decades on, I’d be riding the same bike for an FKT one week and take it touring the next, with a fast-paced road ride in between where I’m in contention for city limit sprints, I wouldn’t have believed them. But that’s the reality today, and it’s to a large part thanks to our love of touring.

Even when we’re not in a hurry, a bike that rolls with almost no resistance, steers with precision, and responds eagerly to our pedal strokes is simply more fun to ride. And whether we race or tour or just ride to the coffee shop, most of us ride purely for fun. It’s important not to lose sight of that simple, but important, fact.

Further Reading:

• A beautiful tour: Natsuko’s trip to Rishiri Island
• A tour close to home: Rediscovering the Cascade Mountains
• For the trip to Houshi Onsen in the typhoon, check out Bicycle Quarterly 54.
• The tour along the Baltic Sea was published in Bicycle Quarterly 26.
• Sophie and Adrien’s epic tour across Africa is in Bicycle Quarterly 85.
• Our book The All-Road Bike Revolution about the R&D that has made our bikes faster, more comfortable and more reliable.