Bicycles and Big Riders: A Guide to Bike Shopping for Heavy Folks

 I recently came across an article on Outside Magazine's web on bike shopping as a plus-size rider. I was discussing it online with friends, as you do, and realized that if I'm qualified to have an opinion on anything, cycling as a heavy rider is probably it. 

See, I worked as a mechanic in bike shops either full or part time for nearly 20 years before I wore my hands out and had to give it up, so I know about bikes, and I ride regularly for commuting, camping and recreation. But also, I'm a big boy. While I'm fairly active, my build is probably more suited to a defensive lineup than a peleton, and I run about 6'3" and 300 lbs. 

They call me "The Mountain That Bikes"

So I have a pretty good idea of what works and doesn't for a larger-than-average rider, and thought I'd share some of what I think is and isn't important. I'll also tell you about what I ride, myself. 

Spoiler: It's a bicycle

While the bicycle world, particularly bicycle marketing, can get wrapped up in cramming as many gears as possible into the rear cassette, new bottom bracket standards, and shaving grams, our priority as heavier riders (aka "Clydesdales and Athenas" in racing terms, that being men over 220lbs and women over 165), are a bit different. I mean, maybe we still want to go fast or shred some trails, but we'd like to not break stuff too often along the way. You might have also found that the bike shop employees, who are often (but not always, to use myself as an example) are thin and stereotypically athletic individuals, may not quite know what to do with you. 

So here's a short breakdown of what I think matters. 

Wheels

Wheels are probably the most important thing to big riders, and will make the most difference. First off, if you're going to be riding on pavement, look for a bike that will fit at least 32mm wide tires, off road consider 2.5-3" wide tires (fat bikes are great, but can present extra challenges for heavier riders, including longer axles making them more vulnerable to damage, and the bigger tires suffering even more drag with your additional weight than they would for a light rider).

Rims should be double-wall (box shaped cross section instead of just u-shaped) and have at least 32 spokes. Aluminum rims hold up better than the steel ones found on old bikes, and offer better braking, so if you're setting up a vintage road bike, plan to upgrade the wheels if you can.

Brakes

Speaking of rims and brakes, disc brakes offer really good stopping power for the heavy rider. Hydraulic disc brakes work really well, but maintenance can be fiddly, so for a casual rider (or touring/commuter oriented cyclist like me, who likes field reparability) decent mechanical disc brakes work well, and often better than the cheap hydraulics on some stock builds.

If your budget only extends to a vintage bike, consider upgrading to newer brakes if you can. The caliper brakes on old ten-speeds and vintage road bikes don't stop as well as newer dual-pivot calipers, new levers and brakes can transform a cheap old bike into a great commuting machine. Older mountain bikes often have cantilever brakes, which can stop really well if they're set up perfectly, but linear-pull "v-brakes" are easier to get more performance from (you'll also have to change out the levers to match the cable pull, or add an adapter to go from center pull cantilevers to linear pull v-brakes)

Suspension

Unless you're spending over $1500 on a serious off-road bike, avoid it, inexpensive suspension forks don't handle heavy riders well. And bikes with rear shocks tend to suck until you get past the $2000 price point.

Other parts

You probably don't need the lightest and most cutting-edge drivetrain, in fact "cutting edge" and "finicky" are usually synonyms. That being said, as long as they shifters and derailleurs work, they're fine whatever they are. You may want to make sure you have low enough gears for climbing. Two-piece cranks seem to hold up better than the old-fashioned square taper design, and I've never had any luck with older cottered cranks. Pedals are going to wear out, don't stress over which ones you get, just assume you're going to have to buy new ones periodically.

Saddles

Squishier is not better. As a heavier rider, you'll probably sink through the cushioning like it's an old mattress, and as your sit bones push down, the rest of that displaced padding will push up into your softer bits. Think more "support" than "cushion" when you're shopping for a bike seat. Sometimes wider saddles, combined with meatier thighs, lead to extra chafing and ergonomic issues. Don't let some sales guy convince you to ride on something that looks like a tractor seat just because you're big, try some sportier stuff. A good rule of thumb is the more leaned over you are, the thinner the seat, so on an upright bike, a broader and more supportive platform works, but as you get into a "sportier" position, your ideal seat will get slimmer, EVEN IF you're a big rider (and most people are more comfortable riding leaned at least a bit forward, sitting bolt-upright puts your weight right on your tailbone and spine and can be less comfortable than being slightly "slouched" forward).

Jerome K. Jerome offered this advice on bicycle seats about 100 years ago "There may be a better land where bicycle saddles are made out of rainbow, stuffed with cloud; in this world the simplest thing is to get used to something hard."

Frames

Steel, aluminum, carbon, titanium, there are good frames made out of any of these. Cheap titanium (which isn't actually all that cheap) is going to be really flexy for a big rider, sometimes to the point where, if you stand up to crank up a hill, it'll bend enough that your tires rub on the frame. Cheap carbon is rare and should be looked at with suspicion. Steel frames can be great, cheap ones can be a little flexy but mid-to-higher end steel frames work great. Same with aluminum, while in theory, it has a shorter fatigue life than steel, in real world conditions a well-made aluminum alloy frame will last you for decades. Bikes designed for touring work well, as they're meant not only to be strong enough for extra weight, but to handle reliably under a heavier load. The only disadvantage is they tend to favor stability over maneuverability, which can be a drawback if you're looking for a quick and agile ride. 

Handlebars

Depends on the type of riding you want to do. For city and casual riding, swept back bars are fantastic, and even work well for light trail and touring use. Straight-ish bars are best for trails, as they give lots of control, but aren't especially comfortable or ergonomic. "Rams horn" road handlebars offer good ergonomics and the ability to change hand positions, which is really helpful on longer rides, the trick is to set them a lot higher than you see on racing bikes (level with your seat or higher, usually). Wider bars give more leverage and control, in general, so tend to work better for us big folk

So what am I riding? Well, the frame for the bike pictured up top is by Surly bikes, a Minnesota-based brand that manufactures frames in Taiwan. The model is called the Disc Trucker, which is based on their Long Haul Trucker touring bike, but with the addition of disc brakes. The wheels are Velocity "Cliffhanger" rims, which are designed for on and off road touring, laced up 32-spokes-each to Shimano XT hubs (the front one having a dynamo to power the lights, which has nothing to do with durability, but makes me happy). I built the wheels up from parts myself when I worked in a shop. 
Tires are Schwalbe Marathon Mondial in 700x41, an all-condition heavy touring tire. I've got Surly's "Truck Stop" handlebars, which are big and wide and even have a bit of rise in the middle and a Brooks B17 saddle, and I reign in my blazing-fast speed with Avid BB7 mechanical disc brakes. 
Overall, it's a heavy-duty touring bike designed to be reliable and sturdy for commuting, camping and general riding. Is it the perfect bike for everyone? Nope, but it works well for me, and a similar setup would probably work well for a lot of folks. I built it up myself by Frankenstiening a couple other bikes together with some new parts, but a similar build-up would probably cost around $2,000 retail. 

A closer look at some of the components: 

A mountain bike crank is sturdy and gives me low range for hauling camping gear 

Tires and rims that will take a beating and have enough air volume to avoid flats

More mountain bike parts for a wide gear range

Mechanical disc brakes top well and are easy to adjust 

Nice wide bars set just above seat level are easy on my hands and back, and provide control and leverage

I hope you find this helpful, and if you have specific questions, feel free to drop them in the comments, and I'll do my best to answer them. 

My Year in Nonfiction - Living Through Extraordinary Times

 It's probably no surprise to hear my nonfiction reading was a lot about how people behave in difficult circumstances. The pandemic and the partial shutdown of our economic and social lives has definitely been on my mind, as well as everyone else's. Add to that nationwide protests against police brutality, a record-breaking hurricane season and a tense election plagued by an outpouring of conspiracy nuts and it's been an... exciting year. 

I read a lot of different things, ranging from my usual genre loves of science fiction to a few how-to books for projects and hobbies, but here are a few that really stood out as particularly relevant to the mood of the year. 

Early on in the shutdown, before I had to return to in-person work I stumbled a book that really resonated with my new, involuntarily slowed-down life, How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy by Jenny Odell.  This book was not about actually nothing at all, but rather finding healthy ways to unplug from the "always on" demands of work, social media and advertising that are constantly clamoring for our eyeballs and attention. This book got me thinking more about the things I found satisfying away from the ubiquitous screens and made me re-evaluate my relationship with both social media and work. This re-evaluation is still ongoing, but the books that followed became part of it. 

In the same vein I picked up Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit and The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling by Arlie Russel Hochschild. While these books covered very different areas, the first being more about the values of looking at the world on a pedestrian scale (as in "walking" not "boring") while the second is about how the workplace has come to place more and more demand on not only our physical and intellectual labor, but our emotional work as well, as we're increasingly expected to show particular emotions and attitudes as part of our job. Demands that are made unequally along lines of status and often gender, which can create all sorts of hidden wear and tear on our psyche. 

These books helped me look at the everyday grind, what was good, what was bad, and got me thinking about how not only my place in the whole machine, but the flaws of our economic and social structures and how they might be improved with a bit more thoughtfulness. 

But of course, this wasn't an ordinary year, this was the year the machine broke down. The immediate cause was, of course, the COVID-19 Pandemic, though the fact that our cultural and financial institutions were woefully unprepared to deal with a large scale disruption made everything, and continue to make everything, worse than it had to be. So I got to thinking about disasters. 

Two books that really opened my eyes to a lot of the reality of what happens when a disaster hit, the first, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why by Amanda Ripley talked about ordinary people reacted to extreme circumstances, and in a lot of cases how what really happens contradicts the expectations of what's going to happen created by movies and pundits. It explored more than a hundred years of disaster reporting and sociology, involving earthquakes, fires, hurricanes and revolutions. 

Much to my surprise, the pop-culture images of widespread panic and looting were fairly rare in real life. If anything, some people go too far in the opposite direction, waiting passively for things to make sense again, with tragic results. But for the most part, people seem to be pretty sensible in an emergency, working together, behaving rationally and getting away as best as they can. Often they'll behave extremely altruistically and help out others. 

When panic does happen, it's often the result of predictable circumstances, where people are unable to move or act, and are packed too tightly to be able to respond with any sense of autonomy. The same seems to be true of rioting in times of civil unrest, protestors almost never spontaneously riot, it's usually the actions of police or military forces putting pressure on them that causes the situation to explode. 

Looting too, seems a lot rarer than it's made out to be in disaster movies, even in actual riots and especially in life-threatening emergencies. It does happen, but it's hardly widespread. The much greater danger seems to be the vigilantes who take it upon themselves to "protect" the community from the looting they imagine is going to happen, which in practice often looks a lot like shooting anyone of a particular racial or socioeconomic group who dares show their face in certain neighborhoods (this was a big problem after Hurricane Katrina, exacerbated by police with much the same attitudes). 

Ordinary people, it seems, do OK in disasters, while authority figures tend to be the ones who actually freak out, leading to what sociologists call "elite panic," and causing unnecessarily draconian or violent responses to an emergency in the name of maintaining the social order, as opposed to helping people in need (to see this happening in slow motion, just read anything dealing with the response of the US Congress to the current situation).  

Often, in fact, everyday people will work together at their local level to create temporary communities in the wake of a disaster, trying to keep each other fed and safe, which was the topic of the other Rebecca Solnit book I read this year A Paradise Built In Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster. In this book, Solnit describes how some of the improvised communities built in the wake of earthquakes, hurricanes and the like allowed people to not only survive, but to thrive. Often the sense of purpose and the breaking down of routines and social strata made people happier for a short time than they may have been in their everyday lives, and these cooperative bands of neighbors were more effective in distributing relief than the official government response was (which led to more of that elite panic and sometimes interference with grass-roots relief efforts in the name of imposing top-down order once again). 

It's worth noting that the current situation, where the best way to help each other is to keep our distance and stop the virus from spreading, doesn't particularly lend itself to neighborly measures like erecting spontaneous soup kitchens or street medic stations. But think about how many people have been sewing masks or donating blood, volunteering where they can. In times of crisis, the human instinct is often to do SOMETHING to help out, which is pretty great. And, honestly, not terribly surprising, in spite of what all the post-apocalyptic movies we all watched might have told us. We are, as a species, instinctively cooperative, which is probably the most important reason we've been so successful. 

The final book that really tied into my theme for the year was probably the meatiest and most complicated of the bunch, Behave: The Biology Of Humans At Our Best And Our Worst by Robert Sapolsky. This book explored not only the way we act, but the hormonal, neurological, genetic and environmental factors that influenced all of those. I could probably (and maybe will) write a whole blog post on what I learned from this book alone, but there are a few takeaways that tie into what I read in the other books. 

Probably the most important ones are that we human beings, like other primates and most other social animals in general, are very good at dividing the world into "Us vs Them." And we'll often make all sorts of excuses for Us, and blame anything we can on Them. Now who constitutes and "Us" and what terrible enemy counts as "Them" from moment to moment can be very fluid, because we're pretty complicated critters, even compared to our closest cousins in the wild. It can be along racial, political or religious lines, it can be between fans of rival football teams or even between people who like football and people who don't. And we can exist simultaneously in several Us/Them relationships at the same time. "Sure, he's a Dallas fan, but he shares my love of '70s heist movies, so he's not all bad." 

The Us/Them paradigm can be manipulated, for good but more often for ill, because of something else that makes humans particularly human, our ability to think in metaphors. We literally feel sick at seeing an image of something repugnant, like we smell rotten meat, we feel joy at a particular song that reminds us of home, symbolism is so closely tied into reality in our minds that we have trouble separating them on a subconscious level. And terrible people use that to exploit the Us/Them division. "Look at these people from group X," they say, "are they even really people? They're more like cockroaches." And part of our brain stops seeing other people as human beings, and if they're not human beings, does it matter how badly we treat them? This is called pseudospeciation, and it's one of the most effective propaganda tools out there. It works well because, sometimes, the more we hate the Thems out there, the closer and more loyal we feel to Us. 

And all this works because we're never as rational as we like to think we are. Probably especially people who pride themselves on being rational all the time. What we think of as rationality is often rationalization, our very clever brains looking to make excuses for our unconscious biases and things that lurk in the deep, dark currents of our psyche. We don't like to admit to ourselves that we don't trust a person because something about them reminds us of our third grade bully, or because we're a little bit prejudiced against something. Or maybe we need to eat lunch and we're just cranky, but we'd NEVER let a little thing like slightly low blood sugar affect our judgement, would we? 

But in spite of all our strange, chaotic, and seemingly unpredictable irrationality, Sapolsky tells us, we're surprisingly nice to each other most of the time. There are evolutionary and personal benefits to cooperation, and studying our primate cousins teaches us that the noisiest and most aggressive are almost never the most successful, rather the ones who are really good at getting along with each other. No man, (or chimp, or baboon) it seems, is an island. 

The takeaway from all this? Well, for me, a lot of it's still percolating, but in spite of the chaos of this year, I feel a bit more optimistic about human nature, and have been really thinking about my own place and where I want to go from this kind of transitional place I find myself, career-wise. There's a lot to be said about the feeling of satisfaction in finding a way to serve the greater community, and maybe I'll figure out how to do that (and buy groceries) in the future. But I've still got a lot of reading to do, either way. 

Happy New Year, folks!