Rocky Mountain Cycling Club
The Club for People Who Love to Ride!

One Gear, No Brakes

Forget Lance and the new generation of bicycling technomarvels. The hottest ride in L.A. and other cities is a nonstop, quad-burning, single-gear dinosaur.

By John Balzar, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer.
(published October 2, 2005)

It's like riding a bicycle, once you learn you never forget . . .

As with other handy adages, this one will get you from here to there for a good long while. Then one day you come across something new that also happens to be something quite old. And you find yourself starting over again.

Riding a bicycle is one thing; riding a "fixed-gear" bicycle like your great-great-grandfather's is something else again—and while the two machines may look much the same at first glance, it's worth remembering that a pack horse and a wild mustang appear alike, too.

Fixed-gear riding is a zesty trend in road bicycling just now, particularly on urban streets in the U.S. and Europe. As improbable as it is exuberant, fixed-gear cycling makes hardly any sense, except to those for whom the old-fashioned fun of riding the hard way makes all the sense in the world.

First, a few words about fashions in the realm of serious road bikes, then we'll get to the question of why some people are learning to ride a bicycle a second time.

By far, most of the energy in road bikes follows in the slipstream of Lance Armstrong and the pro peloton of the Tour de France: increasingly exotic aerospace materials, evermore refined technological components, super-subtle aerodynamics, rising costs. The most advanced of these 16-pound asphalt bazookas now command prices up to $10,000, and they are destined to be obsolete in a year or two. Ounce for ounce, these machines can cost five times the price of silver bullion.

Exotica of this sort has naturally stirred its own backlash. Retro is back, for one thing. Steel-lugged, 1980s-style road bikes are gaining ground among those who ride rather than race and don't care to pretend otherwise. These bikes weigh a couple of pounds more, but so do most of their riders. Then too, the once-clunky "comfort" bike is, finally, evolving in the European style toward functional, but still lively, urban transportation.

Lastly, in a realm apart, in a world unto themselves, wearing unshakable grins of true believers, happy as anyone can be with their pant legs rolled up and their faces covered in sweat, are the most boisterous contrarians of all: The zealots who ride fixed-gear. Call them maniacs, and chances are they will swell with pride. Call them crazy, and only a few might object. Tell them that you just don't understand what the devil they're doing, and they'll talk your helmet right off.

I can attest to these facts, having caught the bug myself awhile back. In these gray-haired years of my life, I ride a fixed-gear bike whenever the chance arises—although, to be perfectly straight about it, I do not ride a fixed-gear with nearly the flair that the technique demands.

Which brings us back, roundabout, to the one essential flaw in that old cliché about hopping on a bicycle. Balancing on two wheels, as we all were taught, involves pedaling and coasting. On a fixed-gear bicycle, you cannot coast.

The rear sprocket is screwed onto the hub of the rear wheel. There is only one gear ratio—no clutter of shifters or derailleurs on these bikes. The chain provides direct drive with the forward sprocket. Your pedals rotate with the turning of the back wheel. They stop rotating only when your wheel does.

Think about it. You approach a stop sign. An old synapse fires a signal to your feet that it's time to ease up on the pedals. Habit takes over from there ... you never forget. Your feet relax into coasting mode, just as they have for all these years. Your pedals, though, have no such inclination. They continue to spin with all the power of your forward momentum, say 180 pounds' worth traveling at 12 miles an hour. The pedals whirl around and kick your unwary feet with the force of an angry mule.

In a millisecond, you panic and stiffen. The pedals then become a launch platform. Your confused brain finds itself flying over the handlebars while schoolchildren at the curb scream. You are now a fixed-gear bicyclist stripped of some portion of your skin and the entirety of your pride.

That's only starters. The real artists of the game—the strongest and most demented among them—jabber away merrily about "simplicity" and "getting down to the basics" and "connecting directly to the ride." Before long, they start stripping the brakes off their bikes, too.

The rear brake doesn't amount to much anyway. With practice, you can use your feet on a fixed gear to resist the forward spin of the pedals and provide some measure of slowing. As for the front brake? Well, get rid of that and you are among the elites of the clan, or the foolhardy, if you prefer. No longer can you screech to a halt in the face of the everyday crises that confront cyclists—the cars that streak out of hidden alleys, the doors that swing open on the parked car ahead, the soccer ball that squirts into your path. From now on, the object is not to stop, but to dodge and wriggle your way out of trouble. All you have are wound-up reflexes that must be a split-second quicker than anything in your way. All the while, remembering that you cannot stop pedaling.

"While it may seem crazy not to have brakes, I feel that it's actually more natural," says Jimmy Lizama, co-founder of the Los Angeles Bicycle Kitchen, a community repair shop and nexus of the city's fixed-gear culture. "A fixie becomes a wonderful extension of the ambulatory process. It's another limb that you use to dance, weave and flow through the space that's available to you on the street."

The fixed-gear craze took hold with big-city bicycle messengers in the 1980s. A scruffy, hard-working lot, these young men and women found that it was not enough to simply joust with buses, trucks, taxis and commuters in weather good and bad. They began making it even more challenging: on fixed-gear bikes without brakes. And the fact that messengers were getting themselves mowed down and mutilated did not stop their rebellious, high-energy circus. One Web memorial for messengers lists the names of 44 killed in traffic accidents in 20 different cities.

Riding "fixed" spread to other young cyclists. For a long while, the only thing that held the culture together from city to city was word of mouth. Urban cyclists in Seattle were amazed at the energy they found when they visited New York. Messengers in San Francisco were surprised to hear about the action on the streets of car-crazy Los Angeles. Cottage industries to provide fixed-gear equipment popped up in odd locations, such as Minneapolis and West Newton, Mass.

Then the Web began bringing them together. In rural Michigan in the tourist town of Traverse City, a potter, real estate broker and cycling fanatic named Dennis Bean-Larson found himself online chatting about fixed-gear bikes with strangers. When the conversations got technical, Bean-Larson and his Web friends found it difficult to visualize things. After all, fixed-gear set-ups were not something you could find at most bike shops or in magazines. They were often stripped down and jury-rigged 10 speeds or track bikes borrowed from the velodromes where fixed-gear racing is standard.

"If we were all looking at the same photo we'd know what we're talking about," he recalls thinking.

In 2001, he started a website, http://www.fixedgeargallery.com, where like-minded cyclists could post pictures of their fixed-gear bikes. Bike No. 1 was Bean-Larson's own 1970s Fuji, converted to a fixed gear. That year, 50 other people sent in pictures of their bikes. The next year, 131 bikes were added, 406 in the year after, and 1,041 in the year following. Nearly 2,500 bikes are now on display from cities across the U.S. and Canada, from Europe and Asia. Increasingly, cyclists attached testimonials saying they were inspired by the website to salvage an old bicycle from their garages or from yard sales and rebuild it into a fixed gear.

Because few mainstream manufacturers were showing much interest in such bikes, most of them emerged from private workshops—assorted frames outfitted with a mishmash of components. Viewed singly, these bikes appeared rather everyday. But scrolling through a few dozen, a visitor to the website could gain an appreciation for the artistry, the range, the expressions of personality that are possible with the simple asphalt scorcher.

"So many great things have happened since this bike came around," wrote Jason B., in submitting pictures of his Bridgestone from Seattle. "It cheers me up when I'm having a bad day. It clears my head when I've spent too much time at the bar or when I'm overwhelmed at work. It keeps me healthy and on my toes. I love her."

This summer, Bean-Larson hosted the first annual "Fixed Gear Symposium," which attracted 85 die-hard fixed-gear cyclists to rural Michigan for a weekend of rides, competitions, music and bicycle voyeurism. Most of the participants were surprised at what they saw. Until this gathering, they had known each other only by the photos of their bikes.

Young, messenger-culture urbanites were curious to find that about half the people in attendance were middle-aged men and women with graying hair, including none other than 60-year-old Bean-Larson himself. Many of these young riders had thought they owned the culture. Likewise, the 50- and 60-year-olds were intrigued to see so many youngsters. Many of these aging cyclists had been riding fixed-gears as early-season training aids going back to their 1970s road-racing days.

"Isn't it great?" beamed Bean-Larson. "The age barrier is totally gone because we have something in common." That "something" also has whet the appetites of entrepreneurs, a sure sign that this eccentric fringe culture is being drawn into the mainstream. With electronic communication cutting into the business of the bicycle courier, some have gone into business selling the accouterments and culture of urban cycling. A handful of new bicycle manufacturers, such as Soma in San Francisco and Surly in Minneapolis, emerged to satisfy demand. More recently, mainstream bike companies such as Raleigh and Lemond joined Bianchi in offering fixed-gear cycles. In 2001, bike messenger Travis Hugh Culley published a celebratory account of the Chicago courier scene with his book "The Immortal Class." And custom frame builders rebounded after a generation of decline.

"Rising gas prices are finally starting to play a role in all this," says one, Jon Kendziera, of Jonny Cycles in Madison, Wis., who specializes in stylish urban bikes of lugged steel. "It's a very interesting time. This is certainly better than the road bike boom of the '70s and the mountain bike boom of the '80s."

In Los Angeles, "I'd say that in the last two or three years, business has quadrupled," says Todd Munson of I. Martin Bicycles, one of only a few local bike shops that are considered fixed-gear friendly. "We used to stock a fixed-gear Binachi Pista as a novelty, and now we order them in runs in a full range of sizes."

Of late, the fixed-gear culture has spread beyond just bicycles. Athletic apparel company Puma recently began sponsoring a team to compete with messengers in urban fixed-gear races called "Alleycats." And in one of the odder advertising ploys of late, Lincoln sought to promote its Navigator SUV by associating it with images of New York City bike messengers—an ad that raised howls of protests from fixed-gear cyclists, who view 3-ton vehicles with the same loathing they have for packs of hounds on the loose.

The entire fixed-gear trend and the energy becomes even more curious given the history of the bicycle.

The "modern" chain-drive bicycle with equal-sized wheels came into being about 1885. Within nine years, cyclists were weary of trying to get up hills with only a single-gear, and multi-gear inventions were brought to market. That same year, exhausted from having to pedal nonstop, a cyclist patented the freewheel.

Billions of bicycles around the world have since proved the appeal of these simple "improvements."

A hundred years later, the urge to wind the clock back has left fixed-gear cyclists pondering how to express what they are seeking.

"It's a way to bring yourself into tune with the pace of the urban setting. Bold notions and bold maneuvers define the excitement of living in a city," says Somerset Waters, an enthusiast and board member of the Los Angeles Bicycle Kitchen. "These are stripped-down, simpler machines. But they have the edge that goes with living in the city. They are Zen and 'The Art of War' at the same time."