One bike, two sets of wheels

Spring has sprung a leak. We in New England briefly saw the sun on Sunday (I was in Maine, it was still cold), and that's been about it since forever. The poor people riding Rasputitsa on Saturday got slaughtered with cold, rain, and snow. Enough with the hard-o stuff, us softies need some warmth and sun, please. 

Though my interactions with cyclists and cycling in general are of the "all day, every day" variety, they're mostly virtual. The weather and my weird schedule and everything else mean that my Strava log is filled with solo rides. Despite this, my equipment choices are normalized to what it seems everyone else is doing - a wide tire compatible drop bar bike (my 8 year old HOT BUNS CX bike) with two sets of wheels (which in my case is actually 3, since I keep one set for the rollers). Set 1 is RCGs with 28mm GP4000s (tubed), set 2 is GOATs with 35mm Schwalbe G-One All Arounds (tubeless). My mountain bike also gets two sets of wheels, but that's somewhat of a luxury and an accommodation to my conceit/fantasy of doing some fun mountain bike events later in the summer and the corresponding need to get a bunch of time in on that bike. 

While I wouldn't necessarily want to go race Speed Week on my cross bike, I can certainly drop into group rides or our local Wednesday night crit series and do as well/have as much fun as I'd have on another bike. You might choose different rims for your budget/preference/tire choice, but the concept works really really well. 

Since we managed to ship all of the orders from the last preorder (late April shipping start) before the month had closed, we're going to hold the current 'late May shipping start' preorder open through the weekend. The All Road 38s and 50s will likely be to the end of that window, but everything else is in the place we'd hoped to get - well stocked shelves and the ability to start shipping builds before the preorder rims actually hit. It'll take a few cycles to get the All Roads stocked up and on the same program as the other wheels. 

Speaking of All Roads, here are some pics of the new Hotfoot rims, which have the same molding and finish as the All Roads. Bluntly, we've never seen rims molded this well, anywhere. There's no filler or paint on them. The molds, materials, and processes are all more exacting in order to get to this, but Lordy the end result. 

These rims really prove out what we'd predicted last fall - that the era of proprietary rims was waning. We're pretty aggressively priced on these, but that's where things are headed in the market and we want to lead. Although everyone has a reason for making his or her own choices, we just can't see what these won't do for you that a set costing twice as much for an equivalent build would. The product element is there, you can customize until you're blue in the face, and we're here for the build and the support. No pay to play media reviews or team sponsorship or ambassador programs, though. You've got to go elsewhere for those. 

Now I have to go punch the weatherman in the face. This just isn't okay.