The human mind has a propensity for categorizing things. We have difficulty seeing things on a continuum (like gender, sexuality, autism, mental health, etc.) We’re always eager to pin a thing down, put a name on it, and decide how we feel about that.
So in the bike world we talk about road bikes, gravel bikes, mountain bikes, but then, actually, each of those categories gets busted up into subcategories, or renamed in a way that is convenient for marketing purposes but fails to capture the shift and change going on underneath.
This is what has happened to road bikes, which are now, a lot of the time, actually All-Road bikes.
In my mind, a little over a decade ago, road bike tires started getting wider. I was riding 23mm tires and then 25mm and then 28mm, which I used to experiment with “gravel” riding as it came to be known, before eventually building myself a gravel bike. Hilariously, I rode 32mm tires on that for a few years before landing on 40mm and more less living there, but I’ve gone right past the subcategory I’m trying to talk about today, which is all-road.
Because of the way I progressed through those tires sizes and riding styles, in my mind there was road and there was gravel. In the background, we began hearing about all-road stuff, but I mostly ignored that or just lumped it in with gravel. As it turns out, however, all-road is its own thing, and it is much, much more popular than I realized.
In fact, I’d wager that the pure road market (let’s call that everything up to 28mm) is smaller now than the all-road market, which runs from 28mm to 35mm, with most of those tires being slick or file-treaded.
My sense is that the legions of roadies who animated American cycling culture through the Lance era, didn’t all convert to gravel riding. In fact, they’re not really interested in trail riding, or don’t think they have the skillset for it. BUT…dirt road riding has an appeal, and that means all-road makes sense for them. Coupled with the fact that most riders seem to enjoy more tire volume, all-road becomes this magic catch-all for roadies who explicitly aren’t gravelies, which is a name I just made up.
And this phenomenon mostly passed me by.
I helped launch a company’s wheel program. This is in my non-TCI work. And the first wheel they brought to market was a gravel wheel, which I expected to kill. It didn’t, and I chalked that up to the fact that the wheel market is really crowded, which it is. Maybe I also could have written better copy, but that’s by-the-by. Later they released an all-road wheel, and that one hit pretty big by comparison. That wheel is optimized for narrower tires, and it has a deeper rim, so it’s more aero. These turn out to be very appealing characteristics for this vast sea of all-roaders I was unaware of.
I guess I have a few points I’m trying to make here. The first is that, I think, all-road is the new road, as categories go. Second, we’re at a place where these categories and subcategories are increasingly blurry and almost arbitrary. Will all-road and gravel overlap a LOT? Yes. And third, thinking categorically is only so helpful when you reach this level of nuance about what characteristics go into the bike you want to ride. You may have become an all-roadie without even knowing it