Just a Couple of Dirty Words

In the superlative-heavy world of bicycle marketing there are two words a copywriter tries to avoid, and those words are ‘heavy’ and ‘compliant.’ Take those crayons out of the box and throw them in the trash, they’ll only get you in trouble with the teacher. Approved adjectives include: light, stiff, agile, aerodynamic maybe. As your resident contrarian though, I would like to argue, today, for compliant and heavy, because I think those two words and characteristics have a lot to offer.

First, compliance. It’s actually a sort of nebulous word, right? When we say a frame or a wheel or a handlebar is compliant, what do we mean? Well, we sorta mean flexible. Flexibility is like the third-rail of bike marketing. From ‘flexible’ it’s a short hop to ‘noodly,’ and if you make something that’s ‘noodly’ well, you won’t be making it for very long.

Our industry has fetishized stiffness, which almost makes me blush to say. Stiffness has become shorthand for powerful, snappy, responsive. It means high-performance. It means ‘pro.’ In practice, designs that are overly stiff don’t feel good to ride. Here are some other words: jarring, brittle, harsh, fatiguing. No one uses those words, but sometimes they’re apt.

As nearly always with engineering and design, the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. A great design balances qualities like stiffness and compliance. A great bike won’t beat you up. In the first big carbon fiber boom, companies were making the stiffest bikes they could, and I heard a lot of people say stuff like, “Have you ridden that thing? It just takes off like a rocket.” And it was true. A short test ride would have you convinced the bike was going to be a game changer, but then over time it became apparent that all that stiffness was finding its way into your bones and into your fillings. It was too much to absorb over the period of a three-hour ride.

Because the dead honest truth is, the force of impact between your bike and the Earth has to go somewhere. It works best if impacts and vibration are absorbed gradually and progressively, as they might be with a more compliant frame or wheelset or handlebar. Otherwise, it’s all destined for your body. Most bike designers get this now, but our use of language to describe what they’re doing hasn’t fully evolved. 

This all bleeds over into how we talk about weight, too. Despite knowing better, companies, but more disappointingly reviewers, still hew to the idea that lighter is better. This is most distressing on the mountain bike side. I read the other day about a mountain bike wheelset that was “heavy” because it weighed 100 grams more than another wheelset. 100g is less than a quarter pound. And here’s the really salient point when it comes to bike stuff that’s going to be used hard. The opposite of light isn’t heavy; it’s durable.

Here again, the best designs aim for balance. The lightest thing is almost always the least durable. I understand that durability is hard for reviewers to talk about. They don’t have a way of extrapolating a product’s lifespan in the time they have to review it, but they’re not stupid either. To ding a product for being heavy without crediting it for being durable is irresponsible.

We love numbers and superlatives. This is the lightest thing, represented by a number. This is the stiffest, the most this or that.

But the best bikes I’ve ever ridden were never either of those things, and that should tell us something about how to understand what makes something great.