Most of us live in urban areas and our gravel rides are made up of a mishmash of different surfaces and trail types. We head out on a ride with the new RX801 Limited Edition shoes to see how they cope with gravel riding in the urban jungle.
“Just watch your handlebars down here” I say to my riding buddy Clive “It’s pretty tight, even on a gravel bike”. Urban riding arguably presents the perfect environment for using a gravel bike. Riders searching for local trails and wanting to minimise their reliance on a vehicle to get them to the start point, will often link together different types of trails in order to create a route that flows properly and is fun to ride.
The ride that I had planned with Clive was a perfect example of this. I wanted to showcase the incredible diversity of riding that you could find, even when staying with the confines of the city we live in. I would be lying if I said that all the trails were beautiful. In fact, some of them were downright scruffy and unloved in sections, but that is both the attraction and the curse of living and riding in a post-industrial city.
Little scraps of derelict land might not be an obvious source of gravel riding nirvana, but tracks made by dog walkers, “desire line” trails (created by people taking a shortcut away from an official path in order to make their route more efficient), ancient paths with an industrial heritage and little urban cut-throughs can be the perfect basis from which to create a really fun gravel ride.
While the thought of flying along some sun-dappled Tuscan strada bianche or kicking up a plume of dust on a mid-western farm road might be the marketing executive’s dream image of gravel riding, there’s something magical about creating a route from less aesthetically pleasing trails, yet still having a great time. You still get the same buzz as you might from riding in gravel heaven – the sense of speed, the fun of pushing the grip of your tyres to their limits, the thrill of ‘underbiking’, the camaraderie of riding with a close-knit group of friends and the joy of a perfectly timed mid-ride café stop. But you’re getting all this without travelling far from home and without needing to rely on a vehicle.
You might well be thinking, this all sounds lovely, but how exactly do I find these little nuggets of urban gravel riding gold? Unfortunately, there’s no quick answer to this. Gravelly ‘trail hunters’ combine many skills in order to find urban paths and to meld together a perfect route. Some might rely on Strava heatmaps, some use komoot. Some people join a local gravel riding club and mentally distil the best bits of the trails they’ve been show on the weekly night ride. Some use walking their dog or taking their children to a nearby park as a secret excuse to explore an unknown trail – all the time hoping to find gravelly nirvana hiding in plain sight in a patch of previously unexplored woodland.
I would add to that list hours (and hours) spent pouring over maps. Making my eyes go fuzzy by staring at too many satellite images. Mentally joining the dots between brief glimpses of trails on google streetview. And mainly, riding. Lots of riding. Trying out trails to see where they go. Having an open mind as to the destination of your gravel ride. Using a bit of potluck/serendipity/sixth sense and heading off into the unknown.
This won’t appeal to all gravel riders of course. As with everything in life, some people want guaranteed “bang for their buck”. Not for them the random chance of finding a closed off trail, or a “private land – no access” sign or a set of unrideable mid-trail steps. They want guaranteed 100% perfect gravel riding every time they go out.
Luckily, for every rider who only wants to stick to known ways, there are equal numbers of gravel riding fans who dream of the unknown. I christened this the ‘never-ending-search-for-newness’ and to me it’s something that makes urban gravel riding so fun and so addictive. “I wonder what’s down there?” is a question that Clive and I will ask ourselves practically every time we go out riding. We’ve had our fair share of disappointments, but we’ve also found trails so incredible you would think they’d been built by some mythical god of gravel riding.
We’re permanently amazed how despite having ridden our local gravel trails for nearly a decade (even before gravel riding was “a thing” in fact), we still manage to find something cool to ride on each ride that we do. Sometimes rather than discover something completely new, we just reverse the direction in which we typically ride a particular trail. It might sound obvious, but it’s incredible how something so simple can have such a profound effect. Levels of grip, requirements for balance and ‘body English’, deciding where and when you will need to brake and change gear – all will be affected by the direction in which you ride a particular trail and will help keep your stoke levels topped up to maximum.
Urban gravel riding might not have the cachet of riding somewhere stunningly beautiful or bucket-list worthy, but in my mind the thrill and the sense of fun are just as great. Less time spent driving to the start of your ride also means more time to spend on the bike or in the mid-ride café stop too of course. Sounds like a win-win to me.
Once you’ve done your thinking and planning, what else do you need to consider to ensure you have a perfect day out in the urban jungle? You need the right equipment and clothing of course. Whether it’s the perfect balance of weight, comfort and stiffness in the Shimano RX801 shoes or the crisply indexed shifting of a perfectly tuned GRX derailleur or the precision control of a set of GRX disc brakes, you will be able to find all your perfect gravel riding partners on Shimano Gravel website.
Bio
Olly Townsend is the editor of Gravel Union and spends his entire life dreaming about gravel riding. He’s based in the UK, but has been fortunate enough to ride gravel all over the world.
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