This is part manifesto, part praise song for a machine.

Some time ago I inherited a bike. I had just moved to Morgantown, WV for graduate school, where the lone Cinelli track bike I had brought with me was no match for the gravelly slopes and single track cut-throughs. Being a fixie kid at heart has given me a soft spot for streamlined ‘Italian’ bikes, so naturally when my dad began looking to replace his single-speedified 2005 Bianchi Cross Concept with something a little less ancient, I swooped right in.

My dad isn’t exactly in the Facebook swap meet game, so I have gratefully served as a palliative care nurse for his esoteric and beat-up bike chunks ever since I picked up riding in high school. But ‘beat-up’ hardly does the Bianchi justice. The old White Industries ENO hub had ground itself into the dropouts, the crown race was chemically bonded to the steer tube and the headset bearings looked to be covered in that kind of organic peanut butter that you have to put in the fridge, and the crunchy variety at that.

Still, it was nothing a life-long shop monkey and retired collegiate road racer wouldn’t ride. As the saying goes, race what you can replace, which for many kids means rocking a preowned, fully analog workhorse. For me the one that got away is my old rim brake CAAD12 Black Inc. Light, snappy, minimal faffing around with goops, fluids, adapters and gizmos— it was the road bike, distilled. After riding a few CAADs and Allez Sprints over the years, I have come to adore the ride that high quality alloy bikes offer. The Bianchi, with its scandium front triangle and lugged carbon stays, makes for a very responsive and light frame with a personality that I immediately found familiar to my old crit bikes once I began scooting around town on it. 

But after riding the Bianchi to campus and back just a few times, I knew that it needed some attention. One of the brake bosses was so corroded that it snapped inside the fork’s threads on a pretty unassuming jaunt. Coupled with the fork’s questionable crown, I elected to get a new Ritchey Comp carbon fork rather than drill the old boss out. While I was at it, I replaced the headset with some fresh Cane Creek bearings, and voila, the front end was sorted and completely confidence-inspiring.

In the rear, however, it eventually became clear that the eccentric hub would slip no matter how hard I cranked it down. I initially resolved to dig through my boxes of miscellany and slap a Ultegra 6800 derailleur and shifter on. My old road training wheels were reenlisted, and suddenly I had what felt like a new bike. The 11-28 cassette, while tiny by modern “gravel” standards, still made my commute much more enjoyable than the 40x20t single-speed set up the bike came with. The nicest revision of all was a pair of Paul Mini Moto V-brakes that came off of my first ‘cross bike that I built early in my cycling life.

Not long after putting gears on it my love for riding was totally rekindled, and I got back onto Strava to alert the media that I was back to my bicycling ways. In one particular post, I shared my first picture of the Bianchi, chuffed that I had kept it rolling after 18+ years of abuse. And there I sat, scrolling on Intstagram, waiting for the kudos to roll in when one comment chirped, “Damn shame what that bike has become.” 

For context, my dad was not the first owner of the Bianchi, nor was he the second. That title belongs to the infamous Don Powers (yinzers know him as ‘Dahn Pahrs’), former ringleader of the Pittsburgh single-speed circus and the Strava commenter in question. Before Don moved out west, he and my dad were best riding buddies and shared many single-speed podiums together around the US. Don bought the bike from a local Pittsburgh racer in 2011 who decided that cyclocross was not his forte. That same year he had the ENO wheel laced up for a stab at the inaugural DDoO— a clever name for the stupid (but awesome) achievement of completing Pittsburgh’s notorious Dirty Dozen on a single gear— drummed up by Appalachian bike cryptid Gunnar Shogren, who coincidentally (or is it?) gave me the sweet vintage Salsa stem that’s on the Bianchi right now.

Gunnar's Salsa stem.

Between Don building the ENO wheel and the Bianchi falling into my hands, the bike had ridden to 5 DDoO finishes and one top-5 overall by my dad in 2018. Various SSCX and proto-gravel achievements were on its pal mares as well. While to the uninitiated, Don’s comment might have seemed a bit ‘toxic-bike-bro,’ the old guard of the West Pennsylginia single-speed scene is anything but. Hell, White Industries parts get handed down for free. What Don was getting at wasn’t that I was ‘soft’ for putting a derailleur on it, but that in doing so I had willfully bookended the bike’s life as the single-speed rocketship it had spent the previous decade as. But even if he was just being a dick, what’s cycling without some trash-talk?

The hub in question.

To reiterate, the Cross Concept is a cyclocross race bike, ‘conceptualized’ by none other than legendary bike designer Sky Yeager. She had a good few achievements with Bianchi during the early 2000s, and you'll know a bike was her project by the '100% Chick Designed' sticker at the bottom of the seat tube. The Cross Concept's high bottom bracket and short chainstays make it corner like a dream, and although it’s certainly a farcry from any dumbed-down modern 'gravel' bike, it is a highly capable off-road machine that yearns to go off-piste. My rides quickly got more rowdy as a result, and since I was without a mountain bike at the time, I began taking it to all of Morgantown’s local trail systems. There, the road derailleur meant a more-than-ideal amount of chain slap and dropped chains, especially since I was without a narrow-wide chainring at the time. 

Maybe Don’s comment was ringing between my ears too, because after just a few months I ripped the gears back off, serviced the ENO hub, carefully filed down the dropouts and crossed my fingers it would stay straight. By that point I had determined I would make my return to racing in the following ‘cross season, and had already secured another almost-vintage scandium frame to build up, with plans to demote the Bianchi to the lowly position of pit bike floating around in the back of my mind. The Paul brakes got tucked away for the new project, and I pulled one TRP mini-V brake and one Avid Shorty 4 out of my catacombs. Hey man, they do the trick!

Business up front...

Once I had restored the bike back to Don’s standards ‘cross racing was just about to pick up. With the “A” bike still unfinished, I began practicing mounts, dismounts, carries and off-cambers with the Bianchi. If you've ever seen videos of huskies playing in the snow for the first time in their lives, that’s what it felt like riding the Cross Concept on the terrain for which it was designed. I barely weigh 150 pounds, so I notice issues with traction. Still, wrenching up steep pitches with tall, damp grass was no problem, even with file treads on, so I chalk that completely up to the geometry of the frame.

I had only decided to line up at my first race in years because I needed a carrot to chase. I was smoking and drinking a lot, I was out of shape and I wasn’t gonna correct any of that without a reason. Training for a race was at least a more healthy distraction from my inevitable doom and gloom cycles. Before I knew it, I had a calendar full of races and I was picking up unforeseen results, including a Pennsylvania SSCX state championship and a 4th place finish in the P1/2/3 race on the same bike. This past season made me get the racing bug all over again, and I have the Bianchi to thank in great part for that.

I won’t lie, keeping this bike functional has been a bit of a pain, but I think that’s what single-speed is all about. We don’t do it because it’s easy. I don’t mean to proselytize about single-speeding as the ‘purest’ form of riding. I don’t even think such a thing exists. Everyone reading this understands a single-speed’s beauty, its im/practicality and whether or not they care to ever ride one. But still, do you remember your life before cycling, seeing that person pedaling through the snow or up that giant hill, and innocently wondering why? And then eventually you became that person yourself. As cyclists we’re all inclined toward challenge, at least to some extent. It’s that sense of awe, that mystique which drew me to riding fixed gears in the first place. Not only did so-and-so do blah-blah-blah, but they did it on a bike with no gears and no brakes! Pretty crazy, right?

... party in the back.

The Bianchi and the single-speed community have worked in tandem to remind me that cycling is simultaneously annoying and invigorating, unglamorous and beautiful, everything all at once, and that I wouldn’t have it any other way. Whether it’s my hand-me-down bike or my niche discipline of our silly little hobby, I’m not giving up any time soon. Plus, that celeste paintjob is to die for.