Much as the trend is to rush out and buy a racket and tube of balls during Wimbledon, so I have convinced my lovely wife to go out and buy a new bike to replace/augment her slightly tatty £80 Gumtree special hybrid as Tour de France time hits again.
The inevitable Cycle To Work scheme justified pushing the budget a bit but there really aren’t many lady-specific options around and while I don’t consider single-sex frames absolutely essential, the arguments for women-specific geometry, particularly a shorter top tube, do make a lot of sense.
It turns out that Specialized are flogging off the last of their 2015 range at the moment and my LBS, a Spesh dealer, was able to supply a 2015 Dolce Sport for a not-too-unreasonable £640. It comes in a suitably ladylike colourway complete with a light smattering of carbon, a Sora drivetrain and a full complement of cages, bottles and even a wee saddle bag.
One for the Lady…
The chap who runs this shop is an arse and I’d sworn not to buy anything from him again, but I thought a fitting was pretty much essential and as the prices are manufacturer supported, i.e. everyone has them at the same price, there wasn’t much incentive to go elsewhere. Being sure of a decent fit was worth the gritted teeth resulting from 45 minutes of his arrogant patter.
Now, it certainly wouldn’t do to have my spouse zooming around on a slick new machine with me creaking along on my needing-a-bit-of-attention MTB so it seemed natural to insist that I too needed a road bike. Hang the bank balance!
Well, it is my birthday soon…
By complete and utter coincidence I had recently spotted on HUKD what, to my eyes, looked like pretty much the perfect bike. Amazing fortuity. And so it came to pass that today I ordered myself a 2015 Genesis Volare 10.
…and one for me!
Steel?! In this day and age? Well, yes. Despite not having any personal experience of the ‘real world’ advantages/disadvantages of steel, alloy and carbon, having owned precisely one, one and zero examples of each respectively as an adult, there is something slightly contrarian about the steel Genesis bikes that I like. Especially their single-minded devotion to using them at the sharp end of professional cycling.
I *really* couldn’t afford this one.
OK, so it’s not constructed from super-expensive Reynolds 953 tubing as used in the Volare Team bikes but uses instead Genesis’ own ‘Mjölnir’ steel, likely an analogue of something from the lower-end of the Reynolds range, 520 perhaps.
As Reynolds themselves have this drawn in Taiwan nowadays and the published Mjölnir strength/stiffness are seemingly identical to the Reynolds figures, it may even be (whisper it) the same stuff. Genesis must be considered a good customer/advocate by Reynolds nowadays so it’s not a stretch to imagine a ODM/white label kind of deal.
A Mjölnir, yesterday.
Anyway, frame aside it’s predominantly Tiagra-equipped so I don’t feel like too much of a cheapskate (and can conveniently look down on the missus’ Sora machine) and with a fashionably straight carbon fork/sparse spoke count so it doesn’t look like too much of a luddite’s ride. It was well reviewed at £1000 so man maths makes it look like a veritable bargain at a smidgeon less than half that (gots dat £5 voucher, yo).
I also think it’s a handsome beast, something that can’t always be said about Genesis and their occasionally, erm, challenging paint schemes. It seems they span the beautiful (the Team above and their stainless numbers are generally amazing) to the slightly odd (the 2014 Volare 10 was a mess) but most are classily understated and nothing is too mundane. I suppose that’s a good thing in this age of ubiquitous black/white swoopy carbon things with macho graphics and them deep, deep rims.
So now comes the wait. It’s like Christmas again!
I know I’ll come across as a bit of a Strava weenie here but I really am looking forward to seeing what my first proper road bike as a semi-fit adult means for my road segment times. I’ve been dragging the Hardrock around terrain that it is vastly unsuited for – great for improving fitness, not so great for judging just how fit you are – so there can’t fail to be a bit of an uptick in my speeds.
I can generally maintain a roughly median placing on most segments, but really found the longer segments and the bigger climbs a different story as I was barely in the 30th percentile on some of them. OK, probably unrealistic to expect too much from an old man on a heavy bike with knobbly tyres, but these things begin to get at you after a while, hence the chase for a new bike!
It also means I can keep the XC for where it is best suited; off road. About 2,500 road kilometres are starting to show themselves on it.
So hopefully it’ll be here this week in time for a run out to the Chiltern Cycling Festival this weekend. If not I’ll definitely have it for the RideLondon FreeCycle in early August, by which time I’m hoping I’ll have put at least a few hundred kms on it.
C’mon, TNT!
