The Burro does Bainbridge Island

Yesterday was the shake down ride for testing out the Salsa Fargo... aka 'The Burro'. Me, the burro, all racked out and 35 pounds of dumbell weights boarded the Washington State Ferries and headed over to Bainbridge Island for a test mini tour. I chose to do the infamous Chilly Hilly route. This is a 33 mile ride put on bike Cascade Cycling Club and is in February of each year (the chilly part) and has 2700 feet of climbing (um yep, the hilly part).

The intent of this was to see how the bike handles and more importantly, how does it feel to ride a bike with all that weight.

I'm not a weight weenie, but a touring bike, with all its gear can get heavy pretty quickly. The Fargo is not a very light bike to begin with (~28 lbs). Add racks, bags, gear, bottles cages, bottle of water, tools, lights, first aid kit, sun screen on and on and on... all of a sudden you are riding a behemoth. I would estimate that the bike was over 60 lbs and could be close to 70lbs! Holey Quad Busting, Bipedal Misery Machine Batman!

So how did it ride? In a word - awesome.

The Burro creeps up hills. The Chilly Hilly course has 2-3 sustained hills and a few shorter ones where I needed to use the 27x36 top gear on the bike. At those very slow speeds, the bike did well, but some times the front end gets a bit floppy. This was likely because of the front panniers with the added weights (5lbs each side). Lastly- standing off the saddle and climbing was rather different from a regular bike. The bike has so much more mass, the bike feels a bit whippy in the back and front and I believe this was due to the added weight of the panniers and load. 

What goes up must come down. Going down hill? Hold on to your hat. This thing screams down hills. All that weight and it really books. You have to be a bit careful however, since it does not corner like a normal bike - its slow to turn and wants to run wide in the corners. And, because of this propensity to pick up speed - brakes are equally important right? Well, the disk brakes on the bike performed excellent - even in the rain.

When you're not on hills - where are you? In the flats. The bike rode very well and once up to speed it does not feel like its much harder to pedal than a regular bike. All that mass give the bike a very solid feel and, well, felt kind of comforting.

The bike is spot on for this type of job. I give the Fargo 4 our of 5 stars.

Ok, now enough on the bike - how did my strength and endurance do with all that weight on a hilly course. I was a bit worried about this aspect of my ride. But, I did very well actually. I feel like I have reached a level of fitness that is ready to slog over the Cascades and back on a solo tour and not just survive - but even better, feel strong and have some fun doing the ride to boot. I have about two weeks left of training and it should be just all icing on the cake really. Well, this weekend is the Flying Wheels Century and this will not be anything remotely looking like cake.

Ok, on to the pics!

Here is the route of my ride on Bainbridge and the elevation profile:

Here are some general snapshots of the trip.

Yep, this was the test load. I also had blankets to fill out the bags and give the weights something to perch on.