By Christopher Cudworth

The Felt 4C Red Rocket has been a faithful training partner. Really.

It’s a question we should all ask ourselves now and then. How do you feel about your bike? Really…

Many who ride might not feel touchy-feely all-emotionally about their bike (or bikes) and yet if pressed they would have to admit they really do have feelings about the machine (or machines) they ride.

But let’s stick with the singular for a moment, assuming that nearly everyone who rides probably has at least two bikes they ride. A road bike and a mountain bike, perhaps. Or a cyclocross war machine designed to roll over sand and other human bodies if necessary.

It happens, you know.

That unspoken devotion

Devotion to our bikes is often an unspoken thing, of course. You don’t roll up to your Saturday morning group ride and say out loud, “I love my bike.” People would stare.

And yet someone else might nod and take note of your machine and say, with some degree of admiration. “Nice bike.” And that’s enough. Said.

Beauty in a Waterford steel frame bike

One of the riders I know has a beautifully maintained Waterford steel frame road bike. It has a paint job that would make anyone smile. Red to flame yellow to blue. To ride this bike when you were a kid would have been fab. But to keep it rolling smoothly after 30+ years on the road is on the order of fabulous. He is a great mechanic, for starters, who replaced only the front fork to adjust for modern headsets. There have been parts replaced along the way of course. Cranks. Gaskets. Hubs. Wheels. But the bike, per se, is the frame. That is what we ride.

Last year I was given a Waterford by my brother-in-law. It hangs in the garage as yet because I do not want to mess with it until it has been determined with absolute certainty what should be touched and what should not. The frame is a 56″ cm and I typically ride a 58, yet my bike-wrench CAT-3 neighbor down the street who is 6’3″ and a much better rider than I rides a 56 and tells me most cyclists ride a frame that is too large for them.

“It’s all in the setup,” he insists.

And yet the Waterford has a couple issues that need resolution before it is truly ridable. The bike is designed for criterium racing. It is sharp and snappy and feels like it is connected to your body when you hop on and go. But that’s the point. The bike is so well tuned with its metal frame that unless you are fitted well to the machine at all points, it feels like you are running on shoes that don’t fit.

So it needs a new stem, but that requires a new front fork to accommodate the headset that would allow a new stem, to adjust for body length and reach. And so it goes.

So the Waterford remains a project of love and respect. The day will come when I go out and ride it, but not until it gets the full attention it deserves. My Waterford-riding mechanically-gifted friend has promised to guide me to Nirvana on that bike. Can’t wait.

Those carbon fiber feelings

In the meantime, I ride the Felt 4C carbon fiber framed road bike purchased 7 years ago. It has served me well. We’ve done over 20,000 miles together, including a couple crazy rides I should never have attempted. That day in 96 degree heat. That morning I went out into a driving rainstorm. A few races where it was only the bike that kept me in the running. Well, not exactly. I had to pedal, but I felt more like I was hanging onto the bike than riding it.

So my feelings toward the Felt 4C are genuine and real. We have shared lonesome miles trying to build fitness and worked together through the types of thoughts and emotions that drive us all to distraction. My bike thinks just like I do, you see. I know this to be true because when we both experienced that bike wobble back in September the Felt 4C did not want to crash on the road any more than I did. So we worked together to make it to the ditch even though the vibrations of the universe were working against us. Now that’s a bike you can trust. I hope. At least I think that’s how it all happened.

When the Felt 4C came out on the market, it was named Bike of the Year by some biking magazine for its combination of decent components (Shimano Ultegra and Dura Ace mix) and its generally light frame and construction. They called the bike The Red Rocket.

Bike lusts and other trusts

Well, there are plenty better bikes on the road, of course. I once rode next to an Orbea that seem to drive itself. The rider took both hands off the handlebar and pedaled happily along as he changed shirts, adjusted his water bottles and generally did whatever he felt like doing while the bike did its work. That bike was so stable and so smooth and so quiet that you got the impression, truly, that it afforded the rider an extra 2mph in saved effort.

Probably true.

Whereas the Specialized ridden by another buddy always sounds so loud that it seems like it is going to fall apart. The impression if false, of course. It is just the style of rear hub on th bike that makes noise whenever the rider stops pedaling. But impressions do count. Still, he rides away from me at will. So he feels pretty good about his bike, obviously.

Whenever new bikes are featured in the bike magazines, it is fun to leaf through and imagine how you might feel riding a $12,000 Pinarello Dogma, or other some such machine.

Multiplicity

But in the end, one usually feels pretty good about the bike you do ride, because the options are to trade up or trade off, and many riders do. Some have 4 or 5 road bikes they switch depending on conditions. Yet most riders stick with the bike they brung to the dance. They show up week after week, perhaps concerned about that creaking noise in the lower gasket or the way the chain seems to be slipping even though it is new.

The frame beneath is what gets us from here to there, and all points in-between. That’s how you feel about your bike, no matter who you are. It’s an all points in-between thing we all have with our machines. It’s the reason we ride. The space we traverse. The machine we grow to trust and depend upon. Really.