relaxed cross bike

If you read this blog regularly you know I like Surly bikes. I’ve tried lots of bikes, but most of my favourites rides come from Surly so you can’t argue with success. I posted earlier about wanting to build up a Surly 1×1 this year and then I posted some reasons why the 1×1 is such a cool frame. Now that I have had this bike on the road a month I thought it was time to share my initial thoughts.

I’m not surprised that I’m enjoying riding the 1×1 so much, but what is surprising me is that I like it as a fixed gear bike. That wasn’t my plan really. I was going to use an internally geared hub [IGH] like a Rohloff or Alfine to give me some gears, but along the way the simplicity of the fixed gear option appealed to me and I thought why not?

I sort of expected to run it as a fixed gear for a few weeks than swap in a IGH, but I’m enjoying the simplicity of the current setup so much I’m going to stay fixed.