How to cycle through the winter
Winters get a bad reputation in Montreal. It's a pain to drive and park (I'm told) and walking sucks with ice and slush a constant hazard. However, cycling remains surprisingly easy, and is a real morale booster! It's a little bit more physically demanding than the rest of the year, but that little bit of physical activity is good for you. Winter cycling also makes more of the city easily accessible when it wouldn't be otherwise. There are three main things to get a handle on to make winter cycling easier: Adapting your bike to the elements Dressing properly Choosing a route Adapting your bike First off, if you don't have full fenders yet, get some! Salty slush flying everywhere is bad for the bike and bad for your clothes, and your tires throwing snow straight down your boots is a real bummer, too. Then you need to think about winter tires. I've ridden with very wide and soft tires some years, and studded tires other years. You can get away with wide-and-soft, it's fun on fresh snow, but it can get sketchy in the turns and on ice, which is not the case with studded tires. Get studded tires, I'm putting mine on this year. Then, there's the parts on the bike. You'll need to grease anything that might be in contact with road crud, or it'll jam up: derailer pivots, bolts, even your headset and bottom bracket bearings. You probably shouldn't grease cables, but be prepared for them to jam up sometimes if you leave your bike outside. Condensation makes fools of us all. It's not a huge deal to change the cables at the end of the season, or even mid-season if you ride lots. You already have lights, yeah? Get in touch if you want a dynamo-powered system, but modern lithium-cell lights are great, you'll just need to recharge them more often than in summer (more hours of darkness, plus the cold sucks the life out of the batteries). Dressing properly Or, adapting your body. A fun thing about cycling is that you're exerting yourself more than if you were walking to your destination, so you'll be warmer! You don't need to dress as warmly as you might be used to. It helps to think not of how cold you'll be in the first five minutes of your ride, when you're still getting warmed up, but for the rest of it, when you're generating lots of heat. Layers help a lot, since you can adjust a little bit when you really get going. My big down jacket only comes out around -15°C (not counting wind chill), which is only a few days in Montreal most years. The rest of the time it's wool, hoodie and warm jacket. Long johns are extra-deluxe, and the very best are Stanfield's, made of wool in Nova-Scotia. We don't sell them but they're easy to get. On the other hand, your feet, face and hands are pretty exposed to the wind. A scarf or balaclava, big mittens (no fingers!) or pogies (Bar-Mitts), and good insulated winter boots or snowmobile boots (with Darn Tough invincible merino socks) are fabulous. You can save the clippy shoes for the spring riding season. And if it's below -20°C and there's a bad wind chill, feel free to skip the ride! Work from home, bundle up and walk, or take the metro. I'll be the first to admit it's pretty miserable to risk frostbite. It really sucks the fun out of the ride. Choosing your route This might be where you have to get creative. Unless you're lucky, your usual summer route might not even be possible, let alone safe. That said, more and more of the city's bike paths are permanently cleared in the winter, often being ploughed and salted before the main street they share! I know that's the case for the Rachel St. bike path right in front of the bike shop. The off-street paths are unfortunately out, but smaller residential streets can be pretty great if the snow is fresh or they've been cleared. Watch out for compacted snow and black ice, though, and give car doors a wide berth. This year will be the first winter for the new Réseau Express Vélo (REV), with Bellechasse as a new east-west axis and Saint-Denis looking fabulous for north-south through almost the whole city. The city has committed to keeping them cleared all winter, but in my experience things are a bit slow when there's a real big snow storm. There are a few bike paths here and there that might be useful to you, explore your neighbourhood! Readers in Pointe-Saint-Charles and Verdun, I'm sorry. You're on your own, I've never found a good winter route. Main photo by the iceman, Jonathan Chhun
The solution to all your shifting problems
At C&L, we really enjoy time-tested solutions to the conditions you encounter when riding in the real world. As a colleague recently told me, "you only believe in bikes the Wright Brothers would have been able to fix". That's an exaggeration, but in that teasing, JD proved a point that bikes haven't really changed that much in the last few generations. New parts come along and we're promised revolutionary new tech, but the concepts are no different than those of a hundred years ago and many bikes today would be perfectly recognizable to mechanics long-past. If you come by C&L and you start talking to Sam about your troubles with shifters (be they unreliable, uncomfortable or just mysterious), he'll probably steer you in a surprising direction for a solution: friction shifting. It's an always-reliable fallback option to fix a problem, but many people who shift that way find they get used to it very quickly and even come to prefer it, and any bike mechanic from the last eighty years would recognize it immediately: it's proven. What's friction shifting? If you walk into a bike shop (ours, too) today, all the bicycles you'll be able to test-ride will have "indexed" shifters. Your derailer, which moves the chain to different gears, just goes along with whatever the shift lever tells it via the shift cable. By moving the lever, you pull on the cable or release it so that the derailer's spring moves it back on its own. The shifter is "indexed" with a mechanism which catches the cable and keeps it in place when it's traveled far enough to move the derailer over by one cog. What this means for you is that you move the lever over by one position (and it goes "click") and the chain moves over by one cog. That's indexed shifting: simple for the user but mechanically opaque, and if something goes slightly wrong, the shifting doesn't work right until it's fixed. The way shifters worked for many decades was different: you moved the lever until you decided you were in the right gear. No clicks, no notches to hold the cable in the right place, just the friction from the lever being squeezed onto its mount by a screw. What does that have to do with modern components? Well, friction shifters have improved over the years, first with French company Simplex, then Suntour (RIP) in Japan, and more recently in a collaboration between Dia-Compe and Rivendell in Taiwan and the USA. Modern friction shifters have a light touch, are reliable in keeping their position, and last forever with only inexpensive replacement washers to change every decade or so. These shifters have also kept abreast of modern 11-speed drivetrains, which need to move the derailer further than ever before, with an elegantly simple solution: you just get a shifter with a bigger barrel so that the cable moves further when you move the lever. A friction shifter is compatible with any derailer, any cassette, any chain. Mix and match if you want, move from 10-speed to 8-speed from one day to the next. Put the shifters down on the frame like racers did until 1990, put them on the stem like on your old Peugeot, put them at the ends of your handlebars like cyclotourists have done for ages, put them on your flat handlebars like a classic MTB, put them wherever you please. The freedom to use any part and mix-and-match drivetrains is exhilarating! We'll be receiving a delivery from Dia-Compe soon which will include several models of their superb friction shifter (none better has yet been invented) for downtube, bar-ends and a special downtube 11-speed model. We're also getting some beautiful classic brake levers, 'cause why not look classy if you're going to look classic. In addition, we'll be building our upcoming Bassi Montréal V3 as a traditional randonnée/sport-tourer and will be using bar-end shifters from Microshift, and while we don't insist anyone has to use friction shifters, we do like to give people the option, so we're sourcing a convertible index/friction model for next summer. And by the way, all our steel Bassi frames have standard downtube shifter mounts. Try them out, we're sure you'll like them.