What is Storuman Gravel?

Stor­uman Gravel is a non-​competitive gravel cy­cling event for every­one. It’s or­ga­nized by Lus­pho­l­mens Ar­ran­görs­för­e­ning to­gether with Nor­rland­scyk­lis­terna, and starts in the “ham­let of world cham­pi­ons” En­samheten 9 km out­side Stor­uman. The courses are tough, var­ied and hilly for those that want to give them­selves a tough chal­lenge. In ad­di­tion, there is also a shorter course, a very gen­er­ous max time and an e-​bike class so you can choose whether you make it a re­ally tough work­out or a re­lax­ing tour.

With this event we want to show the pos­si­bil­i­ties of cy­cling as a form of ex­er­cise in gen­eral, and gravel bik­ing in the Stor­uman area in par­tic­u­lar.

What is gravel cycling?

Gravel cy­cling is the fastest grow­ing form of cy­cling, and takes you away from high-​traffic as­phalt roads to var­ied gravel roads, dirt roads and the oc­ca­sional path. It floats dif­fusely be­tween road cy­cling and MTB — you put in a lightly threaded tire that is a cou­ple of fin­gers wide, lower your air pres­sure slightly and ride wher­ever it’s pos­si­ble.

This “new” cy­cling genre has for real opened up rural areas for long-​distance cy­cling in a way that was not pos­si­ble when every­one wanted as­phalt under their tires. From hav­ing a very lim­ited num­ber of roads to choose from, often with heavy and fast traf­fic, a huge road net­work with fan­tas­tic op­por­tu­ni­ties is now open for ad­ven­ture.

That thing with as­phalt though, even if called gravel cy­cling, you don’t avoid as­phalt al­to­gether, you often have to pass some to get to and from more ad­ven­tur­ous streches of gravel road, and mixed with other it adds to a sat­is­fy­ing vari­a­tion of sur­faces.

Ini­tially, gravel bik­ing was a grass­roots move­ment, but it wouldn’t grow as fast as it does now if the man­u­fac­tur­ers hadn’t been re­spon­sive and started mak­ing bikes and tires ideal for this type of rid­ing, and through its mar­ket­ing made the world be­yond the most deeply in­volved aware of that the genre ex­ists.

Older road bikes only fit nar­row tires, so early on, the gravel cy­clists used ei­ther cy­clocross bikes, an MTB, a hy­brid bike, or that road bike de­spite nar­row tires (it works bet­ter than you think). Of course, you can do that today too so you don’t have to buy an­other bike.

The trend started like many other things in the US and there Un­bound Gravel is the most fa­mous gravel race. In Eu­rope it started a lit­tle later, but now the move­ment is real, and things are start­ing to hap­pen in Swe­den as well. The typ­i­cal gravel road sur­faces dif­fer in dif­fer­ent parts of the world and thus the na­ture of the races. In the US, there roads often very rough with coarse sharp gravel that re­quire heavy and tough tires, while here in Swe­den we usu­ally ride finer gravel and get away with nar­rower and lighter tires.

If you have been into road cy­cling, you know that traf­fic can be prob­lem­atic and it may be dif­fi­cult to find nice rolling roads to ride on. If you in­clude gravel and dirt roads in your rid­ing, a whole new world opens up, es­pe­cially here in rural Swe­den. Al­most no traf­fic, great va­ri­ety, bends and slopes, up and down, and you see vil­lages and sur­round­ings you didn’t know ex­isted. An ex­cel­lent form of cy­cling for ex­plor­ing the nearby area — get­ting the most out the rid­ing you can do where you live.

Rid­ing on the roads that exist even if they are not per­fectly smooth may seem like a pretty ob­vi­ous idea, so why didn’t any­one think about it sooner? The cy­cling cul­ture may have had too much focus on pro­fes­sional cy­cling and de­vel­oped in parts of the world where road cy­cling on as­phalt has such good con­di­tions that there was no need to broaden the per­spec­tive. What­ever the case, gravel bik­ing is now here to stay.

A ded­i­cated “gravel bike“, a bike with drop bars and 30 – 45 mm wide gravel tires, is also fast on as­phalt. Up to just over 30 km/h you can hardly no­tice any dif­fer­ence from a reg­u­lar road bike. It is also pos­si­ble to ride sur­pris­ingly fast and com­fort­able on gravel roads, which means that many hard-​core road cy­clists dis­cover the genre. The man­u­fac­tur­ers help, a mod­ern road bike with disc brakes often fits fairly wide tires so with a sim­ple tire swap it be­comes a com­pe­tent gravel bike.

MTB cy­clists, who may think of road cy­cling as bor­ing con­sist­ing mostly of rid­ing busy and straight as­phalt roads, like the va­ri­ety and flex­i­bil­ity gravel bik­ing pro­vides. A basic MTB that has a sus­pen­sion fork but is rigid at the back (“cross-​country MTB ”, XC) works al­most as good as a ded­i­cated gravel bike, es­pe­cially if you fit a bit nar­rower and smoother tires.

There’s no clear de­f­i­n­i­tion of what a gravel bike is or what a race course looks like. There are gravel bikes that sim­ply is a road bike with slightly wider tires, to vari­ants that are close to MTB with drop­per post and sus­pen­sion fork. The com­mon de­nom­i­na­tor is that (al­most) all have drop bars, and fit wider tires than a tra­di­tional road bike, but (usu­ally) nar­rower than an MTB.

Gear tips

The “se­cret” with a good gravel bike is not the drop bars, but good gravel-​specific tires. Suit­able width, suf­fi­cient thread and a rel­a­tively soft rub­ber com­pound. They do won­ders for rolling re­sis­tance, con­trol and not least com­fort.

The gravel bike’s tires are not in­flated to be as hard as on a reg­u­lar tour­ing bike. With the tour­ing bike you know that if the tires are soft it rolls poorly, but the softer rub­ber com­pound in a good gravel tire means that the in­crease in rolling re­sis­tance is rel­a­tively small. When rid­ing over gravel, the soft tire swal­lows the small bumps so it be­comes less jit­tery mean­ing more com­fort, bet­ter ground con­tact, and it rolls bet­ter, so in all you get lower rolling re­sis­tance de­spite the softer tire. Of course, on smooth as­phalt a harder tire is a lit­tle faster, so on a race course with mixed sur­faces choos­ing a suit­able tire pres­sure can be an ex­cit­ing ques­tion for those who like to op­ti­mize for mar­ginal gains.

When it comes to tire width, one can say that 40 mm is the most all-​around, with it you can ride “all” sur­faces and it’s nei­ther slow nor heavy on paved roads. Very strong cy­clists often ride with a bit nar­rower tires, and if the ground is a lit­tle less coarse, a nar­rower tire can be faster. You may want wider if you want more com­fort, or more sta­bil­ity in down­hills on loose gravel. If you only have one pair of tires, 40 or 45 mm is a good choice. It should be said tha the trend is to­wards in­creas­ingly wider tires, but the rea­son for that is that the road sur­faces in other places of the world is often rougher than we are used to see in Swe­den.

If you have an older bike or one that is not specif­i­cally made for rid­ing gravel, then it may not be pos­si­ble to fit as wide tires as 40 mm into the frame, and then the best choice is the widest that fits. The stan­dard rec­om­men­da­tion is to keep at least 4 mm be­tween frame and tire, but if you don’t ride in the mud you can skimp on it a lit­tle. How­ever, side­ways in the fork the dis­tance should be kept as if a spoke breaks or you get a punc­ture and the tire starts rub­bing against the frame it may be dan­ger­ous at speed if it oc­curs in the front wheel. How­ever, most bikes have plenty of space in the fork so this is rarely a prob­lem.

If you have to use nar­rower than 40 mm one can say that about 30 mm is the lower limit where it doesn’t feel lim­it­ing, and at 35 mm there is rarely a need to widen fur­ther. That may seem nar­row con­sid­er­ing that reg­u­lar tour­ing bike tires are often wider, but with the soft rub­ber com­pound and lower air pres­sure, the gravel tires are more ca­pa­ble on coarser ground than one may think. It’s also pos­si­ble to have dif­fer­ent tire widths front and rear, bikes can often fit a some­what wider tire in the fork.

The thread pat­tern on a gravel tire usu­ally con­sists of fairly closely spaced flat knobs. These roll well and pro­vides good grip in most con­di­tions a gravel cy­clist will en­counter. Only if you ride in wet and muddy con­di­tions you need coarser pat­terns, such as usu­ally seen on typ­i­cal MTB tires.

Ex­pe­ri­enced gravel cy­clists usu­ally ride with­out tubes in the tires, tube­less, some­thing that has been stan­dard in the MTB world for many years. The ad­van­tages of tube­less are lower rolling re­sis­tance and lower risk to get a punc­ture. How­ever, it can be a lit­tle cum­ber­some to work with as the in­stal­la­tion is often quirky, and the sealant dries in a pool if the bike is stand­ing for long pe­ri­ods. For those who ride their bike less often, inner tubes may there­fore be the bet­ter al­ter­na­tive, and it should be stressed that the tire makes a much big­ger dif­fer­ence in rolling re­sis­tance than the inner tube (or lack thereof).

If you still want to op­ti­mize for mar­ginal gains and get roughly as low rolling re­sis­tance as tube­less, you can use inner tubes made out of latex. Today they are some­what ex­otic as most peo­ple go for tube­less, but they are still good (search for Chal­lenge latex or Vit­to­ria latex). Latex is an ex­tremely soft and com­pli­ant ma­te­r­ial, hence the low rolling re­sis­tance, but it is also a bit porous and there­fore loses air fairly quickly so you have to pump be­fore every ride. How­ever, on a bike for ex­er­cise and com­pe­ti­tion that may be ac­cept­able. The tires them­selves are today al­most al­ways de­signed for being used tube­less, but of course they also work well with an inner tube.

The next thing to think about after the tires is the aero­dy­nam­ics. You don’t have to be a very fast rider for it to play a role, as there are both head­winds and down­hills. On flat ground with no wind one can roughly say that over 25 km/h it starts to have a real im­pact, and that 80% of the air re­sis­tance is caused by the cy­clist rather than the bike. What makes the most dif­fer­ence is thus wear­ing tight-​fitting clothes (no flut­ter­ing in the wind) and a low han­dle­bar so that you don’t catch as much wind.

When it comes to low­er­ing the han­dle­bars you have to be care­ful though as if you are not used you may get some back or neck pain, and if you are in­flex­i­ble it can be more dif­fi­cult to get power into the ped­als if you are sit­ting too much bent for­ward. A drop bar has the ad­van­tage that you can change the grip and po­si­tion be­tween more up­right and more for­ward de­pend­ing on the sit­u­a­tion. With a straight han­dle­bar you need to set it in a po­si­tion you can hold for the en­tire dis­tance.