Thunder road
They might look like road bikes, but with a few subtle tweaks here and a wider tyre there, endurance bikes will take you anywhere. This is our pick of the bunch
Six hundred kilometres in one go. Consider how that might feel. You’d better be wearing your comfiest bibshorts. Now imagine those bibshorts are in fact woollen plus-fours, your bike is made from pig iron, the wheel rims are wooden and you only have one gear.
That’s because your name is George Pilkington Mills, born in 1867 in Middlesex, and you’ve just won the inaugural 1891 Bordeaux-paris in a time of 26h 36min 25sec. Impressive as that is, back in 1886 at the age of just 19, you stamped your name on a record that had stood for 133 years, Land’s End to John O’groats on a pennyfarthing, 1,450km in five days, 1 hour and 45 minutes. So you call that 8kg disc brake bike with the slack head tube an endurance machine? My dear child, it has 32mm tyres. That’s a hovercraft!
Pilkington Mills also used to carry a revolver in his pocket to ward off stray dogs, so it’s a stretch to compare his Victorian exploits to those of this year’s LiègeBastogne-liège winner, Primož Roglič, who had nothing more dangerous than a banana in his jersey. Yet there is something relevant to Mills’ story here, in that it begs the question, ‘Just what is an endurance bike?’
By definition, isn’t any road bike an endurance bike if taken on the right ride? To a degree this is true, but in 2004 the definition of the term changed irrevocably when Specialized released the Roubaix.
In a sense the Roubaix looked like a lot of road bikes of its time, but closer inspection revealed a much taller head tube, longer chainstays and room for up to 30mm tyres. It even had suspension in the form of ‘Zertz inserts’, elastomers placed in gaps in the seatstays and fork legs – although it’s said these just plugged holes, and it was the flexible tube shapes that provided damping. At any rate, Trek followed a year later with its similarly pitched Pilot, and Giant in 2008 with its Defy. Endurance was now a category, not just a moniker, and its raison d’être was to provide comfort over long distance and poor terrain.
Longer, slacker geometry remains the primary jumping off point today, but added to that are disc brakes, suspension systems and tyre clearances that would make cyclocross blush. And that’s before aerodynamics, high stiffness and low weight creep in, all things that start to make an endurance bike look like a race bike again. But there remains a primary difference, and it’s the way bike engineers try to meld speed with versatility and comfort.
A lightweight bike is not designed with the Arenberg Trench in mind any more than an aero bike is aimed at climbing the Stelvio, but an endurance bike is designed to make a decent fist of both, on the same day, whether that day is 30km long or 300km. The endurance bikes of today would have made George Pilkington Mills a faster rider. Here are the four we would have recommended him.