(It looks cooler with carbon race wheels….)
Where to begin. This is the first road bike I bought myself, and that fact is meaningful for me. I rode a lot of different bikes growing up that I didn’t have personal connection to or intention with, and I think that matters when it comes to riding bikes. At least for me, I love – loving my bikes, and it is part of what makes me love the sport. I love working on them, making them custom for me, tweaking every part of them. It makes me want to ride them. I also had to learn that bikes need to fit the rider, and riding a bike when you’re uncomfortable makes the experience a lot worse. I grew up being told that having the best equipment for sports doesn’t make one better at that sport, and I think I took that to mean that equipment wasn’t important for the sport you’re playing. I only learned later in life that for sports where there is no sport without the equipment, like cycling, that the equipment is what makes the experience mostly what it is. You can’t ride a bike without a bike, you can’t keep up with the peloton on a mountain bike, the best downhill mountain biker wouldn’t be competitive on a hardtail, and if I swapped only one part of my Tarmac, the 58 cm frame, for a 49 cm frame, I would not be able to enjoy riding in the same way.
I have a lot more to say here, but all that is to say that loving your bike is essential to loving riding it and to loving cycling. This bike is the first bike that I called truly mine and that I have truly loved.
Now for a brief personal road bike history.
I grew up riding bikes with my dad, and when I was ~ 10 years old, he wanted to get me a road bike. He managed to put together a Trek Mountain Lion with drop bars and road brake levers (an OG mullet drivetrain!) that was pretty sweet!
The Mountain Lion didn’t see much action. My 4th grade biking inspiration was limited to my mountain bike. In high school, I started doing rides on my dad’s road bikes – particularly his Ritchey Breakaway. I crashed hard descending 84 as a senior (due to a slow leaking rear tire that pinched and popped in a corner….~don’t wanna give the wrong idea about my handling skills in high school~ o.O) (but I was still kinda stupid) and lost a lot of confidence after that. I’d still come back and ride with my parents for breaks during college, though mostly off road. My back would always hurt riding the Breakaway.
After college when I started falling in love with cycling, my dad decided to get me an Alibaba carbon frame for like $300. It took a couple months to be delivered, so I took the Breakaway with me to Berkeley for my new job in 2019. I managed to break the Breakaway (no pun intended) while riding up El Toyonal on a fall morning in Orinda. I snapped the headtube off the top tube as a result of not tightening certain bolts specific to the breakaway design. I took it to Bernie Mikkelsen in Alameda for repair, which is a cool story on it’s own.
The Alibaba frame came pretty soon after. It did the job, but the frame left the bike without any soul, anything cool about it. It was matte black without any decals on it. Maybe I have lost the context and feeling of upgrading to a carbon frame for the first time (which was the whole point), but that bike still wasn’t it for me.
2020 is when I got really sick, but it’s also when I decided that cycling was something I wanted to pursue and part of my path of sorts. I had to relocate from my parent’s house to my aunt and uncle’s in Truckee in December so some mold remediation could be done, and I brought my road bike with me despite the snow.
Depressed and lonely, my bike was part of the little that I had up there. Without much to do, I spent time looking at frames to upgrade to online. I justified the purchase with the somewhat reasonable idea that my unbranded Chinese carbon frame would probably fail catastophically one day (as people report for the mtb frames). I chose this 2018 Specialized Tarmac SL5 frame off the Pro’s Closet because I wanted to bump up from a 56 to a 58, my dad had a Tarmac, I liked Specialized, and I liked the paint job, among other reasons. I thought that the paint job had white spots on the black coat, but I was suprised to find that the sparkles that were there just showed up as white in the pictures (probably due to camera flash).
After deconstructing the Alibaba bike and building up the Tarmac, an activity that was a Godsend at the time, I rode whenever able during the Tahoe winter. I rode up Donner Pass whenever the temps went above 40 and the roads were clear, which was about twice a month in January and February. It was funny riding up in the winter sunshine while cars were passing me on their way to Sugar Bowl or Donner Ski Ranch.
Since then, this bike has been the receiver of continuous upgrades. I bought an 11 speed Shimano Ultegra R8000 groupset for it at the of 2021 in addition to the Shimano Ultegra tubeless aluminum wheelset pictured above. I did my first criterium and road race in 2022, joined Alto Velo later that year, and upgraded to a set of Hunt 50mm deep carbon rims.
This bike has survived some hard crashes. Perhaps my collarbone saved the frame from most of the impact in a crash in a crit in the pissing rain in 2023, but it certainly held it’s own in another crash in another crit a few months later.
2023 also saw the addition of some Zipp components, namely a carbon seatpost, carbon handlebars, and an alloy stem.
In 2024 I started running 28 mm GP5000’s, which was surprising a Tarmac SL5 could fit tires that wide. I also purchased a Quarq DFour Dub Power meter to pair up with my Shimano 53/39 chainrings. After doing 400 watts up every hill with my 28 tooth largest rear cog, I upgraded to a long cage derailluer and an 11-34 cassette. Another huge addition were pedals with extended spindles – this really made my pedaling technique easier to maintain. I decided to cut the steerer tube and lower my stem later in the year, and I really felt the lower center of gravity and increased stability and handling when descending.
I admit, for 2025 and beyond, I’m looking to updgrade to a lighter disc brake frame. Carbon rim brakes are terrible and certainly contributed to the crash where I broke my collarbone. This frame is also not the lightest or stiffest (though it is light and it is stiff)
That being said, I don’t think I’ll ever sell this frame. It has some rough marks that only come with being ridden a lot. It’s not worth that much to sell in the new world of disc brake bicycles. It’s worth having as a back up road bike or a trusty companion for the trainer.
I love this bike for many reasons. This bike is a trusty workhorse. It’s there for the hard miles. It’ll survive hard crashes. It’s there to be raced in a crit or in a hilly road race. It’s good looking. It’s upgradeable. I know exactly how it was built and how it works. It’s given me many projects I’ve spent many hours on. It’s run flawlessly for thousands of miles with no signs of slowing down. I won’t be absolutely devastated if it breaks in a crash. I’ve lent it out to friends without worrying much about it. It’s a Specialized, and it’s a Tarmac. It has prestige, and there’s no such thing as a bad Tarmac in my opinion. It’s straightforward. There’s nothing complicated about it. My Crux has this headset issue that everyone knows about now, and I had a whole debacle of getting the cable housing internally routed and figuring out a 2x mechanical drive train isn’t compatible. Not this bike. It’s a serious race bike when you want it to be – it’s black. But it’s a tool for a fueling a passion and having fun, and you can see the glimmer of it’s flecks of sparkles when you stop and look at it. It gave me purpose when I was depressed. It gave me independence when I was limited. It’s been there for me, and it has never asked for much in return.
Specs:
Frameset:
- 2018 Specialized Tarmac SL5 Expert DA (stands for how it was sold assembled with Dura-Ace components) 10R carbon
Cockpit:
- Zipp SL 70 Ergo Carbon Handlebars 44 cm
- Zipp Service Course SL Stem 120 mm
- Zipp SL 70 Carbon Seatpost
- Specialized Power Expert Saddle 143 mm, CroMoly rails
- Shimano Ultegra R8000 Pedals +4mm spindle
- Zipp Service Course CX Bar Tape
- Wolf Tooth Bar End Caps
Drivetrain:
- Quarq DFour Dub Power Meter Crankset 175mm
- Shimano Ultegra R8000 Chainrings 53/39
- Shimano Ultegra FD-R8000 Front Derailleur
- Shimano Ultegra RD-R8000 Medium Cage
- Shimano Ultegra R8000 Cassette 11-34
- Shimano Ultegra ST-R8000 Shifters
- Shimano Ultegra BR-R8000 Brake Calipers
- Sram Dub Threaded Bottom Bracket
Wheelsets:
- Race: Hunt Carbon Aero Wide 50, Tubeless
- Training: Shimano WH-RS500 Wheelset, Aluminum, Tubeless
Tires:
- Continental GP5000 S TR 28 mm
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