TAKE THE ROUGH WITH THE SMOOTH

Meet the versatile new Pearson gravel bike designed to take you further than ever before.

“The limits of my language,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein, “mean the limits of my world.”

Clearly, he’d never ridden a Pearson gravel bike. Still, one old philosopher’s loss is the modern cyclist’s gain (as absolutely nobody said ever); and Pearson’s ever-expanding collection of versatile gravel machines are designed for unlimited riding. Enter Rough With The Smooth, the newest recruit to our Pearson’s fleet and created to tempt you from the tarmac. It’s also the ideal ride for those who have already discovered the pleasures of pebbles and want to venture even further afield.

Like every Pearson bike that's gone before, Rough With The Smooth has been conceived using Pearson House Design (PhD), our in-house geometry system refined over thousands of fittings at our Sheen studio. Featuring a slightly deeper head tube and suitably pitched seat and head tube angles, all ensure a more comfortable riding position during long days in the saddle, without compromising on handling. A lightweight aluminium frameset features Pearson’s custom triple-butting and offers a superior strength-to-weight ratio to comparable materials.

Specced for adventure, the frameset includes rack and mudguard mounts, with clearance for tyres up to 700 x 45c. To fuel your body as well as your riding ambitions, Rough With The Smooth has triple bottle bosses in abundance; on both the seat-post and top tube, as well as two more on the down tube (top side and underside).

A full-carbon fork features additional cargo mounts, ideal for strapping a small tent or bag. Pearson’s flared gravel handlebar and Inside Job stem allow for full internal routing (including a dynamo) and the integrated cabling gives the bike an extremely clean aesthetic. It also offers the practical advantage of not interfering with additional kit and luggage, so you’re free to load up with even more cargo.

We’re not suggesting you imitate those Victorian explorers, prone to taking dining tables and tea services into the African bush, or a dresser and chest of drawers to the foothills of the Himalayas. For the modern two-wheeled adventurer, less is most definitely more; think compact tent or bivvy bag, while no self-respecting bike-packer would set off without their trusty (ie fancy) coffee pot.

If it’s a kit list you’re after, Long Distance Cycle Journeys (LDCJ) is an online resource claiming to be the largest bicycle-touring data set in the world. With intel collated from more than 480 long-distance riders, their combined experience amounts to around 570 years on the road years and more than 8 million kilometres ridden. So they’re big, which is to say small, on gear and where the secret, generally, is improvisation. To paraphrase Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in the vastly underrated movie Skyscraper: “If you can’t fix it with duct tape, you’re not using enough duct tape.”

Those of a certain age and – let’s be honest – nerdy disposition may well remember the cycling modification craze known as ‘drillium’. This what-it-says-on-the-tin design philosophy was a means of reducing the weight of your bike and cargo by the drilling of countless holes, generally in places where holes were never intended to be. One-part artwork two parts fetish, the resulting savings were tiny and improvements to aerodynamics fewer still.

Those days are, fortunately, long gone, rendered obsolete by superior components and fabrication advances. The point to all this is that whether you travel light or not so much, Rough With The Smooth will help you ride further than you’d ever imagined. Whether that’s an easy overnighter to a country hotel, or an insane overlander from one end of the country to the other, this is the bike for you. A Shimano GRX600 groupset ensures effortless shifting, while Pearson’s Ebb and Flow alloy wheelset gives the perfect balance of durability and performance. The hydraulic disc brakes provide plenty of stopping power, too, even when loaded to the gunwhales.

The watchword here is ‘versatility’, which is why the eminently adaptable Rough With The Smooth will be just as suited to a morning commute through the back streets as a morning sunrise in the back of beyond. Wherever you ride, you’ll find the handling both agile and responsive; the lightweight frameset is deceptively robust and also boasts sufficient stiffness around the bottom bracket to guarantee effective power transfer. Shorter chainstays reduce vibration on all surface, while Bolt thru-axles offer improved stability in both the front and rear.

We don’t generally tend to compare our bikes to cars; it’s not really how we roll, given Pearson’s ongoing mission to persuade as many people as possible to eschew their vehicles and embrace the benefits of cycling. And yet, if pushed, we might suggest that Rough With the Smooth offers the ease and comfort of a Range Rover with the gnarly snarl of a Subaru. (So long as you pedal hard enough.) The limits of your world, we’re sure you’ll discover, will more likely be the limits of your legs.

View the full specification - Rough With The Smooth >

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