One Year with the Moots Routt RSL
I am a firm believer that the best bike is the one that you ride. Which is why it may be hard for any bike to ever top the very first road bike that I bought: a second-hand CAAD 5 with an red white and blue color scheme to match that frame’s Made in the USA bona fides.
I rode that bike absolutely everywhere, before being convinced somewhere along the way that carbon fiber was the future. Thanks in no small part to a heavy dose of bike industry marketing, I wound up selling the Cannondale and buying a lightly used early generation Trek Madone (this was back in the day that Lance was still King), thus kicking off the better part of two decades worth of buying, selling, and trading my way through a number of bikes from several of the ‘big names’ in bike manufacturing. This buying and selling probably didn’t win me any favor at home, but along the way I have been fortunate to ride a number of bikes that I really enjoyed. Though, I’m not sure I have ever owned a bike as versatile, durable, and fun to ride as the Moots Routt RSL.
It has been a year and a few months since I first built up my 2019 Routt RSL and in that time I have used it for just about every style of riding imaginable. Sometimes this has meant using the Routt for its intended purpose at big gravel events like D2R2 (where I definitely showed up with the wrong gearing, but that is a self-inflicted mistake) or just wandering around the hidden gravel roads outside of New York City. Other times I brought the Routt out for early morning road racing in Central Park, and it has done plenty of ‘road bike’ miles on tarmac in the post-COVID days.
Has it been the ‘best possible’ bike for each of those individual use cases? Almost certainly not. But I don’t think the Routt was dreamed up with just one use case in mind. At least as I have ridden it, the Routt has been a ‘go everywhere, and do almost everything’ bike. There will absolutely be lighter, faster, more aerodynamic road bikes. And there are certainly gravel bikes out there that will stake bigger and better marketing claims around this or that performance metric. But I have yet to ride another bike that can do all of these things as well as the Routt, all while looking as beautiful (at least to my eye).
The Routt can (and has) done an NYC road race on Saturday morning and then turned around for a bunch of singletrack exploration the next day. And it does both of those things well! On the road it is not quite as precise as say a Moots Vamoots, but I have very happily raced it in the big 100 person road race fields we used to enjoy in NYC before COVID. And there are some puts & takes for cyclocross compared to say a Psychlo-X but again, we have used the Routt for CX without significant drawbacks.
All of which is a long winded way of saying: I love this bike. Before you ask: I don’t know what it weighs. I honestly don’t know the geometry specs off-hand. I just know that it is a blast to ride and I look forward to many many years of putting in miles on this bike - be they paved, gravel, or off-road entirely.
Given we have a number of other Routts on the team, I also wanted to ask some of the other folks who have ridden the Moot Routt RSL to weigh in. Here is what they had to say, straight from TBD slack to the Journal:
I f*cking loved my Routt. I raced it in the park. I got drunk on it while riding at Rasputitsa. I raced a whole season of cross on it, and it was fast as hell. I rode my “hometown century,” one of the hardest on earth, on it; a ride I’ll never forget.
My Routt is never going to win in a sprint (I’ve definitely run out of gears coming up on state line), but it’s been the perfect bike during quarantine. My motivation to work hard and go fast is at historically low levels, so it’s been great to just hang out on my nice wide tires, find some new trails and check out the scenery. Also it’s very very pretty, which I think we can all agree is the most important quality in a bike.
It’s definitely a niche bike, at least the old Gen is. Perfect for doing rides that cross tarmac, grass, gravel, and urban road decay. It’s not the fastest road bike, and it probably cannot handle some of the stuff my CX bike could handle. But it does most things very, very well.
Honestly, my palate is not refined enough to tell if it’s the slightly relaxed geometry, the wider tires, or the magical spiritual qualities of Titanium. I just know that I prefer if over my Allez pretty much always. I have taken it off road a bunch and really enjoy the riding it’s opened up. And in my view, the best bike is the one you think coolest because you ride it more often. And I love the way my Routt turned out. All the colors, and the lines, and the entire thing really. I look at it and want nothing else than to ride it!
What has changed with my moots Routt RSL (2019 model)
The first time this Routt RSL appeared on the Journal it looked quite a bit different. Yes, it was shiny and new and not covered with 12+ months of NYC grime and muck from various gravel adventures. But a few more significant things have changed as well:
The 1x 48T crankset setup is gone. The 1x AXS setup worked pretty well for most of 2019 when the bike saw a lot of action on pavement including plenty of NYC road racing. What it didn’t work quite as well for is steep gravel riding like at our memorable day at D2R2. So with COVID ending the 2020 road season before it really began, it made since to swap to a more versatile 2x setup featuring the same 48T big chainring but with an easy climbing 35T small ring.
The i9.65 aero wheels have been set aside. Similar to the 1x crankset, these wheels were more focused on NYC road racing than long training miles and winter weather. With no road racing to be had they’re currently in storage, replaced by a set of Zipp Service Course wheels paired with some Rene Herse Bon Jon Pass 35’s, which give a perfect plush ride and the versatility for just about any gravel adventure in close proximity to NYC.
The Zipp Sprint Stem has been switched to a Moots Ti Stem. This was all about comfort. As with the rest of the build, the first incarnation of the Routt was focused more on paved adventures/racing and as my use case shifted more toward off-road adventures, a slightly shorter reach made perfect sense.
Otherwise the bike is more or less setup as it arrived in early 2019. The SRAM AXS groupset has continued ticking away with no major maintenance issues, and the frame has been as durable and maintenance free as you would expect from a Ti build from Moots.
Disclosure: Moots is one of TBD’s partners, but we wouldn’t recommend a product if we wouldn’t happily pay full retail for it.
A New York City based cyclist and sometimes photographer. Part adventure rider, part crit racer, and fully obsessed with an English bulldog named Winifred.
Instagram: @photorhetoric
E-mail: matthew@tobedetermined.cc
