Kona Rove: where it all started (sort of)
Bikes of past lives
Early into 2020 amidst all the chaos I was cycling a ton to stay sane with school/work being a total mess. I had been gifted a Miyata Country Runner from a friend and I was almost immediately hooked. But that bike was kinda cobbled together and I wanted something that wasn’t painful for rides over an hour.
Enter this Kona rove. Still one of the only bikes I’ve ever bought new, and I was relatively naive about bikes when I got it. But man oh man did this bike launch a ton of adventures and rides. In the year and a half I had it (mid 2020-early 2022) I put over 4000 miles on it on all sorts of terrain. It taught me road, gravel, MTB and anything in between as my only bike for a while.
This bike was the epitome of utilitarian and basic. Claris 2x8 (fantastic groupset), FSA cranks, and some very humble, very heavy and generally awful QR loose bearing wheels with SX19 rims that were, rather importantly, not tubeless. However, the fit worked great for me after some advice from mentors and more experienced riders, the ergonomics generally rocked and I love how the frame looked.
The first 6 months I really didn’t modify the bike at all, but I did ride it a lot (over 1000mi if memory is correct). It went to a lot of beginner MTB areas and was generally a blast on trails with 650x47 knobbies though and I learned a lot about how to stay on the bike when the dirt was loose, steep or muddy.
The first big upgrade was fenders and nicer pedals from Velo Orange. I think I was kinda going for a randonneuring look, but didn’t quite have a sense of style for bikes yet.
It did surprisingly well in the snow though!
About a year and 2000 miles in, I did some serious upgrades. New tape, cables, cassette, and crankset were the main things, with a 42/26 New Albion crank (don’t buy these! It wobbled on every single spindle I tried it with!) providing much much lower gearing. Which was helpful because at the time my favorite group ride did ~3500’ of climbing in 20 miles or so. Good times.
Nothing much changed for the rest of the bike’s life. For better or worse the wheels couldn’t be run tubeless so I generally switched between no fenders and GK slicks for roadie stuff and fenders and GK knobbies for gravel and singletrack after I wore out my original WTB venture tires.
I did some fun 40-50mi road rides and learned how to be fast on pavement with this bike, but by far my favorite ride I did with it was the Hell Of the North Plains loop by the OMTM folks in oregon. We did it on an awful, rainy, windy day and every mile was a challenge (emotionally more than physically) but I look back on it as the best 40ish miles I put on a bike. Good riding buddies helped a lot.
After 4000mi I was absolutely looking for a new riding experience so I sold the bike to a buddy from college and moved onto weirder, worse, but also better bikes. The Rove had an aluminum fork that chattered, it was heavy, rode kind of harsh, and never lived up to my dreams (which a thru axle steel or carbon bike of the same design likely would have) and yet… it remains one of my favorite bikes to this day because of the places it took me, the commutes, the fast sunny road rides and cold rainy gravel days. It was the bike that took riding from a form of transport to me to so much more, so for those experiences alone I think it’s a good bike.
Fenders always look good
Donut bar wrap goes hard.