A Century on the Wrist with the Traska Summiteer 38 “Oxblood”
This may not be the typical hard use review you are used to seeing here on SBWC, but I promise it'll make sense, just bear with me for a few minutes.
Earlier this summer, I reached out to Jon Mack over at Traska and pitched him an idea for a review I'd been turning over in my head for a while. For the uninitiated, Traska has been turning out a range of neo-vintage, enthusiast focused watches since 2018, when they launched their first Kickstarter campaign. Suffice to say it was a success as they have continued to refine each model and regularly sell out. As Jon and I had built some rapport through DMs on Instagram, he agreed to send me something out to make things happen, but with a caveat—he would choose the watch. I was intrigued, and obviously agreed. I guess this is as good of a time as any to mention that this watch was provided free of charge for the purpose of this review, but all opinions expressed are my own and everything stated is as honest and unbiased as I can make it.
About three days after our conversation, FedEx dropped off the package and I was in for one hell of a surprise. As if Jon read my mind, I received the exact model and color I had been drooling over on the Traska website for the past several months; the Summiteer 38 in the very sophisticated Oxblood Red. Although I'm black dial diver guy through and through, something about this particular watch pulled me on like a tractor beam and wouldn't let me go, and for good reason, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Let's get to something that may have confused a few of you, the title of this review. You may be thinking, “a Century is a long time, nobody is wearing a watch for that long, especially one that's only been around a few years” and you'd be correct. This is a cycling focused review, and in cycling, a century is a measure of distance. 100 miles to be exact, and the name is fitting because 100 miles feels like it takes a century when you are sitting on a bicycle. The watch made it into my hands just days before an event I'd been looking forward to all summer, the “Blackberry bRamble” a fully supported road century ride in beautiful Eugene, Oregon and I was looking forward to putting it, and myself to the test.
Which brings me to the review criteria. Riding any distance on a bicycle will point out flaws with any piece of kit, and a watch is no exception. Vibrations, bumps, sweat, wind, every little sensation just adds another layer of discomfort if something doesn't fit right, and every mile just amplifies any issue. One hundred miles in the middle of summer, on a twenty year old race bike seemed like a good opportunity for a shakedown. For the sake of this review, I'm going to break things down into three simple categories, two of which will be judged mostly according to my on bike experiences, those being comfort and performance/functionality, the other being appearance.
Let's get the looks and specs out of the way before we get to the hard stuff. Traska really likes leaning into the neo vintage look and the Summiteer line is no exception. The dial screams Art Deco with its’ tasteful “sector” design, stepping down dramatically towards the center of the dial and creating some pretty mesmerizing effects when the light hits the dial just right and a sense of depth that flat dials just can't match. Combine that with the applied cast lume indices and you get an extremely satisfying 3D experience that won't leave you dizzy and nauseous like Avatar probably did. Speaking of the lume, it is grade-A Super LumiNova; extremely bright and pleasantly blue, and lasts for hours after a short burst from a flashlight. Traska offers four different dial colors on the Summiteer, with safe options like black or blue, and the more adventurous this red or a classy green with gold accents. A cool thing to note about the Summiteer is that the second hand is actually painted white, which really pops nicely against the color of the dial and helps differentiate between hands.
The case leans heavily into the styling of another famous “explorer’s watch” with very contemporary design and proportions. At 38mm, it hits the sweet spot when it comes to wrist presence, wearing slightly bigger than the spec sheet might suggest. For those with small wrists or who just like the more retro sizing, Traska also offers the Summiteer in a 36mm, but I think the 38mm will be the more popular choice for most. The case is beautifully finished with a mix of high polished and brushed sections and featuring some nice chamfers towards the flanks. The tasteful mix of brushed and polished surfaces do a great job at making for an interesting watch to look at without feeling flashy, and the color of red that Traska chose for the dial keeps the watch from looking like a fire truck on the wrist. I’ll have the full specs below, but the important bit is this: 38.5mm case width, 46mm lug to lug, 10.5mm tall with the crystal, and a lug width of 20mm. This makes for an extremely pleasant watch to wear, especially when on a bike. The case and bracelet are also treated with a hardening process that increases the surface hardness to 1,200 hv, making it much harder to scratch than stainless on its own. In my time testing the Summiteer, I have only picked up two scratches, both of which are on the clasp and are hardly visible. When Traska says you can wear their watches without worry, they mean it.
The bracelet is one of the places that Traska really flexes their design prowess. Though it is more or less your standard oyster style bracelet, there are a few secrets hidden in the design. The links are the usual screw pin affair, but the three pieces of each link aren’t fixed together as you are probably used to, but rather fully articulated segments, making for a bracelet with unmatched flexibility. No matter how messed up your wrist shape is, I can guarantee this will hug it like no watch has before with no pinching or weird angles. The bracelet is nearly entirely brushed, with just the outside edges and the chamfers on the clasp being polished. This also lends to the overall lack of flashiness that makes this watch fly completely under the radar, though don’t call it boring. The clasp is a compact, toolless micro adjust clasp with a double pusher release, similar to the Omega Seamaster clasp, though this actually feels better executed and much less bulky. One of those little secrets I mentioned before is the fully decorated inner mechanism, something that you will only see when the watch is off, but something that really increases the perceived luxury of the watch.
On August 30th, I grabbed my bike, roughly 500g carbs worth of gels, drink mix and payday bars, my helmet, shoes, strapped on the Summiteer and headed down to Eugene for a long day on the bike. The morning was cold and clear, but it was going to get hot, and soon. I was nervous about a few things when I pulled up to the start line, one of which was if I could handle wearing a watch on a bracelet for six hours of harsh cycling. Normally for rides over an hour or two, I opt for a G-Shock or no watch at all, but this is what I signed up for when I pitched the review idea to Jon. Setting off, vibes were high. Two of my friends were riding with me, I was on a fast bike, and had an awesome watch on my wrist.
Before departing, I set the time to my atomic clock app with the idea of testing any accuracy drift over the course of the ride. It may not seem like it, but even a road bike is capable of generating some pretty extreme vibrations, enough to rattle loose anything not slathered in loctite blue. A quick Google search will show that even on smooth pavement, the vertical acceleration measured at the stem is 4.43 m/s. For comparison, the recoil of a 9mm handgun is roughly 5.3 m/s. Suffice to say, a six hour bike ride could really mess up a low quality movement and I wanted to make sure I was equipped to measure that. Not that I was concerned, Traska uses Miyota 9 series movements, with the Summiteer sporting the 9039, an extremely modern no date movement. Having owned another 9 series movement equipped watch in the past, I was confident that I could absolutely thrash this watch with little to no issue and very minimal drift. Traska regulates all their watches in four positions to an accuracy of between -10 and +20, with my example running at +9 seconds a day. I'm happy to report that after six hours, I only recorded one second of deviation, and that may not have even been from the ride.
One thing that a century ride is great at is pointing out issues with your kit. After so many miles and so many oz of sweat, every hot spot in your shoes or helmet, itchy seam in a jersey, the rubber on the arms of a pair of sunglasses can really start to drive you crazy, enough that you may never use that piece of kit on another ride, even if it was something that you had no issue with on previous shorter rides. With that in mind, I tried to pay close attention to any sensations on my wrist, especially when hitting bumpy bits of pavement, but after about an hour of riding, I honestly forgot I was wearing a watch. It wasn't until about four hours into the ride, once it was about 87 degrees and I had drank enough electrolytes to kill a horse that I started to notice it, as my wrist was swollen like a summer sausage, but two notches of adjustment with the clasp granted me several more hours without annoyance. One small gripe I have regarding the clasp, and this is actually one of my only real cons, is how the design of the bracelet and clasp makes it slightly awkward to reel the micro adjustment back in. The articulating links on the bracelet means there isn't a whole lot of rigidity when the watch is off your wrist, causing the links to “pile up” when you try to push against it. That wasn't an issue on this ride though, as the heat kept my wrists ballooned up for the rest of the day.
102.7 miles, a mile of vertical elevation gain, and six hours later, me and my homies rolled across the finish line. After stowing the bike, peeling off my jersey and replacing it with a t- shirt, and grabbing a slice of blackberry cobbler with ice cream and a domestic light beer, I sat down to gather my thoughts about the ride, life and my experience with the Traska Summiteer. There comes a strange sense of clarity after forcing your body that far beyond its limits, almost as if exertion and pain draws you deeper into your own mind. And as I sat there in the grass, eating a bite of cobbler and vanilla ice cream and washing it down with some rocky mountain water, one word was turning over and over in my mind. Uncomplicated. I know that might sound like another way to say boring, but I'll explain.
The Traska Summiteer is uncomplicated in that it just gets the job done. It looks good without drawing attention to itself from others. You can look down at it and smile at its vintage beauty, but you are never going to need to worry about someone else trying to steal it, or worse, some weirdo coming up to tell you “nice watch”. Even in Oxblood Red, it’s a watch that flies completely under the radar. It's a red dial watch that feels like a black dial watch. It's a watch you won't need to fuss over. It's a watch that you can bang around knowing that it'll take a whole lot to scratch it and the movement can handle it. This is a watch I could see myself wearing every day for the rest of my life; it does everything I need a watch to do with no fuss. Again, don't take this as me saying the Summiteer is boring, it's a gorgeous watch and I find myself looking at it constantly. It's a watch that has no business being as good as it is, especially for $670. Traska has been upgrading and enhancing all of their lines year after year since their inception, but I think Jon is going to be hard pressed to make the Summiteer any better with its next iteration, and that's not a bad problem at all.