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Two months ago I decided to take up bicycling. Thanks for the advice everyone. After determining that as my learned friend @MollieTheMare indicated, the Pacific mountain bike I'd come into was kind of a piece of shit, I went hunting around for other bicycles I could borrow from people, and found myself with a menagerie of old bikes that had been sitting in garages for years or decades now sitting in my garage and being fixed up and ridden around my neighborhood. I've got a 90s Trek hybrid for girls, a 2012ish Trek hybrid for men, a remake Schwinn cruiser, and a Jamis road bike from the 2000s that I quite like but have to keep fiddling with to make work for me because it's actually the wrong size. Eventually I'm going to return all but maybe one of them to their original owners. I'm still kind of figuring out what exactly I like/want/need in a bike, and how to go about finding it.
So cycling mottizens, consider this the "What are you riding?" thread, or the "What bike would you advise someone to buy?" thread. I'm curious what the fine people of this place think is a good bike.
I basically only ride a hard-tail 29r XC MTB on local trails now. It's at the level of cheapest bike that I do not consider a piece of shit. For where I live, the best combo of: low maintenance, getting out and exploring a bit, and not risking being killed by a motor vehicle. It's also cheap enough I don't feel compelled to baby it.
I have an old road bike that needs a bit of work, and an oooold road bike that needs a lot of work.
In my ideal setup I would live somewhere where there are miles and miles of open road and good bike infrastructure in the city. In that case, my imagined lineup would be:
If someone just wanted "a bike," the suggestion would depend on location. But assuming generic suburban US middle age adult, an alloy hard-tail 29r XC MTB for local trails is probably the most accessible "real" biking. E-bike for those over the age of 70 with money.
Borrowing a bunch of bikes was a great idea, and sounds like fun.
I think I've mentioned here before, the number of bikes you'll want is N+1, where N is the number of bike you currently own. The optimal number to in fact own is M - 1, where M is the number of bikes where your spouse threatens to divorce you.
It was! There's something fun about inflating the tires, adjusting the brakes and shifters, lubricating everything, and getting an old bike out on the road. It's like an easier lower stakes version of the barn find car. It was also the best education in bike brands for me, virtually every house around me has a bike in the garage, 90% of them are trash that the owner thinks is a really high end bike and the other 10% are really expensive bikes that the owner thinks is just old trash.
It's amazing how quickly one finds oneself wanting all kinds of specialized varieties of bike, while simultaneously secure in the knowledge that others are doing more with less.
I find myself riding on public roads much more than I thought I would. I had a vision or stereotype in my mind that this was fairly dangerous, but upon really thinking about it and doing it more, I just need to be choosy about time and route and I can avoid most traffic pretty easily, make no left turns at speed, and have minimal problems. Route A is good for weekday evenings with minimal traffic after 6pm but bad during the day, Route B is through a neighborhood and good during the workday but terrible at rush hour, Route C runs through an industrial park and is perfect and completely empty on weekends but impossible on weekdays.
It's interesting, to me, how riding a bike changed my interaction with roads and traffic relative to walking the dog, going for a run, driving for utilitarian and recreational reasons. Hills are fairly irrelevant to driving, annoying but ultimately meaningless outside of split time for running, a major obstacle for a bicycle requiring serious route planning. As I walk or run on the left hand side facing traffic, turning left is the inside lane, and anyway crossing traffic is no big deal anywhere I go for a run. On a bike, I really try to avoid left turns unless it's at a stop sign, as that presents the worst risk of a car coming up behind me hitting me while trying to pass. Going for a run, if I need to stop and rest or walk for a bit after a hard effort or halfway up a hill, it doesn't matter and no one cares. When I fail on a hill climb on a bike, I feel like a public failure walking my bike up the hill, like wow I really suck at biking, and occasionally even get motorists slowing down to ask if I'm ok or if the bike broke down.
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