The balance of comfort and speed when making bicycle decisions is probably the hardest thing about buying a bike or taking one apart and putting it back together.
I have reached my threshold for how much speed (pedaling efficiency) i am willing to sacrifice for comfort. My current commuting/cruising around the neighborhood/grab a couple things at the grocery store bike is an 87 Trek touring bike that was a pretty good lightweight skinny-tired bike in it's day. When i took it apart and put it back together, it became heavier, slower, and much more comfortable. It is the most comfortable bike I've owned so far, it fits me really well, has my favorite upright-swoopy Nitto Albatross handlebars that i had on my last commuter and was really close to taking over as my favorite bike (my Bridgestone RB-2 is my favorite). The idea of riding fast is relative to who you ride with, what you consider fast and how fast you have to go to have fun on a bike. I don't need to go fast. I just need to be able to get to work in an hourish on a bike. It's 14ish miles with alot of stop signs and traffic signals in between and I feel like if it takes me more than an hour, I need to go faster. Lately it's been taking me more than an hour... and I don't like it. I could pedal harder. I could work on getting in better cycling shape. But I like to have fun on bikes, not feel like I'm pushing myself working out. So here is the "problem": I've made my bicycle too slow. The tires on this bicycle are rated for a maximum pressure of 45ish psi, which in the world of bicycle tires, is very low, which makes for a super comfy ride, but adds a bit of rolling resistance to the equation.I usually preach about skinny tires being bad and tires with 100+ psi of pressure being bad and how they cause unnecessary stress on the frame/fork/wheels and other components of the bicycle and send up alot more road vibration and bumps and aren't comfortable BUT (!)..... There are always limits and thresholds to these rules and sometimes you get to the point of diminishing returns. Which is where my current commuter is in my opinion. I still love the bike though.
To cut to the chase with this babbling, where I'm getting to is that most people see bicycles as beach cruisers, mountain bikes or road bikes. Road bikes have skinny, super high pressure tires that make them go fast and aren't good for anything other than smooth hard surfaces. Beach cruisers are comfortable and have huge soft tires good for cruising down sidewalks, boardwalks and gravel paths and won't send you over the handlebars if you hit a soft patch on a sand/gravel path.And mountain bikes are go everywhere, ride over anything, suspension monsters for the people who want to ride fast over rough terrain. When people shop for bikes, these are the categories their options fall into... OH WAIT! I almost forgot about the "hybrids"!!! The "other" bikes. I hate the phrase hybrid as it's applied to bikes. What are they a hybrid of? Mountain bikes and road bikes? Is that what we're supposed to think? Hybrids are what almost everyone who rides a bike to get from point A to point B should be riding. They are usually somewhere between the look of a mountain bike frame and a road bike frame but with upright handlebars and bigger tires. A bunch of them have front shocks and suspension seats posts though, which is a little silly. It's an attempt to make them more comfortable, which is almost always good, but it also makes them heavier and gives you more things that can/will go wrong with the bike later (especially on the inexpensive ones). In Amsterdam they probably don't call all their 3 speed black heavy commuter bikes with fenders and racks and baskets and kickstands hybrids. They just call them usefull. But usefullness is something alot of people walking into a bikeshop aren't thinking about at all. Why would you need a mountain bike with knobby tires and a suspension system so complicated that it looks like a robotic velociraptor to ride to school everyday? Why would anyone want a full carbon frame road bike that weighs less than my squeezy panda horn and has tires so hard that it can't comfortably be ridden down any street in your neighborhood to ride to work everyday? Why? Because these things become status symbols.
I found myself at the oceanfront in Virginia Beach yesterday sitting behind a statue (trying to stay in the shade, because I'm scared of the sun...) with a book in my hand. I would read a little and then hear bicycle riders buzzing by or squeeking by in some cases, as I scanned my surroundings. There were alot of kids on bikes that didn't fit them well, knees bending way more than they should be comfortable with, helmets not fastened under their fragile little heads, i saw lots of beach cruisers of course, and there were alot of those 4 person bikes too. But the riders who caught my attention the most were the ones wearing bike shorts and jerseys who were riding full suspension mountain bikes and some others who were riding fancy road bikes. I saw a ridiculously tan older guy (maybe 55ish years old) with a decent beer belly clad in spandex bike clothes riding a titanium road bike. He passed me a few times and he stopped to look around alot. I guess he was people watching like me. I was thinking why is this guy riding THAT bike down here? On the boardwalk? You can't ride very fast down here because there are a million little kids and tourist everywhere you turn and they clog up the bike path like a towel in a toilet. But this guy was rocking it. The bike fit him well too. He probably bought it new from a local Va Beach bike shop, probably Contes. Daniel Dalton probably fit him for it. And he rides up and down the boardwalk on it. On a fancy road bike that costs more than my car.To cruise around and look at women who were equally as bronzed. It was strange sitting there watching all these people riding by. I had a conversation today with a co-worker who asked if I rode my bike to work, I gave him a lengthy explanation of how i haven't ridden lately but how i didn't have a car for quite a while and rode to work almost everyday for 2 years. He mentioned a guy he knew who had a really expensive road bike that was super light weight, I responded by telling him that i only ride steel bicycles and that carbon fiber was against my religion. This was the first time I've ever thought about the idea of having "religious" bicycle "beliefs". But it is almost a religion. I don't believe in alot of the bullshit that the current bicycle industry is selling. I do however believe that bicycles are a type of status symbol and I'm proud to own and ride the bikes that I have in my life.
