Forum Replies Created
-
Replies
-
OP, what is your budget?
OP, what is your budget? Apart from not having a grand to spend on a new bike, how much have you got?
Changing from Claris to Tiagra will cost what, ÂŁ300?
Most experts say the best bang for buck upgrade is wheels, if you really want to change something look at getting some wheels in a sale or on special somewhere.
Like Simon E says, I would wait until you have more money, and get a whole bike in a sale, or even off Ebay. There are loads of bikes for sale bought by people who want to take advantage of cycle to work schemes, or have seen all the other folk whizzing around on a Sunday and want to give it a go; the bikes get ridden 2 or 3 times then left in a shed or garage, in nearly new condition.
I think 90% of the people would go for the Propel, if they were similarly priced, just because it’s the “better bike”, looks better and makes you feel manly and agressive 🙂I’m one of the other 10%. I have yet to find an aero models that is aesthetically pleasing (though the Propel is better than most other ‘aero’ models). I can be manly without a bike and don’t feel a need any encouragement to be aggressive.
A model with slightly less drag may be a benefit if you’re racing, but technically irrelevant for everyone else. It makes me think of wide wheels & spoiler kits on cars that are driven around town (though I have no problem with people buying whichever bike they prefer).
Absolutely!trying them before buying would be ideal.Well, if you guys equate aesthetically pleasing with manly and aggressive, that’s your hang up! To me, it’s pleasing aesthetics are down to it looking more modern/different than regular bikes. Plus the colours at the time were less conservative than they are now.
Not sure about ” less drag is irrelevant to everyone else.” On group rides with my mates, my bike seems to need very little effort to stay in 2nd or 3rd wheel. I only really noticed when my Propel was off the road and I had to borrow a more conventional bike, I kept dropping off the back of the group because I was putting in Propel-levels of effort to stay on, and that wasn’t enough. Purely anecdotal I know but…
A friend has a Defy…it’s OK
A friend has a Defy…it’s OK. His cost twice as much as mine, I wouldn’t swap. Have also tried a TCR, which admittedly was a couple of years older, but had the worst saddle I have ever sat on. Literally 30 minutes was like a 6 hour rideBought a Propel a few years
Bought a Propel a few years ago, still love it. Part of that is the look of it, but that makes me want to ride it, and makes me miss it when I haven’t been on it for a while.
Did loads of research before I bought it, tried a couple of aero bikes, and a couple of “normal” bikes, including a Super 6, for me it was a nicer ride than any of the others, looked better (the shape) and of course, in red, sealed the deal.
Final thing was, I looked at my rides on Strava, and almost all of them were 2-3 hours. In a year, I would do 4 x 100 milers, maybe 8-10 sixty milers, but literally 150-200 rides of a couple of hours. It would have to be an absolute old rattler to make comfort more of a priority.
Having said all of that, I rode an Everesting on it 3 months after I bought it. 27 hours, over 300 kmMungecrundle wrote:
Most are decent, hard working, professionals. Some have bad days and don’t deal with it very well. A very small minority are absolute arseholes pretty much all the time. Bit like people generally, really.I don’t know how to tell you this, but you are in fact wrong. At least in my experience; when I am cycling, nearly all taxi drivers are amateurs and should not be allowed to drive, never mind earn a living at it. It feels like they take aim at me, and as far as they are concerned, pass as close as possible but just manage to avoid hitting me because they don’t want any marks on their vehicle, or possible delays in getting to their next (extortionate) fare. More close passes come from fecking taxi drivers than I care to mention.
OP – did you get his cab number and report him? I know London Taxis won’t do anything about it, but you should have a go.
I’d say two weeks is where it
I’d say two weeks is where it starts to be noticeable – what you could do before without thinking will take more effort, and take more out of you. You can go a week without noticing any negative change, but two weeks, you will be aware.
I broke my shoulder in August last year, and the combination of 4-5 weeks off then, plus the onset of winter means I haven’t got back to where I was yet. I was in a good place then, and it becomes self-perpetuating (for me at least) when you get to a certain level, you want to maintain or improve that, so you make sure you ride every 2-3 days, if not more than that. And you mix it up, a long slow ride, then maybe an hour of hill reps next time, then maybe a couple of sessions with sprints in.
My recovery started with walking, I live in a beautiful area so literally 5 minutes walking from the house and I am away from buildings and in the woods. I also noticed how easy/quick it was to start, no “special” clothing, no preparation, no having to have the right snacks and drinks ready, no charging of batteries for any kit, just normal cloths and trainers and away I went.
I’ve now started running again, going twice a week with my 21 year old son. Added to that, I have started being more careful with food and drink, and have at least got my weight back where it was before the accident.
Surely by the time Easter
Surely by the time Easter comes round, it will be warmer anyway?
If cold feet is still a problem, you could try socks then plastic bags (A5 ziplock ones with the ziplock bit cut off) then the shoe.
Two thin pairs of socks may work better than one thick pair.
I use a Garmin Forerunner 310
I use a Garmin Forerunner 310 for tracking my rides and runs. I bought an adapter for the strap, so I use it on my wrist when running, but it twists out and can go on a normal Garmin mount on the bike. This means it sits even prouder on your wrist than it would without the mount (it’s quite thick) but that doesn’t bother me. It is an old looking thing, but it does what I want it to and it is a lot less than a 510 or any of the other dedicated Garmin cycle computers.
It lasts about a week between charges, wihch includes 2 or 3 45 minute runs, an hour bike ride in the week and a 4 hour ride at the weekend.
As others have said, a phone + app will let you record your rides and review them after, but you cannot really use it on the bike and expect it to survive. I’ve dropped my Garmin a few times and it still keeps working, we all know it doesn’t take much of an impact to break your phone. And if you get into a situation where you need to call for help, it’s good to know you haven’t run the phone battery down too low whilst recording.
My Garmin has several functions that I like that may not be available with other bike computers or phone apps. It has a virtual partner, so you can set a route and an average speed and the screen shows you whether you are ahead or behind on pace. You can do this either at the planning stage, or you can convert a ride or run you have already done to have the virtual partner ready next time you try it. You can also program workouts to it, so you would have a 10 minute warm up, followed by 3 mins in zone 4, a 1 minute recovery, and then 4 repeats of that. I find it hard to do interval sessions without the watch telling me when the intervals start and finish out on the road, there’s so much else to think about and when you are pushing yourself, simple sums and looking at screens are too difficult. If you’re knackered from a busy day the day before, you can set an alarm if you get out of z2, to try to keep you at a low effort level.
It does bread crumb navigation, which is ok out in the country when the junctions are spaced out, but in built up areas it isn’t always easy to see which turn you are meant to take. But you get audible warnings too.
And this is without live segments, which higher end Garmins do.
When it dies on me, I’ll have a good look at the Wahoo Bolt, and maybe some of the other rival products. Cateye and Lezyne make simpler, cheaper bike computers which will do what the phone app do.
I’ve got a smart watch coming (some kind of Amazfit, never heard of them but they got good reviews) as a present soon, will be interesting to see how it stacks up to the garmin.
I’m also of the camp that doesn’t put too much weight on the 53/11 gearing. How much of our cycling life do we spend spinning out, i’d suggest not much. Having closer ratios in the middle of the cog and the more comfortable climbing gears will be much more efficient over a reasonably long ride…I don’t think this argument stacks up, at least in my experience. Let’s go back to the good old days when all you had to choose was a standard or compact chainset, say 10 years ago! Whilst you have to be pretty far up the ability ladder to spin out a 53/11 regularly, a 50/11 is much easier to run out of gears with. I’m not talking about screaming down a 20% slope at over 50 mph, I’m talking about maybe a 5% slope with a bit of tail wind. Or a gentler slope but riding in a bunch; whenever I have ridden a compact I have been frustrated by running out of gears at speed more often than running out of gears climbing.
I think the OP’s question might be redundant though. My cycling buddies all have road bikes, cx bikes and mtbs. I don’t have a cx, just a road bike and an mtb; I now won’t go with them when they take the cx bikes out, because I have to take the mtb and I know I won’t be able to keep up. I’ll try for 60 minutes or maybe 90, but at some point the greater effort required to move the mtb on a road or smooth off road trail will wear me out before them. It’s a good challenge and workout initially but eventually you get tired. I haven’t tried the comparison of road bikes v cx bikes but I bet the road bike will require less effort than the cx bike for the same distance covered.
Road bikes are optimised to go fast on roads, they are (just) strong enough to take most potholes whilst being light, the tyres are just grippy enough in most conditions to keep you upright, whilst being light, the brakes are good enough to stop you whilst being light. The gears are chosen to give you a compromise between getting up steep hills and maintaining a good average speed on the flat.
MTBs are optimised for off roading, they aren’t as light, the brakes are stronger, you sit in a different position, the wheels and tyres are heavier, wider, grippier. The gears are much more biased to climbing in situations where you could have a lot less grip than a road bike.
CX/gravel/adventure bikes are a compromise between the two above. They can mix some road riding and some gravel riding, but at the extremes of either they just won’t be as good.
Put some extra lamps on and this is about as far as cars needed to evolve.
Extra lamps? It’s already got rally car driving lamps! Can you imagine a hatchback with rear wheel drive and a Lotus engine today?!?!?!
Mercedes have a radio ad for one of their new cars currently. There is nothing about the car at all, no benefits of this v the BMW/Audi competition or any car selling points; it literally only mentions that you can talk to it! And then there’s some throw away comment about it not being able to tell you a joke because it was engineered by Germans…
I ride roughly in line with the offside rear light cluster in these situations.If you’re obscuring one of the brake lights on the car in front it makes the following driver start paying attention to the nearside light cluster, which stops them from planning an overtake (usually).
Occassionally get abuse for doing this but not often – being a large hairy bloke probably helps.
Being a large hairy bloke I then tend to do my utmost to get back in front at the next inevitable queue of traffic, probably not particularly sensible but it makes a point.
+1. I used to en joy keeping up with traffic much like the OP originally described, but I would be on the right of the lane, nearer the white line than the nearside verge. I would also do a lot of looking around, get eye contact repeatedly with the car behind, and let them know they are too close. You could try slowing down in the middle of the road, but that rarely ends well.
In my experience, most car drivers have such total lack of anticipation and crap reactions they are not going to outbrake you.
I agree with Simon, from an
I agree with Simon, from an engineering point of view, if you reduce the distance between the joints, the frame should be stronger. Whether you can feel the difference though is another question! In addition, the lengthened seat post can flex more which can take some of the bumps and vibrations from the road away from your backside.
I’d argue the aesthetics are wrong; in my eyes a sloping top tube looks cack, and a horizontal top tube makes a proper bike.
Just started using it, I think you might be on to a winner. Certainly created a buzz when it pops up on feeds, that’s how I found it. Useful for identifying all those wind-assisted PBs!Could you partner with Relive.CC – would be cool to add weather graphics to their post-ride flybys?
I guess there’s no practical way to add weather to past rides? The data is probably available – possibly Accuweather?
🙂 thanks.
Partnering is a cool idea I hadn’t thought of, thanks! Adding it to my todo list.
You can add weather to past rides. You just need to update them in Strava and Klimat will process them. I’ve added a period to the title before to get them to process. One of my todo’s is to add a ‘catchup’ feature that will add weather to all your old activities, but it isn’t at the top of my list.
Seems a great idea! I’m an old so-and-so, how do you update an old ride?
You can wear through a rotor, yes. I have them on my cross/foul weather bike and after 1000 miles mine are noticeably thinner at the edge, where they get bitten, than in the middle. I’ve seen a picture of a bike with a broken rotor, with the outer edge bent round the outside of the seat stay. That must have been quite a surprise.Can you clarify that, the bit about 1000 miles and they are thinner? I do 2,000 miles a year on my old MTB and I don’t think I have ever replaced a disk. The whol e bike needs replacing mind you!
The road bike has rim brakes and I seem to get through a (basic/cheap) set of wheels once a year. I say seem because my lbs tells me I need new wheels and I buy them. I don’t think I need disc brakes on the road, and although I commute it’s on rural roads and I don’t think I use the brakes that much. I haven’t had one situation in over 10 years of riding on Sussex roads where I have thought, oh sh1t, disc brakes would have helped me here.
If you are riding in the wet and you “think” you need disc brakes, it may be time to reset your personal risk assessments; slow down and give you and others more time to work around any problems that may arise.
Manufacturers sell you cars on the basis of scenic open roads. Not traffic jams.
There’s an ad on the radio at the moment for a Mercedes of some kind. The only thing they mention in the “body” of the ad is that you can talk to it. FFS!
