Those who follow me on Google+ know that I picked up road-cycling some time ago. Those who know me personally are probably surprised why I lazy slob like me who has an expressed distaste for sport started to do sport. Let me explain and maybe motivate you to do something similar.
1. Pre-history
Like all people I learned to cycle when I was a kid (technically, that is not true but for 99% of people you meet indeed the case, I digress). I used these kids driving wheels, which turn your bicycle into a quadcycle or rather a tricycle because you always end up balancing in three wheels. This is possibly the worst way to “learn”, because at the end of the day, you still cannot ride a bicycle. And switching from a fake-bicycle to a proper one is about as hard as to learn it right from the beginning.
After that, I used to have a kids bicycle with 3 gears. 3 gears! What an awesome thing. I cannot remember the gears to be that much of a difference at all, so I was just switching gears for fun, without really understanding when to shift. Considering it was a kids bycycle, the speeds were not worth shifting after all.
The second bicycle I had was a dream in aluminium. A real adult bike with suspensors in the front! Unfortunately it got stolen (out of a locked cellar, imagine that, took my dad quite some time to figure out how the thieves opened the door. Hint: they didn’t, they took off the hinges). I got a new one, shiny silver metal MTB from a supermarket, with rear suspension. My friends told me how cool it is, even girls told me how nice it is. And it weighted about a ton. The gears were shitty, the suspension worth nothing, therefore I abused it to the point where I broke out the spokes on the front wheel. That wheel was never, ever true again. The bike is still around, rusting and heavy in the garden hut. Nobody tried to steal that one.
Parallel to that, my dad found an abandoned old 1994ish Scott Memphis steel cross bike that he fixed up. That was the first time I was on 28 inch wheels and 13kg bike. I was hooked.
2. The Good
Fast forward some years and I am a computer nerd. Like in the books, with glasses, staying inside, disliking sports, you name it. At some point I started to study, guess what, and by more or less luck I turned up in Japan for an exchange year.
And contrary to Germany, where everybody has a cheap fake mountainbike, in Japan everybody has an old-lady bike, except for those that have road bicycles. That’s where I thought I might as well get one as well.
After lots and lots and lots of review-reading, visiting bike shops and talking to myself I ended up with a 2012 Giant Defy 2. Now that was a long introduction.
Anyhow, I got this bike and it is awesome. It is light. After these years of heavy bikes, being able to hold the bike in one hand is an incredible change. The shifting mechanics work like a clockwork (except when they don’t, see below), riding the bike on a street is pure joy because it is basically effortless.
This lack of effort makes it possible to make long distances without feeling too tired. When considering going 70km by bike, I would have balked, but now 70km seems like a nice way to spend a saturday evening.
The cool thing about owing a road bike is the elitism, heh. I just love passing other road cyclist and nodding to each other as a form of mutual greeting. You pay 1000€ to get in this club, though.
3. The Bad
Riding in Japan is quite bad. Well, not riding-in-the-jungle bad but apparently nobody who builds roads has tried to ride a bicycle on these roads. The bicycle roads on the pedestrian roads are a total joke. Unlike the pedestrian roads there are not straight but curved often, the road is of bad quality and full of gully holes that stick out. Also, the slopes are not flat but usually have jumps where I fear that my wheels might be damaged.
Taking bikes on a train is another problem, because they have to be in a bag. There is no sensible reason for this, just to annoy cyclists. These bags cost 30 to 50€, are glorified garbage bags and it takes 15 minutes to disassemble the bike before riding.
While Japan is quite a safe country so I leave my lights on the bike all the time due to sheer lazyness, I wouldn’t leave my bike outside overnight. That means that inside my room, the bike get’s in the way constantly. Considering normal dorms, my room is rather large.
The problem of theft will be even more of an issue when I return to Germany. I am not looking forward to leaving my bicycle in front of a train station.
4. The Ugly
Do not – ever! – try to imitate what a cyclist on a mountainbike is doing. A road bike is not a mountainbike and while not as fragile as you might think, it is nearly as rugged as an MTB. In the first months, I managed to break off my rear derailer (I write it intentionally in the english way of spelling). Also, I have quite a number of scratches from falls because going downhill on a wet road is not so smart. I also had a rather huge number of punctures and I lost one tail light (because it wasn’t affixed properly) and one wheel light (no idea, maybe lost maybe stolen). Also, sometimes the gears don’t shift perfectly, because the cables stretch and have to be shortened. Overall, I pumped quite some bit of money into the bike after I bought it in replacement parts, equipment and clothes.
5. Conclusion
Well yeah, road cycling is not for everyone. It costs more money that you might think, especially in equipment and has some requirements like “proper” roads. But I think if you’re even remotely interested, you should at least give it a try. In the future, I’ll look into groups of people to cycle with, will post my experiences.