Beginning cyclist tutorial - buying your first bike

                 Trek 1 Series

If you are new to cycling, your best bet is to find a local bike shop and hope that you can identify a clerk who is more interested in helping new cyclists than impressing you with his racer boy attitude. This can be difficult to find, but if you do pull it off you will be well served.

First and foremost you are going to need a bicycle and a local bike shop will generally be a better source than the other alternatives: toy shop, department store, sporting goods store, bicycling chain and online sites. Toy shops and department stores very rarely have knowledgeable sales people, even though many of them seem to think they are qualified. In addition, the products they sell are very cheap and not really suitable to serious riding. I realize that by virtue of your newness to the activity you are not yet a serious rider, but we want to give you a fighting chance to fall in love with the sport and starting with a decent bike will help you move in that direction. Sporting goods stores generally have some employees with a decent proficiency in bicycling, but it can be a crap shoot. Bicycling chains usually hire knowledgeable cyclists but they quite often are limited in the variety of bicycle brands they carry. It’s very hard to talk to a real person from any of the online sites. They are better utilized once you’ve become experienced and you know what you want and why.

There are plenty of different types of bicycles to consider: mountain bikes, commuters, touring bikes, cruisers, road bikes and all shorts of crossover variations. Since my focus is on road riding, I’ll assume you want to break into that aspect of the discipline and we’ll concentrate on helping you select a good starter road bike.

With a few esoteric exceptions, road bikes are made primarily of four materials: steel, aluminum, carbon fiber and titanium. Steel is the traditional material. It’s strong, cheap, easy to work with and offers a comfortable ride, so many entry-level bikes are made of steel. Downsides: steel does rust and it is heavier than the three other major materials. Aluminum has become a very popular frame material. It’s lightweight, extremely stiff and doesn’t rust. It offers a more jarring ride than the other materials, but it is a very common material for low to mid priced bikes. Carbon is “the” material for bike frames today. The process to mold carbon frames is quite expensive so you won’t find any low-end bikes made of this material. Carbon offers a great combination of strength, lightness, rigidity and comfort. Titanium offers an incredible strength to weight ratio, but it is very expensive. In the early days titanium’s main allure, its strength to weight ratio, led frame designers astray. They so much wanted to make ultralight bicycles that they ended up with frames that, relative to other materials, felt like they were made of “wet noodles.” More recent titanium bikes have largely solved this problem by using larger diameter and/or thicker walled tubing.

As a beginner, you will probably end up with a decent, affordable steel or aluminum bike. If you’re loaded, by all means buy a carbon frame. Not only will that help the bicycling industry more (higher priced frames imply more up stream jobs), but the fortune you’ve sunk into your bike may help keep you motivated on those cold and rainy days when checkers or Sudoku seem like better recreational pursuits. The quality of frame you buy will to a great extent dictate the quality of components you end up with. Right now, componentry is not very important. If you buy at a bike store, or even a general sporting goods store, you’ll end up with a 16-30 speed bike with adequate brakes. If you really are new at this, I strongly recommend a triple chain ring. Many bikes today are coming with compact cranks that sport only two chain rings, albeit more widely spaced than was common just a few years back. In my experience, the difficulty riding up steep hills is the single greatest factor that turns budding cyclists into “I tried it but didn’t like it” has-beens. Even though you can get pretty low gearing with a compact crank, you can always do better with a triple. Once you’ve become a real bicyclist you can opt for a compact if you want, but give yourself every chance to persevere at this stage by demanding a triple.

Bike fit has traditionally been a black art, but more recently has been quantified with formulas, computers and video analysis. Employees at any real bike shop will be able to size your bike and set it up correctly enough for you to start hitting the road. Eventually you’ll want to indulge in a more scientific bike positioning exercise, but for right now we’re just trying to get you out on the streets. Here is one simple, rule-of-thumb guide to consider. If you’re buying from a department store or general sporting goods shop, you’re on your own. Even if your attendant claims to know how to size and set up the bike for you, chances are good that it will be done incorrectly. Go back to paragraph one – buy your first bike from a local bike shop.

Bike shoes and clipless pedals are not required at this juncture. You will most likely buy both at the time you purchase your bike, but even if you don’t you’ll want them soon enough. We’ll talk about them in a later post.

The only other things you need to take your first ride as a brand new bicyclist are a helmet and a cell phone. Start by riding short distance from home so a flat, mechanical, leg cramp or gastric distress can all be remedied by getting back to the security of home quickly. Short distances will morph into longer and you’ll be on your way to a century sooner than you think.

Comments welcome! Thanks for reading.