Biketastic
November 14th, 2005 @ 10:31 by NormMonkey
From the pedal-power department:
Blogging is still as infrequent as ever, but my excuse for the time being is my geeky GPS route study project, which is proceeding well on the website front (lots of diagrams and thinking about waypoints and decision flowcharts and stuff), and on the taking up all my free time front, but not so well on the code front.
In other news, I got myself a new bike this weekend[1]! This is much more of a road bike than my current mountain bike is. It’s also a bit more expensive, but I got $150 off by buying an on-sale 2005 model.
Next year’s model will have slightly better shifters, stronger forks, one or two other changes, but the frame is the same (apparently Cannondale has found a near-perfect design and they’ve been sticking with it). I test-rode a bike with the better shifters on it, and didn’t find the difference was worth it, and as for the other stuff I doubt I’ll be riding the bike hard enough to make a difference.
Things I learned:
* My body is right on the border between a medium and large bike frame
* 10mm makes a helluva difference in stem length
* Gonna be a bit of a learning curve for the different shifter style
Motivation for getting a new bike:
* Road bike for road biking - the mountain bike just ain’t the optimal bike when all I do is bike on roads;
* Comfort - I really enjoyed the variation in hand positions that the dropdown handlebars give. I also found that this bike is a lot easier to balance. Riding in a straight-up position, no hands-style, is something I like to do once in awhile for a change of position;
* Speed - I haven’t empirically confirmed this yet, but just from the test-riding I feel I should be able to get about 5km/h avg. speed increase from this bike;
* Colour - d00d! It’s blue!
[1] Please excuse the crappy photo. I had to steal it from a white background. Click the image to go to the actual bike stats page.
PINGBACK […] Last year, towards the end of the year, I bought myself a new bike. My old bike (which I still have, much like I bought a new car and still have my old one) is a mountain bike. The new one is a hybrid, but it leans to the road-bike side of the spectrum. There’s more about it over here in a post from last year. […]