An introductory introductory post.

[sara]

Hi there! Nobody else seems to be running a cycling comm on DW, so I suppose I will.

I've been bicycling since my dad and I spent a Saturday morning skinning my knees at a parking lot when I was four, and bike commuting fairly regularly since I was eleven; I've had protracted love affairs with a little red Bianchi, an embarrassing number of Schwinns, and a Peugeot mixte. These days I ride a Trek 520 touring bike and my daughter and I ride a Bike Friday Family Traveler custom tandem, which we bought earlier this fall when she started school. There are little bits of bicycles all over my garage. After many years of bike commuting, I completed my first two half-centuries this past summer, and I'm hoping to do some bike camping next summer with my daughter on our tandem.

I'm a great believer in helmets and, having grown up riding hand-me-down family touring bikes, am old-school about things like steel frames and friction shifting (bar-end shifters still seem sort of radical and extreme!) That said, the tandem is an untraditional little beast and a great ride.

I switched over to a Brooks saddle this last summer and can't say enough good things about it. I don't worry much about weight versus comfort; I've always thought it was easier for me to lose weight than it is for me to lose equipment, which means that I go out on Saturday mornings with a pannier bag with a map, a toolkit, and a lot of snacks, and the speedy folks whiz past and I think, hmm, at the top of this hill I will stop and have a sandwich and maybe make a phone call and watch the alpacas. A speed demon I am not.

I encourage you to introduce yourself and share about what you do with and like about your self-powered machines, whatever they are! And I live in Eugene, capital of interesting bikes, so I particularly want to extend a welcome to folks riding nontraditional bikes. I love my old-fashioned touring bike, but I'm in awe of the guy I see each day who commutes in his hand-cranked Quickie tricycle.

Comments

[aedifica]

Ooh, now I want Dreamwidth-logo cycling gear! *grin*

[sara]

There's a guy up in Portland who does custom-embroidered wool jerseys -- you get a big price break if you order a dozen....

[aedifica]

Cool! Maybe someday if the community really takes off... :-)

[sara]

Yeah, recruiting more than two people would be key....*GRIN*

[aedifica]

Unless we each really, really want six jerseys, you mean? *grin*

[sara]

Yeah, I could see wanting two, but six seems like maybe a lot.

[sinatra]

I didn't do a whole lot of bike riding until a few years ago, though I learned when I was a kid. I am not a particularly good, nor confidant bicyclist, but I'm really enthusiastic about it. I'm currently riding my mom's old Centurian Accordo 12-speed roadbike, which has had some of it's component parts replaced and probably needs more. The gearshifts either need work, or my gear shifting technique does. I do really like the fact that it has a mixte frame, for no other reason than I think it looks cool. I'm one of those people with the obnoxious, badly jurryrigged orange diary crates on the back.

My dream is to someday come across a decent, cheap utility bike so I can steampunk it up. :D

and also, yes, HELMETS. I wish there was some magical way to make helmets look less dorky, but I'd rather deal with dorkiness than possible severe head trauma, so helmets it is.

[sara]

Heh, I was forbidden to strap a milk crate to my bike any more after the bike I had before the Trek fell over three times in two weeks (well, I kept putting CSA veg and bottles of milk up on the back, and it was a hybrid bike with a really high center of gravity). Only bike I've ever come off of that much in that short a time in all my life. I rather gleefully stripped it for parts when we bought the tandem.

Mixtes are awesome. I really wanted a low bar on my touring bike but there just wasn't one on the market that year, and everyone told me it would be hard to find parts if I rebuilt a Peugeot because they're apparently non-standard.

Have you been over to CAT?

[daedala]

I don't bike nearly as much as I would like, but I do enjoy it when I do it. I had slowed down with it a lot over the years, and I realized it was partly because my bike did not fit my body at all and I was a lot less tolerant of that than I used to be. So after reading up about everything I decided to buy a used Terry mountain bike. The difference for me was just astonishing. Women-specific bike geometry may not work for all women, but for me it changed everything.

I got it last summer, and then I bought a house and moved and didn't bike enough because of being busy. Now it's coming on winter and I'm not a winter bikey person. But I hope to start again next year.

I guess I'm kind of a wannabe with nice equipment. But at least I admit it?

[sara]

Heh, I always have the opposite problem with bike fitting -- since hip width doesn't matter much on a bike, I usually want a mid-sized bike set up for male proportions. People boggle at me when I say things like, "Yeah, I really do want the extra-wide bars, please." But then I'm 5'7" and have both a longer inseam and wider shoulders than my spouse, who's a couple of inches taller.

I have definitely gotten a lot pickier about bike fit as I've aged. When I was in college I'd get up on anything, but these days I'm both creakier and riding further at a stretch, so fit matters much more.

[ironed_orchid]

Oh hey, I'm 5'6" barefoot, and have a smallish bike. So size of bike frame may be more to do with finding personaly comfort zone than actual height.

[sara]

Well, and I've got all my bikes set up to be ridden in more of a touring position -- meaning that I'm semi-horizontal, which I strongly prefer because of longstanding back problems -- whereas a hybrid is usually more upright. I get the impression that the proportions are different, but almost all of what I know about fitting pertains to touring bikes or the specific sort of tandem we've got (which is like pretty much nothing else on the market).

[ironed_orchid]

Hi, I'm a total n00b.

That is, yesterday I bought the first bike I've had in over a decade.

I have a hybrid, a Giant Trailglide 3. I kinda have a crush on it.

I live in Canberra, Australia, which is a pretty bike friendly city, having off road bike paths in many places, and on road bike lanes on the busier streets. It's also mostly flat as the city was designed, and they decided to keep the hilltops as nature reserves. I've seen some people riding their mountain bikes up Mount Ainslie, but they are crazy people I don't expect to be joining them.

Also, all cyclists must wear helmets by law in Australia, which gets rid of some of the helmet debate. I do see some people, mostly teenagers riding without a helmet, but mostly everyone just accepts the ruling.

[sara]

I think noobishness is nothing to be ashamed of -- what's important is getting up on your bike and having a good time! *GRIN*

(Can you tell that C. got off work early for Thanksgiving and took the baby and I went to pick up Herself from school on the tandem? And it was a beautiful fairly-warm-for-November afternoon, to boot. Whee!)