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

[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).