New Bike!

Don't get too excited. Still just shopping.

I'd been riding my Bridgestone MB-3 with suspension for 17 years. I guess that's a long time for a bike. The time passed pretty quickly, so I never noticed how old it was getting. (Yeah, I never noticed how old I'm getting, either.)

I still like the bike, but it needs a new set of wheels, new cables, and the suspension fork has always presented problems. The fork has never been quite right for me anyway. It was designed for a huge guy, and I weigh less than 150 lbs. For the first 5 years I had the bike I could never find a tech who knew how to maintain the fork, so I gave up, and if the fork wasn't completely frozen before, it is now.

Since I moved to the Western Suburbs from the Twin Cities in 1998 and had to give up the 15-mile round-trip commute to work, which I'd done pretty faithfully for 5 years when the roads were clear-ish, I've ridden my bike on the Prairie Path a fair amount, and in the rain (which I did even more the first five years I had it), and on some longer rides ... the bike has some miles on it. So it's been figured out that the cost of parts and labor would likely approach the price of a new bike. With all of the newest technology. For which parts are still being manufactured. Which most bike mechanics know how to deal with.

Something that's changed in 17 years, is that the major manufacturers have frames optimized for the fact that women are structured a bit differently than men. For example. Most of us don't carry most of our weight in our torsos. And our arms aren't generally quite as long in proportion to our height.

Back when I bought my MB-3, the only specifically female mountain bike frame was made by Terry. I'm not talking about the so-called 'girls bikes' -- the kind one might like for riding in a skirt. To the grocery store. Or to church. Not that kind. Anyway. The problem with the Terry bikes, was that they were such a small company that they really couldn't benefit from any economies of scale, so while the actual prices compared decently with the rest of the market, the components used were always a step or two down from what you could get on a men's bike that was the same price. Plus, it was impossible to find one to test-ride.

Rule: Never buy a bike you haven't ridden. Ever. If it doesn't fit, you'll never ride it and you'll be wasting your money.

Ok. So back to the present. Major manufacturers make actual mountain bike frames for women. Yay.

None of the dealers have any.

ANY.

So I'm going out to perhaps test-ride a medium guys' Cannondale. It's not going to be easy to extrapolate. I may have to just bug the guy I spent time with yesterday, to get him to order a women's bike for me to try.

Bikes are expensive. I can understand a shop not wanting to order a bike in just for a test-ride. But the shop I was at yesterday had a Specialized Myka. I hated it on so many levels. It felt funny, even without a test-ride (I had all of my cr@p with me, was wearing floppy jeans, it was rush hour, and I was in Chicago). It was ugly, no one could explain to me what that concave-curvy thing Specialized is doing with their tubing is doing for performance, i.e. keeping most of my energy involved with forward motion... and it didn't feel good or stable or tough. And man was it ugly. It had square-ish tubing, was matte brown with turquoise; and to make matters worse, the really nice, excellent bike guy told me it compares favorably with the Hard Rock. A bike I would never have considered. If I buy a Specialized, I want something at the level of Rockhopper, or possibly even Stumpjumper.

So now I think they don't have female Cannondales, maybe because people keep buying them? Meaning, if I didn't buy it, some other female would maybe walk in and snap it up. But they do have that Specialized, maybe because people hate it and won't buy it. I'm not gonna buy it. I don't plan on necessarily keeping this bike for more than ten years. But ten years is a long time, and I want to ride as much as possible. Anyway. I don't have my heart set on the Cannondale. Last year's didn't get such great reviews. But I hated the Myka, and the guy didn't even want to get me down a Rockhopper to sit on. Weirdly, although the shop I was at yesterday is my very favorite, with the smartest people, the local Trek shop is getting a female frame (or two) next week. Because they'd just sold the one they had. I was not impressed with the dude there, but next week we might get a different dude. Actions just might speak louder than words on this one.

Except that the local Trek shop also carries Gary Fisher. Gary Fisher makes a women's frame, and the Trek shop dude didn't even mention Gary Fisher. And he had me sitting on a $300 bike. And he'd never heard of my current bike, which the cooler, more knowledgeable shop guy had.

So here I sit. I have the money to buy a decent bike. This shouldn't be such a hassle. When will I have a new machine? A week from now? Two weeks?

Such silliness.