The local bike shop. At its best, it can be a place where dreams come true, and the home base of a close-knit community of like-minded friends. Despite eking a meagre livelihood in an endangered corner of the shrinking retail landscape, I’ve rarely known a bike shop to close.

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As a conspicuous cyclist, I get this question so often that it’s well worth a permanent blogpost. You want my advice on buying your first bike? Here it is.

If you walk into any bike shop, they’re going to ask you questions like these:

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Aside from a couple ride reports, the last real update I posted was back in March, and a lot has happened in the intervening ten weeks.

Instead of going chronologically, I’ll organize this post along four major themes. I’ll start with some major repairs I faced, and the challenges presented by the woefully incompetent local bike shop. Then I’ll ( Read more... )

When I bought my new bike, I also wanted to finally have a full premium fitting done.

Judging by the people I talk to, unless you’re a cyclist, you probably have no idea that there’s anything more to fitting a bike than making sure you can reach the pedals and the brakes, and that’s it. Well, it gets a whole lot more complex than that…

Still, it’ ( Read more... )

It’s been a while, but I thought I’d do a quick writeup of the ride I did the day after Thanksgiving, since it was kind of memorable in its own way.

One of the things I wanted to do was test my Garmin Edge 800 GPS cyclocomputer, since it had been acting up since my ( Read more... )

Follow this link for my full 2011 Pan-Mass Challenge ride report, including writeup, photos, and GPS logs.

It hardly seems possible, but the Plastic Bullet is definitely getting old. I’ve had it over five years and ridden it more than 16,000 miles.

The past couple years I’ve been a little hesitant to trust the bike, knowing that the wear and tear from all those miles can stress bike parts to the point of failure.

Every spring, I’ve taken the bike in ( Read more... )

The Fourth of July weekend is usually a big milestone on the way to August’s Pan-Mass Challenge, and this year was no different. I led into the weekend with a 50-mile solo ride on Thursday and a 12-mile kayak trip up the Charles River on Friday; both perfect, gorgeous days just before a massive heat wave hit Boston.

Saturday saw me joining a group ( Read more... )

As if last summer’s pathetic travesty wasn’t enough, my local bike shop is at it again.

As noted here, a college student recently plowed into me head-on ( Read more... )

I don’t even know where to start with this tale.

In June I stepped into my LBS (local bike shop), looking for a cycling cap and dry lube. They were out.

A week or two later, I went back to see if they’d happened to restock those items. A girl I’d never seen before immediately jumped on me and asked what I wanted. When I told her I was looking for ( Read more... )