Not To Be Trusted With Knives

My Dilemma: Road Bike or Hybrid?

July 3, 2011 by Beth

So I’ve been seriously, seriously considering buying a bike. I thought I’d maybe blogged about this before, but a quick search of my blog tells me that I’ve only made very brief mention of it. I guess I’ve just been chatting with peeps about it IRL. Imagine that.

Anyway, I finally progressed past the Contemplation Phase and actually went to check out some bikes this weekend. I had gone to a bike shop a few weeks ago, but the salespeople there were talking *waaay* over my head, even though I’d told them that I knew pretty much nothing about bikes. This time, on the advice of my friend Danielle, I went to Dunbar Cycles ((as per usual, I have no vested interest in this company. They didn’t pay me to blog about them or anything. I’m not nearly important enough for that sort of thing!)), back in my old ‘hood. I walked into the store and said, “I want to buy a bike and I know nothing about bikes” and the salespeople there were super helpful and patiently explained ever little detail to me, without even laughing when I asked really basic questions. They even let me test drive a few AND took the wheels off them to see if they would fit in the trunk of my Smart car! Which was my big exciting discovery today – rather than having to pay $1000 for a freaking bike rack on my Smart car, I can actually fit a bike into my trunk! I have to take the tires off, but I can get “quick release” tires that pop off and on in a few seconds. Of course, if I were bigger than 5 ft tall and thus needed a bigger bike, I’d be hooped with trying to put it into a Smart car trunk, but I am, in fact, 5 ft tall and thus only need a teeny tiny bike. Being short FTW!

But I digress. The point of this blog posting is actually to solicit your opinion on what type of bike I should get: road bike or hybrid?

My problem is that I want to do a few different things with my bike. Namely, I want to:

• bike around for fun
• bike to work on days I don’t need my car to get to meetings
• do a triathlon

A hybrid bike would be good for commuting to work (whereas with a road bike, you aren’t going to want to, say, put a rack and panniers on it) and riding around for fun, say, on the Stanley Park seawall. But a road bike would be better for triathlons. Then again, I don’t want to buy a road bike just because they are good for triathlons, in case it turns out that I don’t really like triathlons. But then the road bike I tried out felt really good and would go faster – and faster is always better, right? But the hybrid bike I looked at is ~$250 cheaper! See why I’m having such a hard time choosing?

Here are the two bikes I liked the most:

1. Hybrid Bike: Norco Indie 2

2. Road Bike: Giant Avail 3

I’ve asked Dunbar Cycles to get the Norco Indie 2 in a small size for me to test ride, as the only one they had was a medium, so I couldn’t get a true sense of what riding it woud be like. I mean, it felt good to ride, but it was definitely too big so I wanted to see what it would feel like to ride the proper size. As well, I need to make sure that it will fit in the trunk of my car! Norco is a local company, so it will only take a few days to get in. Conveniently, this also gives me a few days to think about which to buy. Because I really am torn about which way to go!

Tell me what to do, Internet!

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