i have two hobbies, cycling and golf. in both of these hobbies equipment is the least of my issues. I'm 6'3" 240lbs and I ride a motobecane that I built up myself (bought the frame from someone who stripped the groupset from it) with microshift 9speed drivetrain, ultegra crank, fd, rd. Ebay carbon bars and stem. and a host of nashbar type accessories like seat, pedals, etc. learned how to build wheels and built 2 wheelsets for it. All told I've got about $1000 into my bike. My 5'9" 205lbs friend went out and dropped $3200 for a Madone 5.2 back in may as his first bike. to his credit he's been riding a lot and he is getting in better shape. The bike looks sweet, the internal cable routing is great. he just spent another $2000 on carbon tubulars from wheelbuilder.com cuz lets face it, when your 5'9" 205 and riding less than 6 months, you need 46mm carbon tubulars. I SMOKED HIS ASS ON OUR RIDE YESTERDAY! this kid had never really even done any hills yet because living in NYC there isn't much around us but i took him to Palisades park in NJ where there are some decent sized rollers and then one final Mile long climb at about a 7% grade. I beat him up the thing by a full 2 minutes.

For at least 90% of us, it's really not the bike, it's the rider. a better rider would have destroyed me yesterday on his bike. I tried to tell the kid to start with an inexpensive bike and focus on his training first. If he was going to spend $2k on wheels, they absolutely better have a powertap hub and a headunit so he could train properly and get better as a rider. He didn't listen. Ironically, I met this kid playing golf 3 years ago. He always buys new irons every year, a new driver aevery 2 months and he still struggles to break 90. I play "knockoff" irons that I built myself so that I could get them to my proper specs and i've gone from a 19hcap when I started 4 years ago down to a 6 hcap. In my opinoin i go into a bike shop and I see trek, giant, specialized, cannondale, etc and to me it's pretty much pick the one with the paint job you like the best because the feature set is pretty damn similar.

So I guess I'm saying that to me, most of this crap all comes from the same place with the same basic options, get on your bike, ride it and have fun.

(but I guess I will diss trek by saying the wheelset that came stock on his $3200 MAdone 5.2 is a bit crap in my opinion.) my handbuilt wheelset only cost me $300 to build and is a full 250 grams lighter and maybe just slightly less aero.