Originally Posted by
Sunnytadpole
Did some test riding today but I was so nervous and wobbly! Please tell me this goes away soon! Tested out a couple of Treks. I'm a bit concerned that some people have stated the components were cheap and that they had problems with the gears. This was particularly with the FX models.
this weekend I'll be testing out the Specialized models!
I was just saying this to a buddy I gave my old bike to, who was new to riding. The nervousness goes away.
Sitting on a machine 3.5 feet off the ground that makes you go really fast while you balance on 2 skinny wheels is not a natural thing. Your brain is telling you "stop this insanity" when you first start riding.
But you get past that. Eventually your brain realizes that you're not going to die and calms down.
The cheap components on a lower end bike will wear out sooner. They aren't going to just disintegrate during the test ride. So don't feel like the bike will collapse out from under you.
I was thinking about a suggestion someone else made the other day, about getting a used bike now. There are a couple of advantages to this.
1) If you crash it while you're still learning to ride, who cares? It's a $100 craigslist bike. So what if you scratch up the paint or bend a wheel?
2) You plan on losing a lot of weight. That's not just going to make riding easier for the Newtonian Physics reasons. It's going to change things like your posture and what not that may greatly change what makes a bike comfortable. A bike that doesn't feel so comfortable today might feel a lot better 50-60 pounds from now. It happened to me when I started commuting. I dropped like 20 pounds and suddenly my mountain bike that I loved and commuted on felt horribly ill fitted.
3) You're new to riding. You have no idea what you like. You have this idea that you want a certain style bike today. But after a year of riding on a used bike and getting a real feel for what you like and don't like about it, you might have an entirely different vision of what kind of nice bike you want to buy. Better to realize you want a road bike BEFORE you buy a gravel bike. (Or a mountain bike before you buy a hybird, or a cylocross before you buy a beach cruiser, etc etc etc). It might not even take a year. You might get a better feel for it in 2 months.
On the flip side, you're looking at hybrid bikes. They are going to be good all around bikes that go just about anywhere and are always going to be good for cruising around town / picking a few things up at the store / riding out to dinner / etc. So if you buy a hybrid today and realize you'd like to get into back trail mountain biking or do more distance road riding, you can always buy a 2nd bike for that specific purpose and keep the hybrid for the basic putzing around town. (That's where I am today. I LOVE my Crosstrail and commute on it regularly. I'm not getting rid of it, but I'm thinking about a 2nd bike for doing extended full day rides because the Crosstrail is just a little under powered for that)