scale

im semi new to road biking. I biked all last summer but the bike i had build up is just a tad big for me. Ive started to shop.

how long of a test ride can i expect to get out of a LBS on average? The test ride seems pretty pointless considering i would think you would have to ride about 10 miles to get a good feel for if the bike truely fits. On top of that, ill probably swap stems, saddle, etc out once purchased to make sure i get exactly what i want.

How long of ride do you typically get to take? Bumming around the parking lot for 5 minutes seems pointless.

It would be really cool if you could rent one for a day......with a deposit.....find the size you think you would run on and use it for a day...maybe 2 days. If you buy from them...the rentail fee+the deposit goes back to the cost of the bike. If you dont buy from them you lose the nominal rental fee, but get your deposit back.

Sounds fair to me but thats me living in a fantasy world....

Nachoman

Call around and see if you can find a store that allows you to test ride their bikes using your own saddle and pedals. That would be good.

n8tron

I've found it to be a bit of a crap shoot especially if you haven't had experience riding a number of bikes and know what to look for. If you talk it through with a store that does good fits they should get you close enough to what you need. Fitting a bike seems to be a long going almost ever changing process depending on your goals, your style of ride, and how your body changes from more or less cycling.

Competitive cyclists have that sort of rental thing your talking about. $300 gets you a great bike shipped to you for a week and you can use that $300 toward the purchase of a bike from them. Only problem is that means you are testing out just one bike. Kinda hard if your goal was to compare a few different models....

dgasmd

Unlike popular believe of this forum, "test rides" tell you nothing at all. At least in my opinion. I take that back. It does tell you something you could probably tell before you even put a leg over the bike: too big or too little!! There is so much "new bike sensation", fit differences, feel of different gear/tires, and set up that I can't even remotely imagine why anyone would think they can tell differences and particular characteristics from that new bike and the one they ride regularly.

10 Wheels

My Test ride was great. Right off I could feel the Perfect Fit and longer crank arms were for me.

af2nr

There are some shops that will allow extended test rides. The shop I got my last bike from let me take a similar model for a few hours, with my saddle and pedals, on a route that I was familiar with. They had a Tarmac Pro SL with a standard double in my size but before even test riding I explained that due to my relocation to WV I would want the compact. They said that if that was the bike I wanted after the test ride they would order me the compact one.

nitropowered

If you are pretty new to cycling, how are you going to know which bike is going to "feel" right for you?

Take out a few bikes and see if there is anything that really sticks out that won't work for you.

I think some things, you won't know till you have ridden for several months.

ScrubJ

And that, my forum members, is probably the best answer so far.

dgasmd

+1

Even then, there are some things that require time to feel right. case in point is a saddle. I went through 3 I thought were OK at the beginning only to feel like they were murdering my ass 150 miles later. The opposite was true with the saddle I finally settled with, a Selle Italia SLR Flow. I got the original SLR and it felt OK for the first 150-200 miles. Then, something kicked in and it felt great. A few thousand miles later, I tried the SLR FLOW and it was even better. Had that saddle been in one of my test rides or any of the other 3 I had before, the end result 200 miles later would have been very different than the original "test ride".