I won’t explain the part how I arrived at this wacky decision to move from casual weekend mountain-biker to wanting to do the Death Ride, but once I got to that point, I knew I had a lot of groundwork to cover just to get started.
First off, my current roadbike is a 1995 Bianchi Premio; a low-end roadbike that has served me well over the years, but with a key fatal flaw: the shifters are on the downtubes, which I knew would be very hard to use on all the downhill sections on any serious ride. I knew I needed to upgrade so I wandered down to my local bike shop, told them what I was planning for 2008 and asked them to show me some bikes. The first bike the guy showed me cost $4k and I didn’t so much laugh as just immediately dismiss it as an option. We moved down the scale, but not as far as I was hoping to. See, my Bianchi Premio cost me a whopping $450 back in the day and from what I’ve been able to find out via Google, it was actually a pretty good bike for the price at the time. Low-end, to be sure, but still, good value for the money. Accordingly, I was thinking, sure I would probably spend more than $500 on a new bike, but not $4k (which I didn’t, just to make a long story short).
Anyway, I pretty much walked out of the store in a sticker-shock trance and asked for 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th opinions from my friends and family. Turns out that if you’re going to get serious about cycling, the initial outlay is somewhat serious as well. I guess I should have been better prepared for that mentally, but hey.. if you’re going in cold with no experience, there’s all kinds of things that’ll catch you by surprise.
I did some test rides, looked at reviews on the internet and generally tried to get myself edumacated. There were a couple of problems: (1) nearly everyone who reviews a bike they’ve purchased tends to say how great it is, making 80-90% of all consumer bike reviews kind of unhelpful. Not completely useless, as they may have tips like “the seat is horrible” or “replaced this part or that part” etc. but the overall review of their bike is almost always how much they like it. (2) when I was doing test rides, all these bikes were so different from the old Bianchi I was used to that I had a hard time comparing them to each other. My test rides were on different roads at different times, on different bikes and the technology was so far ahead of my current bike it was pretty hard to compare. A bike would *really* have to suck bad for me to notice it.
Eventually, I did 2 identical test rides on 2 different bikes (Orbea Onix TdF and Trek Madone 5.1) one after the other to see if I could get any sense of difference between them. For the most part, I couldn’t. The Madone seemed marginally more comfortable, or *possibly* seemed to corner a little better (but that could have been better familiarity with the road on the 2nd ride) it was the bike I knew the most about and as a my wife pointed out, it would probably have a greater resale value if I ever decided to sell it. The salesman said, “Yeah, these are pretty much identical bikes” so I wound up buying the Madone I’d had my eye on from the beginning. Actually, I wanted to buy a cheaper version, but it turns out that the one I was thinking of won’t be available until *after* the Death Ride and this one wasn’t that much more expensive so I bit the bullet and brought the carbon bike home, treating it like a delicate egg (see the picture from my first blog post).
I got to take it out for its first ride this last weekend, in-between rainstorms. Most of my ride-time was solitary, not a lot of other cyclists chose the road I was on, which was great for me as I could figure out those new-fangled shifters, pedals, computer, etc. without looking like a total doofus. In fact, I only got passed by a single cyclist on the last hill home. This guy was younger, slimmer and clearly had years of road experience on me as he passed me up the hill like I was standing still. Naturally, he was riding the Orbea Onix TdF that I hadn’t bought. D’oh! 
Next time: training in style… or not.
