So, I’ve been biking to work routinely now, plus biking for fun.
Some thoughts on the subject:
- I have nothing in terms of spares on the bike. I’ve never had any sort of spares and it never got me into trouble before, but it does occur to me that it’s better to be safe rather than sorry. So I am probably going to get a multi-tool, tire irons, a spare tube for the tire, and a frame pump so that I can, at the very least, handle the basic road emergencies… which is probably all that I want to deal with anyway.
- I cannot find gloves and my hands feel a little chafe-y. I checked the online stores and it’s even hard to find XXL-sized gloves online.
- I need some form of proper biking stowage that doesn’t ruin the ergonomics or weight of the bike. The way I see it, when biking to work, I’ll just use the usual backpack… but it doesn’t seem like it’s meant for bike rides more than a few miles. So I’m kinda weighing the merits of various stowage types… maybe I want a rear rack, or maybe I just want a good messenger bag for now. For most of my explorations, I just want some small amount of munchies, a second water bottle, and some additional camera gear. The hard part is getting a tripod.
- I should get something to mount my camera on the handlebars. That would be cool.
- The geek in me wants a cyclecomputer with loads of nifty features. I’m trying to resist. The part that sucks is that I think most of the added data views above a basic speed / distance traveled / timer sort of thing are pointless… what I really want is incline and altitude and GPS and the ability to log that data.
- There seems to be a lot of fairly wretched opinions on what to do to maximize chain life. My previous bike I didn’t know better, so I let it get to the point where the chain and sprockets had worn into each other and the chain was not properly lubed. This time I’d like to do better. But there’s a lot of dumb stuff out there.