Learning in your 30s

quozl

I'm 34 and had never ridden a bike until 4 1/2 weeks ago (Friday, May 3rd, 9:10am )

Well, I did get on a bike once at 3am at a house party in my 20s because my drunk friends didn't believe anybody couldn't ride a bike and I was drunk enough to prove to them that I really couldn't I proved it good.

My aims are
- learning to ride a bike to the standard where I can safely commute to work and back (currently a 40 minute fast walk each direction).
- use cycling as form of exercise. I'm fairly fit anyway from all my walking (can't bike, can't drive), but I used to love long-distance running except my lame body mechanics made that a constant balancing act with injury. I'm hoping to get the same sense of relaxation from cycling, although I don't think I'll be able to switch off and go inside my head like you can on long distance runs as I assume that would mean I'd crash horribly!

I'm 4 1/2 weeks in but I figured I'd put this up in case anybody else is in the same boat and interested in seeing how I got cycling. You'd be surprised how daunting it is to start if you're an adult & have never cycled - it seems a very long way from being unable to balance on a bike over 2 metres to being able to avoid cars and buses in rush hour traffic.

Also, unusually perhaps for training logs in here, my main concern is technical skill not fitness. I think it's going to be easy enough to get to where I could cycle 100km but getting a proper level of bike-handling skill - for emergency swerves etc if needed - seems like a much longer term and more difficult project.

fleet

Not quite the same, but I learned to ride a motorbike in my thirties.
I'd imagine it was about the same learning curve.

With reference to your "switch off and go inside your head" query. Yes, you can do this on a bicycle, and easily. In some ways you have more time to do this cycling than running. What with the bicycle basically balancing itself at any sort of speed. Probably not that easy if you're weaving in and out of traffic though!

quozl

Some googling (and I think a post on this forum) lead me to http://www.rothar.ie/ and their classes for adult beginners. I've found no other adult beginner classes anywhere else in Dublin, so thank feck for Rothar!

There's also plenty of information out there on teaching adults (and kids) how to ride a bike. The videos make it look painless and easy for both the teacher and the pupil. You just need a very gentle hill and a bike.
http://www.ibike.org/education/teaching-kids.htm

As I have neither of those things, Rothar it was! 30 euro for an hours 1 to 1 lesson and they provided the bike and helmet. Great value but Rothar seems to be more social enterprise than for-profit.

St Patricks cathedral is a 5 minute walk from their fade street shop and has a nice 50 metre strip of concrete where no unlucky pedestrians can sneak up on you!It only took about 20 minutes of Anne running along behind me holding my seat post before I could start myself off and do the 50 metres on my own.

After that Anne mostly had to give advice and encouragement. I was completely unstable and if I took my eyes of where I was going I'd swerve wildly to the side and have to ram on the brakes. At the end of each 50 metre run I'd have to stop the bike, turn it on foot, and repeat.

Great fun though! I even did one big circle around a fountain to try out turning.

Can't recommend Rothar and Anne enough, and apparently she teaches adult beginners often enough, so there are others out there!

quozl

Now the next hurdle.

Where do you practice as someone who can't ride a bike and who doesn't have a bike?

That Saturday my brother-in-law was kind enough to cycle his bike out to UCD for me (it doesn't fit in our car), and my wife drove me out there, him back and then reversed the operation two hours later. Even our twin toddlers had to come for the car journey as we can't leave them in charge of the house.

Some palaver. A bike is a very awkward thing to move around the place if you can't ride it.

UCD is a brilliant place to practice cycling. There's large open flat concrete spaces separated from all vehicular traffic. You can see pedestrians miles off so you won't hit them, no matter how incompetent you are. It's very bike friendly as it has tonnes of biking students. It's dead quiet on weekends and it even has some little up and down hills.

Initially I could only do 30 to 40 metre straight lines, erratically.
After about half an hour that was 100 metre runs turning corners.

By the end of the two hours I could do a maybe 150 to 200 metre run involving lots of turns. I wasn't able to turn tightly enough to make these continuous though until nearly the very end of the 2 hours, which then let me link them together into continuous cycling. And by turn tightly enough, I mean turn in an area that a camper van could turn in!

Those two hours finished selling me on cycling though and convinced me that I could get to a competent level, if I could only get more practice.

Lesson from this - UCD is a fantastic place to practice cycling as a complete beginner. When I'm teaching my kids, I'd say we'll do some practice there.

quozl

A thread asking for advice on here got me some very good pointers. Some of which I couldn't use because I can't drive and it's too awkward getting the missus to drive me (and the toddlers) some place, but I'll reproduce some of them here for anybody else learning.

- industrial estates are great quiet places to practice at the weekend
- corkagh park in clondalkin has a fenced off cycle track
- phoenix park has 22km of cycle paths, (though I think many of them are shared with vehicles)
- early mornings around your neighbourhood at the weekends before traffic starts. 6am or 7am. (i didn't feel competant enough for that yet as I was just so erratic on a bike).
- cycle track in dodder park (would be perfect for those who can drive there)

Two really useful things I found out:
You can rent bikes in the Phoenix park, quite cheaply. So once you can balance, you can hire a bike there and practice on the cycle paths up there. There are long cycle paths that are separated from the roads except at junctions. So you can just stay on a section and avoid junctions. So many pedestrians on the cycle paths though, and if you can't reliably cycle through a gap a metre across (that's how bad I was) then you'll not be able to pass them.

You can rent bikes in the UCD bike shop. I got no reply to my email but that might be because it's out of college term. They're even open on saturdays so you can rent a bike up there and then practice around UCD. So much simpler! If you can get a reply

quozl

So no bike & nowhere nearby handy to practice (or so I thought, see below) meant a tempoary brick wall.
Phoenix Park rentals closes at 7pm and I don't finish work till 6pm, so that ideas out. If I borrow my brother-in-laws bike how do I get it someplace suitable to practice. Plus he needs it to get to work so I can't borrow it long-term

Solution, bike-to-work scheme Which I could only do as the 2 hours practice in UCD convinced me that I'd be able to see this through.

An alternative would be Rothar again, as they sell reconditioned bikes cheaply that have been donated to them. You're talking maybe 160 quid for a hybrid but you might be waiting a little while for stock as it depends on donations. I didn't want to buy something 2nd hand off adverts.ie etc as I'd not have the knowledge to ensure it was working right, was safe, or fix anything that went wrong. Buying from Rothar would resolve all that.

I got a Trek 7.5fx Hybrid bike from Think Bike in Rathmines. Very similar to my brother-in-law's bike which is what sold me as I loved his bike. Think Bike also give 2 year free servicing with their Trek or Giant bikes. I don't want to sound like an advert for them but as someone who knows nothing about riding a bike that's really really useful. I'm pretty mechanically minded but while I'm happy doing a best guess at lots of things, I don't want to screw up something on a bike that could be dangeorus. Again, Rothar come into this, as I'm going to do their beginners maintenance class (then probably intermediate).

quozl

A week later I had a bike and no way to get the bike to anywhere to practice in the evenings.

My wife suggested I try the local school playground, which is a mighty 26 meters by 15 meters. I'd thought it'd be useless - considering my turning circle is about 20 meters but it's only a 2 minute walk. So late nights over the next 2 weeks found me in that playground at least 5 nights a week, probably twice a night, practicing.

Turns out 26x15 metres is perfectly adequate

I must have spent ten hours in there over those two weeks. Practicing turning, S'ing, emergency braking, quick-turns (using counter-steering, plenty of youtube videos that explain it), gear changes and riding between narrow parallel lines.

Mostly incident free, except for one crash trying to figure out counter-steering which involved me smacking the bike hard on the ground while I was fine. I didn't realise it at the time but I'd bent my derailleur hanger doing that (I didn't know what one was at the time!). This meant the chain started slipping and it got progressively worse until the bike was completely un-usuable. That's where the 2 years free servicing came in - I walked the bike to think bikes and a very friendly guy fixed the hanger for me while explaining what had gone wrong. Free despite it being my own fault.

I also found an amusing tip in an article on counter-steering (by Sheldon Brown iirc - http://sheldonbrown.com/ everything about bikes). The author suggested practicing counter-steering in left turns first so that you don't add a bent derailleur hanger to your road-rash. If only I'd seen that first

quozl

About half way through that week I decided to brave a loop around the block. It's all left turns and it's 1.3 km. There's a moderate downhill (Oakley Road) followed by a drag uphill (Belgrave square) followed by a short moderate downhill on Dunvill avenue.

I was way too nervous and while I knew to keep out from parked cars a fair distance it's easy to know that and harder to keep it in mind while concentrating on pedalling a reasonably straight line while cars pass at what seems like speed.

So I smacked my left finger off a car wing-mirror. Fortunately the wing mirror was fine and all finger had was a gouge out of the knuckle. Lesson learnt.

Pretty scary and unpleasant first road journey but has to be done. Possibly I should have waited a little longer but it's really really hard to practice going in straight lines in a 25x16m playground!

The next day I did three loops of the block incident free and further from parked cars. Needed to get back and do it soon as otherwise I was worried how unpleasant it was might start making me more nervous rather than less. Very happy after the three loops.

quozl

I wanted to be able to commute safely, so some research found me these two resources (there were others but these are key IMO).

45 page booklet on safe cycling in traffic.
http://www.bikexprt.com/streetsmarts/usa/index.htm

The above is free, detailed, diagrammed and seems to be what the current best advice is - ie to a large extent act like you're a car, keep right of way where safer (ie don't cede it by always going far left into cycle lanes), watch out at junctions, make cars wait to over-take you if necessary (but let them pass when it's safe).

However it's written for the US market and it's brain frying to have to swap every left and right when looking a diagrams of complicated junctions.

So, here's one you have to pay for but please do. It's fantastic.

http://www.cyclecraft.co.uk/book.html

It's written for the UK - so left & right is the same. The guy who wrote it is one of the architects of their national bike plan and co-author of their bikeability training scheme for children. It's also eminently sensible IMO and pretty much identical to the above 'Street Smarts' web pages, except even more detailed.
Reading this has made me much more comfortable at junctions, even up to simple round-abouts or the moderately large junction under the Dundrum LUAS bridge. I'm still getting off and using pedestrian crossings if there's a complicated right turn across a lot of lanes of traffic - that's however because I don't yet 100% trust myself to signal right and remain completely stable - I can do it if there's no pressure but it's different with cars all around.

quozl

I bought a 40 euro rear-mounted single-bike rack from eurocycles and with that and my wife's helpfulness the world was my Oyster.

3 weekends ago, we drove up to the phoenix park and while my wife, mother-in-law and my twin toddlers enjoyed the playground, I enjoyed 90 minutes of solid cycling around cycle lines and the partially closed main road. Great fun, great practice and incident free except for when I got cocky and tried to adjust my wife's hair-clip (which I was using as a bicycle clip) and promptly fell off the bike. At no great speed and only my dignity hurt as I did it right after over-taking three attractive lady runners

2 weekends ago and my wife dropped me and my bike up to UCD again. I could only get 90 minutes up there due to the twins lunch/nap schedule but by the end of the 90 minutes I felt confident enough to cycle home. To a degree because there's almost no right turns and light enough traffic on a Saturday, and to a degree because I need to learn, have to go do it eventually and wanted to stop having to get my poor wife to drive me places to practice

It went great, only slightly nervous and mostly downhill which is nice. Only stuffed up once when I was first in line at the traffic lights and stuffed up starting the bike with a line of traffic behind me - yes, I was still at the stuffing up starting a bike when under pressure stage of things So I just got off the road, let the cars go, and go it right the next time the lights went. A friend gave my wife some good advice which she passed on to me - if you're uncomfortable at any stage then become a pedestrian and get out of the situation - that doesn't mean get off your bike in the middle of a junction, but in most situations you can just dismount onto the path and have a break/think about the situation.

On getting home I realised that I'd left my (heavy) bike lock locked to a bike stand in UCD where I'd deposited it on arriving. So that evening I cycled to UCD and back to get it. Went great. Chuffed.

quozl

My toddlers have their nap around 2:30pm (though they seldom sleep now, but they get some enforced down time either way!), so at weekends I can head out during this nap. Usually it's been my wife who heads out for a stroll and I house/baby-sit, so she's been very supportive in letting me out this last weekend.

Saturday:
My first ever bike computer arrived in to Think Bike. I remember thinking an old colleague of mine was such a geek for having a bike computer - and as we are both mega-geeks it's amusing that was geeky enough for me to notice. Now I have my own, and it has a cadence sensor as apparently cadence is something newbies often get wrong and I figured I might as well learn right rather than fix later.

Turns out my attempted guesses at roughly 90 rpm have been way off. They're more like 110 rpm, I can only imagine what the feck cadence I was doing when I was trying to max it out for sprints. 90-95 rpm is a lovely easy comfortable cadence now anyway so I'm glad I spent the little extra for the cadence sensor for the feedback on what I'm doing.

After Think Bike fitted my bicycle computer for me - I continued down to the grand canal bike path and did 20km up and down on it. The cobblestones between grand canal dock and pearse street are ridiculous! Great having a bike computer so that I actually know how far I went, and I got a top speed of 34km/h.

Amusingly I went out for some more practice - mostly of left and right signals and emergency braking - in the school playground that night. Turns out that I did 5km in about 30 minutes in that 26x16m space. I can only guess how many km I'd done in there in the previous 2 weeks. I once ran a 32km, 3 1/4 hour training run in 1km loops around Herbert Park as I'd nowhere else grassy I could run. Those two playground weeks somewhat reminded me of that but there's the added fun of learning a new skill so it wasn't boring at all - unlike the run which was soul-numbing

quozl

Sunday:
Did 27k today around rathmines, ranelagh, clonskeagh, UCD, grand canal cycle-path and the city centre. New top-speed of 38km/h - could go faster but I amn't skillful enough yet to feel that's safe for me or anybody else around!

Monday:
Awesome day.
22km from ranelagh canal up to stepaside village and back today. Averaged 17km/h on the way up, and 19.5 km/h for the round-trip.

Really enjoyed the hill up from dundrum to stepaside and on the way down I hit 44km/h on the way back, fastest I've done and could have easily gone a lot faster but decided quick smart to slow down when I saw I was doing that speed!

Had an amusing newbie cycling moment on the way out. I'm trying to keep a cadence of around 90-95 rpm and comfortable effort but at a couple of points on the way up the hill to stepaside I ran out of lower gears so I had to drop down to about 70rpm and hard effort - figured this was the price of having a hybrid bike. Turns out I'm just dumb! I only use the easier of the front two chain-rings as that's enough to be learning about for the moment but I was messing about with the harder chain-ring earlier and forgot to swap back down.

So I did the entire return trip to Step-aside on the harder chain-ring. No wonder I ran out of easier gears on the way up that hill


I did 72 km since I got my bike computer 2 days earlier. That's cool!

quozl

Another two weeks in:

Positives:

I'm commuting to work and back every day for the last week and a bit.

Have done a beginners bike maintenance course with http://www.rothar.ie and have swapped out my rear cassette and pedals (SPD ones) myself in their workshop. I also learnt enough about bike gearing to realise that I wanted to swap out the 11-34 for a 12-26

I got my wife a 2010 Trek 7.3 fx WSD (women's) for 200 euro, with new tires, saddle, and front wheel - it must have been in the wars but seller was a bike mechanic and it's perfect now. Most importantly for my wife it's pearlescent white - she used to have a white suzuki swift before children ruined all that. She actually liked that car (honest!) and the new bicycle is about the same size and power

Got a pair of FLR F-55 MTB SPD clip-less shoes yesterday - am planning on practicing with them and my new SPD pedals tonight or this weekend. Will be happy enough to see the back of the toe-clips - they're lovely when you're clipped in but can be a pain to get into if you miss the first attempt and set the pedal rocking.

Negatives:

Had a coming together with someone who tail-gated me then beeped me. I swerved when looking back to see what the beeping was and he hit me. Not ideal but he paid for the replacement front wheel that he'd buckled. A peculiar mix of (IMO) aggressive while driving and nice while not.

Costing me a fortune - there's too many cycling toys, and so many that I want to get. I'm even considering building a fixie from parts just because I like tinkering and I've already done the research into how to do it. The problem is that I don't need a fixie and it'd still cost a fair bit from second hand parts. Getting a nice frame with suitable drop-outs will likely cost me 70 or 80 quid minimum - and I don't want to build a half-assed thing with a chain tensioner or attempting to get the perfect chain/gear ratio which seems asking for trouble with chain stretch.

daragh_

Really enjoying following you on your journey! Go for the Fixie. You can never have enough bikes

WAPAIC

This is great, wonderful to hear people getting out and enjoying their bike. Only really commenting because I want to see how this goes! I've been cycling in Dublin for 25 years and had never heard of counter steering, it's a wonder I am still in one piece!

quozl

Went out with the new clip-less shoes last night.

I started out by practicing clipping in and out in a door-way at home as the wife was out and I was house-bound by the toddlers sleeping upstairs.
That got boring quickly

When my wife arrived home I spent an easy half an hour cycling around practicing clipping in and out. I really like the clip-less pedals, they feel even better than toe-clips when clipped in but they're significantly easier to clip into - even though my pedals are one-sided which I thought might be an issue. They almost clip in for you just by the act of pedaling.

Was feeling so smug about how well it was going that I decided I'd commute in today using them. That changed quick-smart after I went to do a u-turn in a narrow alley-way. Remembering the pedal's user manual (I even read it!) it said to un-clip in advance if you thought you might need to put a foot down soon, so being all sensible I unclipped my left foot ready to put it down in case things went pear-shaped in the narrow alley. Of course I then turned to the right, ran out of room and went to put my unclipped left foot down while falling to the right - if I hadn't thought planned what I was doing and fixated on my un-clipped left foot then I'd have just automatically twisted my right foot out - instead I fell over. Nothing hurt but my pride and a little gravel in the palm of my hand. First thing I checked was my rear derailleur - all fine, I think my body staying in the bike helped protect it

I'll give the clip-less pedals more of a go over the weekend and all going well, I'll start using them on my commute on Monday.

quozl

Dropped our twin toddlers to my wife's Aunt & Uncle's on Sunday and my wife and I spent an hour and a half cycling around the Phoenix park. She's not been on a bike since she was 7 but she's loving her new bike.

Great fun - mostly easy cycling (or sailing, thanks to the wind) - but we also went up and down the Kyber a few times. I really enjoyed that My wife decided that twice was plenty for her and did some more gentle cycling.

I'm commuting to work in my new SPD shoes since yesterday. They're great - no more feet bouncing off pedals on the ridiculous roads in Rathmines and no more faffing around getting into toe-clips.

I am slightly nervous that I'll topple over in front of a car at a light but so far, so good!

Felt a bit like cycling out to Step-a-side and back again on Saturday but the coming together with the car has definitely dented my confidence a bit. I really don't want to end up with a damaged bike a 12 or 13 km walk home. I'm sure I'll be happier once I do it again, hopefully get a chance this weekend - rush-hour traffic commuting currently feels safer as everybody is going a lot slower relative to me.

smacl

quozl wrote: »

Felt a bit like cycling out to Step-a-side and back again on Saturday but the coming together with the car has definitely dented my confidence a bit.

Traffic becomes much lighter as you leave Rathmines and Rathfarnham behind you, so you should find the jaunt out to Stepaside quite relaxed. It's a good direction to go, as the Stepaside takes you on towards Enniskerry, Enniskerry to Glencree, and you'll be tipping over the Sally gap before you know.

quozl

I cycled out to Enniskerry and back last night - my longest cycle to date.

36.33 km in 1 hour 35 with an average speed of 22.7km/h.

I picked that route as it's the hilliest one that I can think of - probably not hilly to most of you but I really felt the up/down/up/down all the way up to dundrum, down to sandyford, up to stepaside and then down and up (and down and up) to Enniskerry

My previous longest cycle was 27k and this was the first time I really would have liked some drop-bars. My hands were getting pretty uncomfortable by the end of it and I'd have loved to have another position to put them in. Shoulder and arse were a bit unhappy too.

Funny thing is I've actually run further than this but all work in progress!

Two small questions for anybody who knows:
1 - does it get much steeper after Enniskerry? If I'm currently finding the above a tough journey is it much of a step up to add in heading on to glencree and then back to Dublin via Old Military Road?

2 - Is there some trick to making shifting on the front-ring easier? I was using so much force with my thumb to shift that it was making me unstable on the bike. I was easing off the peddling while shifting. I never normally have to use the front ring but with the two front rings limiting me to 50/26 (crap for uphill) or 34/12 (crap for down-hill) I had to do a fair bit of front ring shifting last night. I should have done more but I settled for 34/12 downhill as my hands were too tired from the flat-bars to be bothered constantly changing. Stupid up/down road!

quozl

In regards to my chain ring up-shifting struggles some googling has revealed that I should be holding the shift lever until the chain ring shifts up.

I'd been pretty much treating it as a button that I press hard and then let go. The rear derailleur seems to act as something I just need to press and then release, as does down-shifting in the front.

I can't go test this theory as I'm house bound minding toddlers but I think this might explain things. Apparently there's only a few spots on the chainrings that actually ramp the chain up and on to the next bigger ring so I need to hold the chain ring shift until one of those is reached?

This sound right to you guys? Why does (almost) nobody mention that chain ring shifting up has a trick to it :-)

quozl

Being house-bound minding sleeping (or at least they're meant to be sleeping!) toddlers I put the time to good use and listened to the Silverstone F1 free practices while working on my bike.

I adjusted the Iso-zone handlebars on my Trek 7.5fx - I'd raised the seat a couple of weeks back and that had meant that the angle of my arms to the handle-bar had changed and I was no longer resting on the isozone rests - if you don't know them, here's a picture.



I figured this might have been part of the problem with hand numbness on my Enniskerry spin last night. Some googling has told me that I'm meant to have the weight passing through the heels of my hands - which I would have before I raised the seat but didn't have since. Now that I've rotated the Isozone rests my weight goes through the heels of my hands and my wrists aren't bent upwards anymore. More basic stuff that I just don't know.

I'd also really like to raise my handle-bars slightly.

Since raising the saddle again I think my handle-bars are too low for me and there's a bit too much weight on my hands. The handlebars are now only about 2 inches higher than the saddle and if I hover my hands an inch or so higher than just above the handle-bars there's noticeably less force pushing me over. Which I think (?) is a good thing.

The problem is that there's no spacers above my stem, so I don't think that I can raise things easily.

I've got a 120mm 10 degree riser and I'm considering trying to find something like a 110 or 100mm stem with a 15-20 degree stem. I'd like a slightly shorter reach as well. The problem there is that maybe a 100mm 25 degree stem would be perfect, maybe a 110 mm 15 degree would be. Maybe those are all wrong

So I'm thinking about getting a 110mm adjustable stem but those are around 35 euro!

Sounds a bit trial and error - is there a better way other than paying 100euro for a proper bike fit - which I'd be more inclined to do if I buy a road-bike done the road.

quozl

And so my newbie cycling addiction spirals out of control...





First steps towards building my first road bike - so I can do longer rides and join a club once they start accepting members again come October.

It's a Ridley 2012 frame that CRC had on major reduction plus a Tiagra groupset that merlin cycles were doing a special on.

It's getting whatever I can get on special offer added to it - I got a FSA stem for 4.90 euro from CRC on flash sale as well as drop-bars for 12e because they were slightly (I can't see it) scratched from being used in a display model.

quozl

I went up Cruagh Road for the first time last night.

It is steep! Bloody steep! It was the first time I really regretted having the 12-26 cassette that I put on instead of the 11-34 that came on the 7.5fx. Struggling up some sections of it at a cadence of 50 to 60 instead of a comfortable 90, heavy breathing away.

The 12-26 is staying but it's making me look forward even more to finishing the road bike build as it has a 12-28. 2 more precious teeth!

On the plus side, it was gorgeous up there!


And the ride down into town was cool

quozl

My road bike build is coming along nicely

I fitted the chain and cabled and adjusted the brakes last night after the kids went to bed. It then became a fully rideable bike!

Still no gear cables so I now have the world's least hip single speed bike, but still...



I took it for a test ride last night around the local school playground. It was my first time ever using a drop-bar bike and it felt a bit like a circus act at the start but I got to like it pretty quickly

I'm significantly more stretched out on the hoods on the drop-bars than I am on my trek 7.5fx - even though the trek is an aggressive (they call it 'fitness') hybrid and the Ridley Tempo is a relaxed geometry frame. I guess it's the 10 or so inches extra between where the stem ends and where the hoods are - whereas on a flat-bar the handlebars are pretty much in line with the end of the stem.

In the drops was even stranger - hands way below the saddle, which is a change for me. Knees way up towards my chest, but not close to hitting it. Felt bizarre but comfortable enough. I get the feeling that it's going to be using my muscles pretty differently from the hybrid. I've a couple of spacers above the bars so could raise them a bit but I'll leave as is for a while and see if it's just a case of getting used to it.

letape

Using drop bars will definitely feel different and take some getting used to, when transferring from your hibrid.

In terms of position, you'r stem is quite short and not very low, so it's not an aggressive position, will just take some to adjust.

Your saddle is fairly far back on its rails, so if you are feeling very stretched out, you could move it forward by a cm or so, and that would make a difference.

I just happened on your thread today; I'm very impressed by your progress on such a short time - not just on your bike, but your knowledge and having already put together your first bike. No doubt you'll have a few more in the next year!

Lepidoptera

Really enjoying your thread and am awed by all your progress so far - to go from just learning to ride to building your own bike now is amazing! I'm just getting back into cycling again after a long time, and it's great inspiration and motivation. Reading over the guides you linked earlier on is really handy as well - I've learned a lot just from reading about what you've been doing

quozl

I did some tweaking of the road-bike - swapping the 120mm stem for a 90mm one and the Kona handlebars for some compact (shorter reach) Deda bars.

I'm pretty happy with that position but I'm going to leave re-wrapping the handlebars until I'm confident that I like where I put the hoods.

The hardest part of building a road bike turns out to be getting a decent set of mudguards onto it!

I made sure to get a frame with mud-guard eyelets and ordered a pair of 23-28mm wide SKS guards as I'm planning on running 28mm tires for comfort

One problem - the guards want to mount where the caliper brakes are. I tried putting the guards in front of the fork - a good suggestion from DirkVoodoo - but it meant too little protection for my feet and drive chain. Problem solved by problem solvers - http://problemsolversbike.com/products/sheldon_fender_nuts. A brake caliper nut that's drilled at the back to accept a M6 nut so you can mount your fender to it. Cool! And Bee Cycles on the South Circular had one in his bits box.

A broken hacksaw blade later and I had 2 of the 8 steel mud-guard stays cut to length - the important two, the ones that would catch my feet and turf me into the road.

I've been avoiding going out on the road bike with all the thunder storms and now with the mud-guards finally mounted I took the bike out in a light rain on Sunday.

Well f*ck me it's a skittish bastard compared to my hybrid! In the space of 3 km I had three rear wheel skids while braking! 2 braking from maybe 26 kph and the third from maybe 35. In the 3rd one both my feet came out of the clipless pedals as I had a real WTF moment. It's a bizarre sensation - for a newbie anyway, I'm sure the rest of you know it well.

It felt like the back of the bike was starting to come forward sideways - which is probably about what it was doing. I'd guess it probably only came forward a tiny bit before I'd ease off the brakes and let things regain traction.

I'd guess it's a combination of 2 or 3 things:

1 - 23mm tires rather than my hybrids 28mm tires. I was only running them at 100PSI so they're not rocks or anything but still significantly smaller surface area than 28mm tires at 85-90 PSI.

2 - I'm braking evenly front and back. This is a bad habbit learnt from the hybrid where it works just fine. I know that I should be using about 1/3rd as much force on the rear brake but I've not learnt to do that yet and with the hybrid it just doesn't matter, the rear stays nicely attached anyway.

3 - position on the bike. With the drop-bars compared to the straight bar on the hybrid I guess my weight is further forward on the road bike - particularly when reaching for the brake pedals. It's a lot harder to move your weight backwards when braking when you need to grip about 7 or 8 cm further forward than I would on the hybrid.

Anybody else got suggestions on why it's so bloody skittish when braking? The above are just my guesses.

I ordered 28mm GP4000 Season tires last week as I want the comfort of lower PSI and the psychological comfort of puncture protection. They should mean a significantly larger surface area in contact with the road so that should automatically help. Thing is, it's not like I was braking from 50kph when skidding, so I need to teach myself to brake properly on the road bike rather than hope that the 28mm tires will be enough

smacl

quozl wrote: »

Anybody else got suggestions on why it's so bloody skittish when braking? The above are just my guesses.

In addition to what you've already listed, changing from a 120mm stem to a 90mm one is going to make the steering a bit more twitchy. Do you need the shorter reach?

A big part of it is also just getting used to the different position. It took me a few months to get as comfortable on the road bike as I had been on the hybrid. Getting used to the drops, particularly for descending, made a big difference.

Anyway, congrats on the build and progress. Something to be really proud of.

quozl

Thanks Smacl

I need the shorter reach at the moment but I might not need it after a couple of months of getting used to a road bike/stretching my back out a bit.

It's twitchy compared to the hybrid but I don't mind that - it's only the twitchiness when braking that I don't like and I'm pretty sure that's mostly because I'm doing it wrong. I think I need to learn to use the rear brake a lot less instead of using both.

smacl

I'm not exactly the most experienced road cyclist myself, but I tend to favour the front brake more when feathering lightly, and descend anything steep in the drops. I'd be far happier descending at speed on the road bike now than the hybrid, regularly in the low sixties on roads I know well. FWIW, I changed my set-up to give me the front brake in my right hand, same as the hybrid, which I also found helped. I use both brakes when trying to scrub speed, stop at junctions, and on steeper descents that I'm not comfortable taking at speed (e.g. Kuppure mast descent, which I invariably crawl down).

quozl

Took the road bike out for my first proper spin on it today
34.5 km with a bit of climbing as it was up through rathmines, churchtown, dundrum, step aside, enniskerry, bray and then on to the In-Laws in Dalkey.

http://www.strava.com/activities/73530428

I love my new Ridley

I've been worried about bike fit but with twins, work and trying to spend some time with my wife I haven't been able to do much on the Ridley. Turns out I didn't need to worry I adjusted the hoods to minimise reach on my compact handlebars - trying for the absolute minimum reach possible on the bike as I thought I might need it. Tried it out and it was way too short Hurrah!

Moved the hoods forward a cm or two and it was lovely on today's ride. I'm already more comfortable after 35k on this than I am on my Hybrid. I used the tops for maybe 7 or 8 minutes and the drops for a couple of minutes - 2nd time I moved to the drops I caused myself a nice swerve at 35kph. I need to practice doing that move at lower speeds That was the end of my use of the drops for the day! It's great to have the ability to move positions and once I'm a bit smoother with my movements between spots then I'll try and spend a lot more time in the drops - they're comfortable.

I went over 50kph today on a bike that I built. That's cool

Highlight of the day was calling into a bike shop I passed in Bray to see if he had a longer sheldon fender nut than the one I have - the owner greeted me with 'Nice bike!'. If he wasn't so far away, I'd be going back there again

Here is my new baby in all its finished glory:) Bar tape on, Continental GP4000 Seasons and (necessary evil) SKS Mudguards.