I was thinking about this earlier. I'm a runner, I've done a lot of running for a lot of years. But I did buy a cheap racer a few years ago and got talking to some commited cyclists.
The thing that struck me was that I wanted my cycling to be difficult. I was happy to my cheap bike that took effort to ride. But they wanted to spend many many hundreds of pounds (or several thousands in one case, I seem to remember the bike was £6k) on a bike as they wanted the best possible performance.
I couldn't understand why you would want to do that. I took the racing tyres off my bike and put slower, higher resistance ones on to make it harder to pedal. It was all very marginal in my book.
What I've never been able to establish is how much difference a £6k bike makes over a cheap one. Surely losing some chunk and getting fit would be more beneficial? Can any keen cyclists let me know how much faster spending 10 to 12 times as much on a bike would make me? Or how good you would have to be to notice a difference?
I'm certainly not saying those of you who are good wouldn't notice a difference btw, I'm on about the
The thing that struck me was that I wanted my cycling to be difficult. I was happy to my cheap bike that took effort to ride. But they wanted to spend many many hundreds of pounds (or several thousands in one case, I seem to remember the bike was £6k) on a bike as they wanted the best possible performance.
I couldn't understand why you would want to do that. I took the racing tyres off my bike and put slower, higher resistance ones on to make it harder to pedal. It was all very marginal in my book.
What I've never been able to establish is how much difference a £6k bike makes over a cheap one. Surely losing some chunk and getting fit would be more beneficial? Can any keen cyclists let me know how much faster spending 10 to 12 times as much on a bike would make me? Or how good you would have to be to notice a difference?
I'm certainly not saying those of you who are good wouldn't notice a difference btw, I'm on about the