Bike envy

The very first sunny, warm day of spring found me out pedaling on my trusty Trek hard-tail mountain bike. I’d just done a long stretch of quiet dirt roads and was on the paved shoulder of a busy highway when a road biker blew by me like I was standing still. Compared to her, I almost was.

I’ll admit that I suffered a moment of flat out envy. It's the same feeling you get when a little two-seater sports car blows the door off your family wagon on a short passing lane. In that place, her bike was better than my bike. Cranking manfully along a highway on fat tires didn’t seem like nearly as much fun as cruising at warp speed. This biker was in that elegant, fast pedaling cadence that gets your muscles working, your heart pumping, your lungs working at max capacity. It produces those wonderful extended endorphin highs that makes exercise junkies smile for days afterward.

This particular case of envy lasted only a second or two.

The road biker was stuck riding with traffic on that noisy paved road. I, on the other hand, hadn’t been passed by a single car. No big trucks had buffeted me the whole time I was riding on dirt.

Though I covered only a fraction of the distance she probably did, I heard birds calling and saw the first tiny hints of green in long-dormant leaf buds. I got all the exercise I could stand this early in the biking season. And I know I had at least as much fun as she did. Maybe more.

But still, there was a definite moment of envy.

Bike envy is a common emotion for me. And I’m not even a really serious bike nut. A couple of my close friends are serious (with a capital “S”) bikers. They’ve each got more cash tied up in their current road bikes alone than I have combined in all the bikes I’ve ever owned. One of them bikes through the winter and has probably rolled close to a thousand miles in the three months since New Year’s. The other keeps his thighs in shape all winter on telemark skis, and jumps on a bike in the spring without missing a beat.

When they suffer from bike envy, they just buy a better bike.

But bike envy can come at you from lots of different directions. When you see someone breezing by on a great road bike, you get road bike envy. When you’re hunched over on the hard seat of a road bike on a rail trail or rough back road, you can’t help but envy the person cruising along on a super-comfortable hybrid. And when you’re rattling your teeth loose over rough ground on a hybrid or hard-tail, it’s easy to envy someone with a full-suspension mountain bike.

But the real cure for bike envy is not (necessarily) buying a new bike. It’s deciding what kind of biking you like to do best, and then spending what you can afford to get a bike that does well in that situation.

Road bike, hybrid, mountain bike, comfort bike, it doesn’t matter. Biking is biking is biking. Good fun, great exercise, a wonderful excuse to get outdoors.