A riding partner

This is Bradley Handziuk. I will be "guest" writing on Emma's blog today. She wrote a little piece about her new bike and I'm going to do the same for my new bike. Thank you Emma for the venue!

The Miele Cicli as it sits today

I've been riding my dad's old Miele Cicli road bike for a while now. I rode it for the last half of college and then for the last 1-1/2 years to/from work. A beautiful, red touring bike, Canadian made with a mishmash of Shimano 600 and Sakae SX parts, it's been a dream to ride. However, last week the guide pulley came off while I was about 4 miles from home. Probably a maintenance oversight on my part but maybe just a sign of age, too. Either way it was the last straw; my mind was made up. It's was time for a new bike.

Pretty much any new road bike was going to be an improvement over the Miele. It had friction shifters on the downtube, brakes which could not be pulled on hard while my hands were on the top of the handle bars, a steel frame (although still relatively light for a steel frame, even compared to lower end modern aluminum framed bikes), and only 6 gears in the back. All of these things are designs of the past. 

After shopping around at a few shops in Durham/Raleigh area and riding several bikes I'd found a lot of features I liked on the different models. Many of the features were obvious improvements over the Miele because of modern design, but also a lot of the features I discovered I liked were subtle differences between Shimano and Sram components.

So, the final decision was the Specialized Allez Mid-Compact. I narrowed in on it because of

• the weight: 19 lb, ~7 lb lighter than the Miele.
• the Sram Apex drivetrain: the Double-Tap shifters are great and especially great because they are isolated from the brake system, unlike the Shimano system. And the front crankset has a 52 tooth chainring and 11 teeth on the smallest cog in the back. This will be much nicer because my legs topped out on some hills with the 52/13 combo on the Miele.
• the COOL color! It has to be good looking right?! The Miele was so bold. My new bike had to be equally gnarly and I think it is. 
• Oh and it was on sale at the awesome local shop The Bicycle Chain

 

I'm really happy with the pedals, too. They are SPD clipless (i.e. they have a clip, confusing. I know.) unlike the Miele's pedals which were platform pedals which had a cage/strap for a while then for the last year or so they had just a wide leather strap (which was actually a lot nicer than the cage/strap set up). I'll eventually need to buy a second pair of pedals because I want to use the same shoes to mountain bike. I guess for now I will be taking the pedals off the idle bike and placing them on the active bike until then.

I took her out for a 29 mile ride this morning to try out the experience. It felt great! No real fatigue, very comfortable, the shifting was great. What more could I want? The route was great too. There are a lot of newly paved roads just south of us but not a lot of businesses or traffic on them yet. Some intersections don't even have their traffic signals turned on. It's a great place to ride. Calm, quiet, rolling hills, and trees allover. It's right near some cool, if not short, mountain bike trails, too.

I'm very excited to get back into biking to work with this new toy. My office is about 8.5-10 miles away (depending on how trafficy of a route I am willing to take that day) and I was just not feeling it most mornings with the Miele. The tires are a little thicker on it (1.25 in on the Miele compared to 23 mm [0.9 in] on the Allez) so it rides a little slower and the heat! Oh the heat! I think I can zip to work in a reasonable amount of time with the Allez. I'll have to get up a bit earlier but that's another story....

I can't wait to get out and ride again!