The One Step Guide to Buying a Bicycle

I took a friend to buy a new bike. This friend is relatively new to mountain biking and had never been to a shop for the express purpose of buying a bike before. I am an expert in this field, and so I offered to “help” with the process, although, as I’ll make clear in a minute, buying a bike requires no expertise at all.

Today’s mountain bikes are technological wonders, incorporating suspension systems and disc brakes, geometries we couldn’t even imagine twenty years ago, and seats that drop out of the way at our whimsical behest. They are also just bicycles.

On the way to the store (the store turns out to be a key ingredient in the One Step Guide to Buying a Bicycle^TM), I said, “My one and only recommendation is to buy the bike that you feel best on.”

And that more or less concludes the explanation of my revolutionary new bicycle acquisition system. Here in the fourth paragraph, the first couple of which were needless set ups, I’m stuck trying to make more of my simple guide than it probably needs. This whole thing is like a one-liner with a series of foot and endnotes.

Many of the people I know, other “experts,” would, upon hearing that you were trying to buy a new mountain bike, begin to use terms and phrases like: head tube angle, pivot point, suspension system, pedal bob, trail profile, etc., etc., ad nauseum. One of the abiding trademarks of insecure expertise is the need to make simple things complicated, the urge to eff the ineffable.

I have never regretted buying a bike I felt good on. I have never found a bike like that wanting. I have also never had the information, the data, cause me to stop enjoying the feel of a bike that, upon first pedal, fit me like a glove and handled like a dream. That feeling of oneness with the bike is a thing that no superior intelligence can undo.

Many so-called beginners feel intimidated by the process of getting a new bike, suspecting they don’t know enough to make a wise choice, and this is a little by-design. It’s really classic “in-group” nonsense, people who know a lot needing to express their self-proclaimed superiority through the obfuscation of information that is readily available.

You know what you like about a bike far better than I do. You know how you feel on a bike far better than I do. I can’t possibly inhabit your experience. I can’t know what you know about you.

And so here it is, my patent pending One Step Guide to Buying a Bicycle^TM, go to a bike shop and test ride bikes as long as it takes to make that love connection. Trust yourself. There is nothing you don’t know that will matter. And once you’ve decided, take that bike home and love riding it, no matter how much or how little it cost, because it is a special bike. It’s the best bike, and whether you knew it or not, you knew it the whole time.