I looked online for tips on buying a bicycle for Ironman and couldn’t find too many good resources specific to the team, so here are a few tips.

Some of the brand bikes people own on the team are:
- Trek, LiteSpeed, Cervelo, Felt, Serotta, Giant

1. If you don’t have a bike yet, wait until after kick-off to get one.

2. Determine what you want to do post Ironman. Do you want to keep doing triathlons or do you like road cycling? This will help decide if you get a tri-specific bike or a road bicycle. Most folks on the team have a road bike and stick aero bars on them.

3. Go with a coach or a team member to go buy your bike, or have them recommend a bike shop. Talk to someone and do a lot of research online because there’s so many different options and this will probably be your biggest purchase.

4. Budget, because bikes can get very expensive up to $5,000 - $7,000. A good bike will cost you $1,500 - $3,000 and then there’s still a helmet, gloves, shoes, pedals, maintenance, and bike clothes. Try and make all your stuff match too, or we’re going to be talking about you.

5. Make sure you find a good bike shop (and make friends). City Cycle in San Francisco is good and Cycle Sports in Oakland is good too. These guys should be able to provide you a proper fit. Note that Cycle Sports gives you a TNT discount (5% of bicycle purchase).

6. http://www.bikelane.com/ is a really good web site for links for more info on bikes.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 1st, 2005 at 6:39 pm and is filed under 2006 . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.