Learn About Road Bicycles

Video Transcript

This is Eric with Spin City Cycling in Austin, Texas and I am talking today on behalf of Expert Village. We are going to discuss a little bit about what is a road bike. If you haven't guessed it by now, this is a road bike. Road bikes are made for long distance riding on pavement and there are several different types of road bikes. We are just going to kind of go over a few of the basics. As I mentioned or as you can see, road bikes have very narrow tires; very narrow tires with very high air pressure. The reason for that so that you have very rolling resistance so these are very fast bikes, larger wheels than what you might find on some other types of bikes in terms of diameter. Again, just a wheel with a lot of momentum. Another very distinctive feature of road bikes are these handle bars. These are called drop bars. A couple of different reasons for bars like this is one of them is so that you can have different hand position over a course of over 40, 50, 60 mile bike road and if your hands are in the same spot all the time, they will get real tire. You might get some numbness. So handle bars, very important. Another thing you will notice on most modern bikes are shifters. Brakes and shifters are integrated into the same unit so it is very convenient, very easy to change gears while you are riding. Another feature of road bikes is they are generally one of the lightest types of bikes and again, that just gets back to being an efficient, fast bike. In general the lighter you get, the more you are going to pay and you know here in Austin you can expect to pay $700 to $800 range for an entry level bike and in terms of higher end bikes, the sky is the limit. So you know there are lots of other components to talk about; frame design. Most road bikes these days will have a carbon fork, some may have carbon fiber in the back and some frames may be out of entirely carbon fiber so hopefully that gives you a little idea what road bikes are about. Thanks for watching.

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