Gearing Up for Bikes

As brand-new bike people go, I'd say my hubby and I pretty well equipped when it comes to bike gear. Not because we had tons of money to just go out and buy it, we didn't.

But once the decision to go carless was made, every paycheck I would crunch the numbers and figure out what Bike Thing we needed I could squeeze into that pay cycle.

Sometimes it was a larger purchase, like a (as in, one) Kyroptonite U-lock . Another week it was a CO2 tire filler thingy; the actual cartridges came weeks later.

The first thing we bought was a bicycle pump with a tire repair kit and that was four months before we went carless and six months before we got our bikes. I seriously considered suggesting a celebratory dinner the week we pulled off decent bungee cords.

Slowly but surely, our Bike Stuff shelf in the garage began to fill up.

Once we had our bikes and figured out what else we needed, we got that stuff, too. But this post will focus on the preparatory gear, as it were.

Which of what thing and why

Because I am who I am, each item was painstakingly researched.  Hours of my life were spent watching various people, usually men, adjust tire spokes using a mind-boggling variety of tools for that purpose. Human ingenuity knows no bounds when it comes to finding complicated ways to do a simple thing, apparently.

After a few weeks, all that research began to nag at me. I began to feel overwhelmed; so many of these decisions seemed to be what our very safety relied upon so I didn't want to make the wrong choice for my family. And although I have take-apart-the-toaster inclinations, a real knack for assembling flat-pack furniture and doing other handy-type things (thanks, Dad!), I was not feeling confident about changing a bike tire at all.

There was also so much equipment to consider. Some items are pretty obvious -- helmets, lights, a tire pump. Others were baffling, like this chain condom or this banana holder. I guess sometimes you really need that extra burst of potassium while biking.

One Sunday morning, I fretted aloud to my husband as we sat beneath our carob tree. Without even glancing up from his phone he casually explained to me -- this was after many of these purchases were made, mind you -- that a bike shop was kind of like a car mechanic. Most people apparently just bring their bike in and pay someone to fix it.

Oh.

I thought back to the many nights I'd spent bleary-eyed watching videos like this one. I considered the sleep I'd lost worrying I was in over my head with this whole carless thing. Futilely, I attempted to count the number of times I'd envisioned attempting to fend off circling coyotes with flimsy, broken tire wrenches. Tire wrenches that were of no help because I'd gone cheap or picked the wrong one. Tire wrenches that would ultimately result in our grisly, sordid deaths.

As all this ran though my mind, the Hubby continued to ponder his next Words With Friends move. He is probably still perplexed by the long, chilly silence that followed his response.

Making the decision

For all this, I usually ended up at the nexus point of the price and Amazon reviews. I always read the bad reviews first to weed out shipping complaints and people who clearly don't know it's them, not the product. If the majority of bad reviews are a you problem, as opposed to a product problem, I'll move on to the three- and five-star reviews. I've had great success with this method and highly recommend it.

I've read other bike blogs that say the bicycle community is judgy and clique-y; I'm sure there are plenty of cyclists out there that will snort derisively or roll their eyes or smugly tell me I've spent too much money or made a poor choice or whatever.

That's fine. I'm sure I'll figure that out soon enough. These are my lessons to learn, after all, so as far I'm concerned mistakes are going to be part of the process.

However, my admittedly limited exposure to bike people here in Phoenix (which is one Phoenix Spokes People meeting and the guys down at Rage Cycles and a friend of mine who bikes) has shown them to be friendly and welcoming.

Helmets

For obvious reasons, i.e. the Hubby being a TBI survivor and my years of work with the brain injury community, helmets were our number one priority, though we are under no delusions about helmets being a magic bubble.

That said, the difference between a concussion and a subdural hematoma is a very real thing to both of us. I'm only going to say this once: the helmet you wear determines that difference. Period. It's not free speech or gun control, the necessity of helmets is not up for debate in our universe. 

My number one criteria when it came to helmets was that it met both American and European safety standards because (sorry America) Europe's standards are far more stringent, probably because more people ride bikes there. If possible, I wanted to support an American company and, lastly, I did want it to look cool, too.

Thousand helmets, though uber-spendy, met all three criteria. And if there was one piece of equipment I wasn't going to waver on cost, it was the helmet.

Fortunately, by the time we'd put the money together for the helmets the ones we wanted had dropped in price significantly! Overall, we saved about $40 on each and I got the fun, playful, sporty helmet of my dreams.

The helmet I wanted was out of stock, but my husband tracked it down on this super-hispster site called Huckberry. Thanks, Huckberry!

One of my favorite features of this helmet is the magnetic pop lock. The logo pops out and you can lock the helmet up by putting the U-bolt or, as I do, cable attached to a U-lock, through the hole. All the safety of a helmet and none of the lugging it around everywhere.

The Practical Stuff 

Here's the other gear we got, though I won't go too in-depth about it since you, too, can go down the rabbit hole of Amazon reviews.

We each have a safety/repair kit on our bikes at all times made up of these things:

Under-seat pouch that holds this multi-tool, the product of literally days of comparison shopping. It also has some of the patches that came with this tire pump, which may or may not be actually compatible with our bikes. We'll find out eventually!

And of course there's the aforementioned CO2 tire inflater and cartridges.

An argument could be made that I went a bit bungee crazy, but of all the bike accessories we bought, I have honestly used all these so many times I don't regret it. I am certain you can never have too many bungee cords.

There's the net bungee, the permanently affixed bracket bungee (on Judd's bike) and the standard hook double bungee, which I use to hold my two U-locks and helmet cable on my front rack.

For the garage, we got this bike stand, which is fine but needs to be screwed into the ground to actually work, something the Hubby doesn't want to do for some reason. Standing alone, it's fine for Judd's bike but mine is a bit big for it.

The really important stuff 

Finally, the stuff that matters, namely our coffee holders. 

As much I use my case and standard water bottle, riding along with my A.T. Oasis Coffee & Tea Shop iced hibiscus tea on a warm day is simply heavenly. 

Panniers and such

We did get a commuter laptop pannier and other accessories once we'd ridden for a while, but I like to pretend I have an audience and subscribers so that's going to have to wait for another post. Spoiler alert: Arkel is amaaaaaazzziiiiing.

You'll notice there are tire wrenches on both the multi-tool and included in bike pump repair kit. We have about four each between us now, so bring it, coyotes.