bike magazines

The first time I came home from the grocery store with a bike magazine, the wife chuckled, and rightly so. I'd bought my new bike a few months earlier and was getting into it, and she pulled the magazine out of a grocery bag and said laughing..."Oh no, he actually bought a bike magazine. It's official. He's a bike person."

And she was right in a few ways. I saw the magazine and saw a few articles on the cover I thought might actually educate me in my new interest, so I bought it, and read them, and found a few helpful tidbits. Still, I read some other articles and I have no idea what they're talking about. I'm not quite fanatical about it to get it all. Since then though, I bought the magazine a few more times, to the point where I looked at the little subscription card. A year for $11. Well, shit. If I buy it off the rack four times in a year, I've already spent that much, so I decided...even if I don't read every one of them, $11 for the year is a better deal, so I went for it.

So now I'm like...two months into this subscription thing, and I'm noticing something. Yes, I know...two months...I'm lightning quick.

I'm noticing articles about how you can get a really good deal on a bike but not break the bank, and I go to the article and it talks about....great bikes for under $3000. Now, maybe I'm not the target audience. Maybe these people are independently wealthy. Their banks must have a higher breaking threshold than mine. I look at the bikes in the article and...none are under $2000. They're all between $2500 and $3000, but....excuse me...we're not breaking the bank?

My bike wasn't cheap, by any means, but when I read these articles, I see stuff like....most $2000 entry level carbon bikes are cookie cutter frames with no feel and...like they're looking down their collective noses at a bicycle that costs two grand! Hello bike snobbery. I mean, when people ask me about getting into this stuff, and ask me what my bike cost, they're shocked. I'm a little embarrassed that I spent that much on a bicycle, yet by the bike magazine standards, I'm bargain basement.

Then I saw this article about how to beat the wind, and since I deal with wind a lot, I thought, maybe this will be worth something. The three big tips were...

1) Wear bike clothes because they fit tight and are more wind resistant
2) Get low on your bike, so you're more aerodynamic
3) Ride in groups, so you can ride behind people most of the time and only the front guy gets most of the wind, and rotate the front guy often so nobody hits all the wind for too long.

So, your target audience is people who ride bikes that cost over two thousand dollars, and this is the advice you have for them to cheat the wind? Don't you think they already have that part down? If you're going to do an article on this subject, don't you have to come with a little more than that? It's not that the information isn't relevant. It's that, if you're going to write an article on the subject, I assume you have something worth writing about...something newsworthy, some new revelation, maybe. No, not so much.

I don't know. For eleven dollars, I think it's still a pretty good deal, but hey....I read this stuff and sometimes I just gotta shake my head.