Bent ("tacoed") bike rim |
Jensen... Di Jensen?² claims to be a "fitness professional." We know what that means, though: an aerobics or yoga instructor, perhaps one of those "personal trainers" at LA Fitness who misinform people about diet while trying to make everyone look like The Rock. Whether Elle has ridden a bicycle since she turned sixteen (or more likely thirteen) is, however, questionable. We say that based on some of the crap in her introductory paragraph:
"Road bikes are made for riding on paved roads efficiently. You probably know them as '10-speeds,' but they can come with a 9-speed cassette that offers seven more gears than the 20 you'll get with a 10-speed. The frames are light weight [sic], and the tires are narrow for easy pedaling."She gets "Road bikes are made for riding on paved roads" and "The frames are light weight" right, but the rest? not so much. For one, road bike tires aren't narrow to make pedaling easy -- that's the job of the drivetrain. The tires are narrow to reduce rolling friction, dummy! Whatever... Di Jensen truly displays her ignorance of bicycles in her babble about "speeds." Elle, a 10-speed is just that: a five-speed cassette and double chain rings. It's not a ten-speed cassette! Having a nine-speed cluster doesn't necessarily mean 27 gears; one of the bikes in the Antisocial Network Bicycle Garage has a nine-speed cassette and twin chain rings, or eighteen speeds! Don't write about stuff you know nothing about! |
Since ModernMom is a Demand Media outlet (Di Jensen supposedly writes for "StudioD"), Elle's stuck having to meet a minimum word count. After (correctly) noting that there's no way you can predict the mileage expected from road bike tires -- variables include rider weight, road surfaces, tire construction and blind luck -- Di Jensen still has to come up with a couple hundred more words. That's where she gets in trouble again:
"Each time before you ride, spin the wheels while the bike is elevated off the ground to ensure the rims are straight. If they wobble, your tires will wear against the bike frame..."They'll "wear against the bike frame"? On a road bike? We doubt it -- it's a lot more likely that the rim will rub on the brake caliper (unless, of course, you have disc brakes). You'd have to have one hell of a twist in the rim for the tire to rub, a bend so sharp that you probably couldn't ride the bike anyway!
¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but may still be accessible via the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was motherhood.modernmom.com/expected-mileage-road-bike-tires-14266.html
² Elle Di Jensen is apparently a pseudonym for pseudofeminist writer L. D. Jensen...
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