Bicycle Tires for Dummy Cyclists

Bent ("tacoed") bike rim

The world is full of earnest strivers, people who work hard for their money and want it to go as far as it can. So we can understand the quandary of the newbie cyclist who's just discovered how much replacing a road bike tire costs. Unlike Discount Tire, your local bike shop doesn't sell road hazard insurance and no manufacturer anywhere offers a mileage guarantee. So we understand why that newbie who just shelled out $90 for a pair of Gator DuraSkins (ignoring a name that sounds like a condom) would want to know "Expected Mileage on Road Bike Tires"¹: we get that. What we don't get is expecting a good answer from the likes of Elle Di Jensen (or asking at a place like ModernMom.com).

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!

No, after reading through Elle's combination of commonly-available information (reworded to avoid getting nailed for plagiarism) and self-sourced misinformation, the obvious conclusion is that this is one "fitness professional" who deserves an award – and that award is the Dumbass of the Day.

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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