Something I've been doing

[JR]

I have an old Cannoncal hard-tail mtb set up for town duty. It has a rack with a collapsible basket and 1.24" slicks. I use to go the long way to the park where I do exercises on the PAR course, stopping on the way home at Trader Joe's for Two Buck Chuck.

I also have a nice full supsension mountain bike and a decent road bike, but they're not seeing too much mileage right now.

For those who are just starting out, hee's my (unsolicited) advice: once you've determined you are actually going to use a bike for exercise you should budget $1,000 to get started with a bike and accessories. I arrive at this conslusion because it seems to be a magic number for a lot of sports. Golf, skiing, probably kayaking, I dunno, they all seem to require about $1K to get started with foot gear, clothes, equipment, etc..

YMMV,
JR

[Lee4847]

My wife and I have giants and we trail ride. We usually ride 20-40 miles two or three times a week. We found that is you stop for a nice big ICE CREAM CONE at the end of the ride you do not loose any weight

Lee

[vaking]

I am not a serious rider, I ride for exercise. I prefer road to mountains. I have a Shwinn 2X9 road bike. Season starts around May and lasts till September. There is a nice park near me with a circle to practice. At the beginning of the season I ride once a week making 3-4 circles in about 20 minutes. By the end of the season I reach 3 times a week each time making 10-12 circles in about 45 minutes. During the season I usually drop 8-10 lb, in the winter those pounds find their way back.

[sscherin]

We solved the kid problem by simply taking them along for the ride on a trail-a-bike..

That worked well till we had a our 2nd daughter so my wife rode with the baby in an Ibert bike seat and I ran the trail-a-bike on mine with our older daughter.. When she was old enough we upgraded to a tandem trail-a-bike.. While I see lots of trailer bikes on rides ours is the only tandem I've seen on the road.


Now that is quite a sight and we get a lot of comments as we rode the bike trails through the park..

Just for kicks we bought a tandem mountian bike last year and put the tandem trail-a-bike on it.. Now it's a quad!

It's kinda like riding an articulated bus It's nice to call out for a little extra kid power on hills..

Last time we took it to the park we had people waiting to take pics of us on the return leg..

Sadly the kids are getting older and moving on to their own bikes now that they can keep up with us..
My oldest just turned 10 and got her own mountian bike.. My 2nd daughter is on her own now too.
Little Louis is back there riding the tandem by himself but he's growing up fast and the tandem trailers days are almost done.

[os1kne]

That's an interesting rig! I'd never seen a tandem model before. My wife and I have 5 y.o. twins and a 3.5 y.o. We have been using 2 of the trailers. I tow the twins behind me (at a load of 100+ lbs.) The twins have just about maxed out the capacity of the trailer and are getting decent at riding their bikes w/ training wheels, but they won't be ready for the trails (rails to trails) that we ride on. I'd been thinking of getting 2 trailer-bikes, but we'd still have the issue of the trailer for my youngest (not sure if towing a trailer behind a trailer-bike is possible/wise.)

Thanks for posting.