Road Cycling

If you get a road bike give me a shout, based in Salford so go out to the Cheshire lanes often. I ride with Salford cycle club and know a good bunch of lads who ride out from Sale. Cheers 1 shed

Yeah will do 1 shed. I actually work with a lady who rides with Salford. The roadie/mtb banter never let’s up 🙂

I observe your post & try to solve your problem. You have mentioned that you want to take up road cycling and also you have mentioned the duration of bike driving which is 40 minutes to an hour. Your family members also wont let you do this as you need it. I can suggest you that you can have slick or strong tires to solve your problems.

I bought a £400 road bike (Cannondale) from Pauls at the end of 2015. Done about 5000km on it so far, just a new rear wheel because the original was a bit too cheap and not very cheerful. It’s been fine, including 100 mile days and 25% hill climbs. If I had the choice again, I’d buy a more CX-orientated bike, allowing me to dive off down tracks when I wanted.

Clothing – I wear the same as I do on the mountain bike (Ron Hills, Rab shorts, base layer, windproof top), but I’d echo comments about helmet peaks. Wasn’t too bad with my (10 year old) Giro, but the 7 helmet I just replaced it with has me thinking about buying a dedicated roadie lid.

I got my first road bike in 1978 and first MTB about 1990ish, as was mentioned earlier I just dont get the tribalism. I still ride both as do most of my friends.

Regarding what to wear, I find theres usually good reason for clothing speciific to each discipline. You can get by with anything of course but why would you.

That said I’ve taken to occasionally wearing jeans for short mtb rides these new slightly stretchy jeans are acceptable for short rides.

You might be surprised how good a mtb with slick tyres actually is on the road. A second set of wheels with tyres fitted makes it a 2 minute job to swap over.
A better option might be a 2nd hand road bike with 28c tyres, or cx bike. That way you can ride tarmac and take off down any tracks you might find on your travels (there’s more of them than you first realise!).
The only changes I made to what I wear was a road style helmet as I found the peak on my mtb helmet got in my line of vision and meant I had a sore neck from raising my head up to see the road ahead.
I use mtb spd pedals on my road/gravel bike, saves buying new shoes.
I’m slowly moving to lycra for road use, it just makes more sense to me.