After the Hybrid ...

[xeney]

I will point out one advantage to sticking with a hybrid instead of having a specific bike dedicated to any kind of riding you might ever want to do: right now, there are five road bikes in my living room. (Plus a trainer, two repair stands, an extra wheelset, and at least a dozen discarded saddles.) There are two more broken road bikes downstairs, plus a couple of mountain bikes and two townies.

We had friends in town yesterday and we had to meet them at a restaurant because how do you invite people over when the bikes are blocking all the sofas? My husband keeps stacking bikes in front of the dogs' dishes, and the poor dogs know how much trouble they'll be in if they knock over a bike, so they just quietly starve. If we each just had a hybrid, the bikes could live in the basement and I could have a real house again.

I need to build this man a garage.

Pooks, I think that if you get to the point where you either wish you could ride faster/longer and you feel like your bike is holding you back, or find yourself avoiding rough trails just because your bike won't handle them, that is the point where you should consider adding another type of bike. Sometimes you will encounter snobbiness about hybrids, and I think it's a little unfair. When I bought mine, I had no idea what kind of riding I might want to do, so a hybrid was a good choice for me, and if I had chosen a better one I might have kept riding it forever. But even so, I had friends who were really obnoxious about my bike, who were openly snobby about it, like it wasn't a real bike. Those guys have $4,000 road bikes but they drive to places that are five blocks away. I don't think bike snobs are the people who get to decide what constitutes "real" riding!