Not liking your bike or gear

About 5 years ago, I purchased a disc road bike. This bike can take guards and a rack which I fitted. This bike does everything I ask of it. It hauls my shopping, gets me to the gym, gets me to appointments and does an occasional winter ride of 25 miles or so. I clean and maintain it and that's it! The problem is that I am completely indifferent to it. I neither like/dislike it. Do other forum members experience similar?

Your rides are boring, not the bike

One biking was resonating. Just in the wrong way. Turns out it was a stuck brake piston not retracting. Sorted that and we were best friends again. Turns out your bike working properly does make a difference!

Not the answer i expected, but the answer i needed!

i have a love / hate thing going on with my caad12.
i love the way it looks and the way it rides when i actually ride it, but i've fallen out of love with road riding at the moment so it's taking up space.
i think a lot of this was to do with being off the bike for a few months and fitness dropping off while my riding mates were prepping for a long distance event so i felt like i couldn't ride with them as i'd be holding them back.
my caad is tentatively up for sale, but i'll probably regret selling it when spring/summer rolls around next year (which is maybe why i've been so shit at getting a proper for sale ad sorted)

If it wasn't so expensive I'd ride the Shiv everywhere. Aeroz to make up for my lack of fitness.

A few years back I hired a Scott Addict Road bike to mess about in the Alps. It was ok possibly a little too big, bars definitely too wide, but far lighter than what I normally ride. As a whole the bike was vanilla at best, despite the terrain being amazing.

A couple of years later back in the alps hired another addict from the same shop. They only had smalls, it was too small, it was painful on my back, but it was utterly brilliant to ride, the conditions were shit…pissing rain, high winds. I had to be out of the saddle for comfort for most of the time. If I had the money I would have bought that inappropriate bike.

I pretty much only buy bikes based on looks, there has to be something about it for me to like it. Same as music; couldn't give a shit what type of music it is, but if it's not got something interesting about it, I'm not bothered.
I think that's why I've completely fallen out of love with road bikes recently, and now mostly only ride MTB. With MTB, there's something different or pushing the boundaries coming out all the time. Road bikes all look the same these days, the geometry is pretty much all identical, and the only difference seems to be what paint is on it.

In short, buy bikes with fun paint, or ones you can crash in forests.

Bikes make no sense. My Genesis Day One is a piece of shit on paper. Total mismatch of parts bodged on to a gas pipe frame, usually with a pannier attached.
Weighs a tonne, looks like shit but I absolutely love it.

When I was head of psychiatry at the Kant Institute in Bern, Switzerland, I had a patient suffering in much this way. I don't think I am breaking any doctor/patient/nutter confidences by adumbrating his tribulations.
He'd been riding a particular bicycle, let's call it a Bolnago, for a few months and, as a humble working man, it had taken him a good while to save up the money to buy it. As you will know Binarellos are not cheap. However the joy he had long anticipated failed to manifest itself. This caused my patient to experience feelings of regret, sadness and shame. I found it all very amusing but obviously kept that to myself.
The patient had essayed a variety of increasingly peculiar methods to overcome his depression. He had lowered the saddle, and then raised it. He had fitted white bar tape only to have his day ruined by a muddy puddle. He had ridden to the shops and back one handed, and then no handed. The prominent scar on his chin told one all one needed to know about how that ended. He had tried lycra, and then wool, and then sports wool, and then vegan sports wool to no avail. One night his wife, driving home from a seance, saw her husband riding entirely naked around the village square.
There were other misadventures and dead ends, an embarrassing court case and an unking thread on Reddit before he turned up in my consulting room. For six months, twice a week for 45 minutes (billed for an hour) we worked through his neuroses, his lonely childhood on an isolated farm with a disappointed father and another slightly less disappointed father, the ensuing identity crises and half hearted acts of rebellion, the year he ate nothing but Stilton cheese. It sounds interesting but the three quarters of an hour often felt like a full hour.
In the end. Oh sorry, someone at the door. BRB.

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I don't get Italian bikes either

👏

Brilliant!

The best thing about these is happening upon one in a random unexpected thread.

Oh sorry, someone at the door. BRB.

'Be right back'....Was the caller your former client who'd come round to chastise you for breaking confidences?

Whatever, the story sounds like a classic case of failed retail therapy. Perhaps that is exactly what this thread is about?

attraction to Italian bicycle parts is a curable disease, good rehab in Catford I heard.

I like it.

CATFORD: where Italian dreams go to die

Even the best pizza in Catford is Turkish and not Italian!

grandfather of pizza

i've come to realise that this is a thread about privelege, and we should all sell our bikes and donate the money to https://worldbicyclerelief.org/

Ooh, big ethical flex

let's call it a Bolnago

This reminded me of phonejacker.

Do you want to want a new bike?