I have a friend who has a passion for bicycle racing. He has teenage boys who do very well in the sport and have won a lot of races. One of his sons flew to Belgium to compete this last summer. As you can imagine, he was a very proud father. I once casually showed him a magazine ad for a bicycle I was considering buying.
I asked him what he thought of it and he launched into a long diatribe about how the bike I was looking at was all wrong. It was too heavy, the tires were too wide, the seat was too low and the handle bars too high… I let him go on for a minute or two then I gently said that I wasn’t intending to compete with the bike, I just wanted to ride around the park and maybe take it down to the beach to cruise up and down the boardwalk. “Oh,” he said, “Yeah, that’s a good bike for that sort of thing” and moved on to another topic, obviously a little disgruntled that I would even bother to show him anything other than a new high-tech racing bike. (Read the rest at Freedom Penguin)
