Читать книгу The Lancashire Cycleway. The tour and 17 day rides онлайн

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Despite the road bike boom, the majority of new bikes sold are hybrids. Hybrids look superficially like mountain bikes, with wide flat bars and fairly chunky wheels and frame. They’re great for light off-road use, like canal towpaths or forest roads. True mountain bikes come into their own on rougher terrain, but if you’re staying on tarmac, fat tyres and suspension will soak up not only the bumps, but also much of the effort you’re expending. ‘Supermarket special’ mountain bikes – sometimes called ‘bicycle-shaped objects’ – are often excessively heavy, burdened with ineffective, essentially pointless suspension. For the Lancashire Cycleway, and pretty much everything else, they’ll make your life worse rather than better.

For riding longer distances road bikes still have many advantages, not least that dropped handlebars give a greater variety of riding positions and allow you to be much more aerodynamic. This can become very important if you encounter a headwind on the Fylde.

The bikes used in the Tour de France may be feather-light works of engineering art, with carbon fibre frames and electronic gear shifting, but the essence of the design hasn’t changed for well over 50 years. Bike-makers pursue innovation in the hope of selling more bikes, and there has been a steady process of development and upgrading, and the advent of ever more specialised and radical bikes, notably for time-trials and triathlons. Even so, the all-round bikes used for road stages in the Tour are still recognisably related to what Fausto Coppi or Eddy Merckx rode. This is, quite simply, because you can’t improve on perfection.