What is the ideal road bike?

• Efficient (fast)
  • If you don’t care about this, you might as well ride a mountain bike as they can traverse any kind of terrain, roads or trails.
• Comfortable
  • Comfort = fun, especially on long rides.
• Handling
  • If you’re going fast, it needs to be responsive and predictable in the turns.
• Brakes
  • The faster you go, the more important this is

Requirements

• Gearing: wide range
  • A wide range is essential: at least 1:4 from low to high
  • Examples
    • My ’99 Trek had low 39-25 = 1.56, high 52-12 = 4.33, range = 4.33/1.56 = 2.78:1
      • This is not enough. The high is about right but the low is much too high
    • Modern: low 34-34 (1:1), high 50-11 (4.54:1), range = 4.54/1.00 = 4.54:1
      • This is great – much lower 1st gear and roughly the same high gear.
  • Modern bikes offer much smaller front chainrings which solves this problem
  • How many gears is irrelevant: 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, whatever.
    • This is marketing bullshit.
    • It’s the range, not the number of gears, that matters.
  • Electronic shifting is irrelevant.
    • Mechanical cable shifting has been perfected for decades and works perfectly
    • Mechanical doesn’t need batteries, is lighter, cheaper, more reliable, simpler, and user serviceable
    • Electronic shifting is a solution in search of a problem
• Frame: carbon
  • Must be both stiff (efficient) and comfortable.
  • Aluminum is stiff but uncomfortable, transmitting vibration to the rider which gets painful and fatiguing on long rides
  • Steel is comfortable but too heavy, and it is not as strong or durable as people think
  • Carbon fiber is the best frame material: the efficiency of aluminum with the comfort of steel, and very strong and durable
• Wheels: carbon
  • Must be stiff (efficient), light, and aerodynamic
  • Aluminum allow rims cannot be both light & aerodynamic – choose your poison
    • When you make them deep enough for good aero, they get very heavy
  • Carbon rims give the best of all worlds, and good ones have lifetime warranty
  • BUT Carbon rims
    • should not use rim brakes – poor braking and can melt the rims
    • should not use alloy spoke nipples – need to use brass to avoid redox
    • Make sure the spokes are exposed so you can true them without unsealing the tire
• Tires: clinchers with latex tubes
  • Clinchers with latex tubes are faster and more comfortable than tubeless
  • Use the narrowest tires that provide sufficient comfort
    • Much has been said that modern tires can be wide without increasing rolling resistance.
    • This is incorrect, misleading and mis-interpreted: wide tires are not faster.
    • All else equal, a narrower tire run at its recommended pressure has less rolling resistance.
    • All else equal, a wider tire run at its recommended pressure is more comfortable
  • Don’t use tubeless tires.
    • Tubeless is great on MTB, where they enable you to run lower pressures without getting pinch flats. These lower pressures increase traction.
    • On road bikes, tubeless tires are neither faster (rolling resistance) nor lighter than tubed tires
• Brakes: hydraulic disc
  • Rim brakes are a bit lighter, but less effective and can’t be used with carbon wheels
  • Hydraulic brakes are better than mechanical: lighter touch and self-adjusting

We recently got a Nordic Track 2450 treadmill to help us stay fit through the long, dark, cold, wet Seattle winters. I have been running on the commercial treadmills (Precor 932i) at the gym for the past few years, so that’s my point of comparison.

Good Stuff

We ordered it online because none of the local shops could come close to the price. It has a good warranty, 30 day no hassle return, shipping delivered to the room of our choice (which is important as it weighs over 300 lbs.), shipped promptly and arrived in perfect condition. Unpacking and assembly took nearly 2 hours but was simple.

The Nordic Track feels as solid and smooth as the more expensive Precor, has a more powerful motor, a slightly bigger running deck (60″ x 22″), elevation from -3* to +15*, adjustable deck firmness, and far more features. The iFit capabilities are super-cool and work well, even supporting multiple users under the same account.

It has 3 fans to blow air on you, cooling and reducing the amount of raw sweat dripping off your body onto the machine. The fans work well enough and aren’t too loud. They can be set manually or automatically, where they blow harder when you run faster. I find the auto mode doesn’t blow hard enough – during a tough workout when my heart rate is the in 160-170 range, I need those fans on full bore.

It includes a wireless heart rate chest strap that works well. The system is polar compatible. It also has handles you can grab that read your heart rate. When first grabbing the handles, I get crazy readings, often half or twice my actual heart rate, for the first minute or so, before it stabilizes on the correct reading. The chest strap doesn’t do this – it reads accurately from the start.

If none of the 40 built-in workouts float your boat, you can create your own – any number of your own – customizing elevation, speed, etc. You can also schedule them, set goals and track progress toward goals, if you want. However, all this requires iFit.

iFit adds a lot of capability and fun to this treadmill. You can download any number of workouts of all types and difficulty levels, many with Google street view maps across the world, including some exotic locations, and you can design your own too. When you run these, you see the actual street view and the elevation changes to match the terrain. It moves along slowly, more like a slide show than a video, but it’s still neat. I was a bit concerned about iFit since my research showed it had a rocky launch with lots of bugs a couple of years ago. They’ve fixed most of that, it works pretty well but still has the occasional crash – more on that below.

The control console response is not instantaneous, but reasonably quick, the touch screen responds to light touch and doesn’t miss gestures like swipes. The screens are well organized intuitively, easy to navigate.

Bad Stuff

iFit is marked as optional, yet it’s required to get the most of this machine. And it costs $100 / year. Without iFit, you can run the machine manually and it has 40 different built-in workouts. But I couldn’t find the simple workout I wanted: intervals with 2 minutes slow and 1 minute fast. I call this a simple 2-1 interval. In fact, among all 40 workouts there were no simple intervals at all! Not 1-1, 2-1, 3-1 or anything close to that. So the “40 built-in workouts” is just a marketing ploy – it’s true, but misleading and not useful. As mentioned above, you can build your own workouts, but only with iFit.

The console runs Android and I can tell from the boot screen it’s some ancient 2.X version. It has a built-in browser that is so terrible as to be unusable. On some sites (including, inexplicably, iFit itself), no text appears, making it unusable. Perhaps it’s a character set or font issue? I don’t know, but you might as well disable the browser in the machine settings because it’s totally unusable. Other than this, the console works just fine.

The heart rate monitor bar is effectively unusable. It’s wildly inaccurate (at least for me) and using it can crash the console under certain conditions (see below). If you want heart rate, use the wireless chest strap – it’s more accurate and it doesn’t crash the console.

The most annoying problem with the 2450 is the console occasionally crashes, sometimes while in the middle of a workout. Here are some conditions that trigger this:

• Using the heart rate monitor bar while running a Geo workout in street view. This will usually crash the console, though it doesn’t happen immediately.
  • Workaround: don’t do this. If you want heart rate, use the wireless chest strap – it’s more accurate anyway. Or, if you’re running a Geo workout, switch to map or satellite view before using the heart rate monitor bar.
• If you have an un-named workout in your history, the 2450 console will crash when you touch the yellow “log-history” button.
  • Workaround: use the iFit website to rename or remove the offending workout.

Conclusion

I think the 2450 is a good value. It has some quirks but they have workarounds. I was pleasantly surprised to find it as solid, smooth and quiet as more expensive commercial treadmills, and total cost shipped to my door was about $2,100. The iFit subscription is required for all practical purposes, though at $100 / year, supporting up to 4 individuals, each with their own history, workouts, etc. the cost of an iFit subscription is small in comparison.