Tough Rides Need Great Bike Parts
Tough rides need great bike parts. After all, your bicycle can be seen as a collection of bike parts working together to give you a fantastic riding experience. Some of that riding will be challenging and full-on, testing you to extremes, and giving your bike a maximum workout as well. The Tour de France gives us an example of how hard it is for riders and their bikes - the parts that make up those machines have to be able to handle some incredible pressures.
The 2020 edition of Le Tour saw the riders tackle 58,831 metres of vertical ascent during the race. To put that into perspective, that is the equivalent of 6.64 ascents of Mt Everest! Riders during the Tour sweat out 1.5 litres an hour at peak effort during the French summer, with about 37,000 water bottles consumed by the 176 riders during the 21 stages of the Tour. And then there’s the food, with all that effort seeing cyclists expend between 17,000 to 29,000 KiloJoules(KJ) per stage of the race. Compare this to the average recommended male adult intake of 8700 KJ. That means elite cyclists take in up to 3.5 times the average on the hardest days of racing. Little wonder you see riders constantly snacking on energy-rich food and specially made carbohydrate-packed gels to keep their glycogen levels up.
It’s mind-boggling stuff as riders sweat it out during the world’s toughest sporting event. And through it all, their bikes have to keep doing the business too. In the incredibly difficult climbs and full-on sprints that are at the climax of every stage, riders depend on their bikes to keep performing. A cycling tour can be won or lost through mechanical failure and that is why tough rides need great bike parts.
We’re not saying that your next ride will be a climb up one of France’s highest mountains, or that you’ll expend 20,000 KJ. But in its own way, your ride is just as important. Whether you’re competing or just staying fit with a group of friends on a long-distance ride, you depend on your bike parts to get a winning result or just maximum enjoyment. Cheap parts are available on the market and while you might be tempted to save a few dollars on them, they’re not manufactured with reliability in mind. This is particularly true of the components that make up the drivetrain of the bike - the cheaper they are, the more likely they are to fail.
As we’ve said, a bike is a collection of parts working together - and they’re only as strong as the weakest link. A cheap replacement amongst a set of superior parts is not a good fit and that is why we recommend you buy parts of a similar quality to the others you have on your bike. To ensure you buy the right ones, contact us and we’ll help you out.
