Ceyda

If you do end up cutting your own lock, the thing that follows is that your bike is now unsecured in a place where somebody has taken an interest in it.

So have the replacement ready before you cut. Either bring a second lock with you, or arrange to move the bike straight into somewhere secure. Cutting free and then riding home is fine; cutting free and re-locking it in the same spot with nothing but a cable is how the second version of this story ends.

And if the deliberate reading is right, do not use that spot again for a while.

The difference between your two bikes is probably the lubricant type rather than the bike.

Wet lube is thicker, stays put in rain, and is the right choice for winter and wet climates. It also collects dirt aggressively and turns into grinding paste if you do not wipe it back.

Dry lube goes on carrying a solvent that evaporates, leaving a thin waxy film. Much cleaner on dry roads, needs reapplying more often, and washes off in sustained rain.

For 25 km a day on tarmac in dry conditions, dry lube plus the wipe-off step will transform how your bike looks. If you had wet lube on the old bike and it stayed cleaner, the road surface or the weather did you a favour.

As for frequency: every couple of hundred kilometres in the dry, or after any wet ride, is a more useful trigger than a fixed number of days.

Two lightweight additions that punch above their weight.

A cable through everything, including into the tent. Run the far end of the cable inside and lie on it, or clip it to something inside. Nobody is quietly extracting a bike attached to a sleeping person. This is a genuinely old trick among tourers and it works because the failure mode of theft is that it must be quiet.

A small alarm. There are tiny motion alarms meant for luggage that weigh almost nothing and are painfully loud. In a campground full of people, noise is the thing an opportunist most wants to avoid, and it also wakes you.

Between the two, you have made the bike loud to move and impossible to move silently, at a cost of a couple of hundred grams.

Checked the pressure — both tyres were soft enough that I could squeeze them flat between finger and thumb. Feeling slightly foolish and also quite hopeful.

As someone who did exactly this: the fitness component is real, and it arrives faster than you expect if the bike is not fighting you.

The order I would work through:

1. Tyre pressure. Today, free.
2. Saddle height. Too low is extremely common on second-hand bikes and it wastes most of your leg. With the heel on the pedal at the bottom, the leg should be almost straight.
3. Chain lubricated, brakes not rubbing. Spin each wheel and watch whether it slows quickly.
4. Then, if the hills are still forcing you to walk, change the rear sprocket for a bigger one. On a single-speed this is a cheap part and a ten minute job, and it transforms a bike that is geared wrong.

If all of that is done and it is still hard, then it is fitness, and three weeks of riding four days a week will change it noticeably.

One practical suggestion: find a shop that builds wheels in-house and talk to the person who builds them rather than to a salesperson.

This is a build, not a purchase off a rack, and the difference between a shop that engages with that and one that sells you the biggest frame they stock is enormous. The right shop will happily discuss spoke count and tension; the wrong one will tell you the weight limit is fine and hope.

In the moment, the entire priority is getting out of the situation safely, and everything else is a distraction from that.

Concretely:

• Keep moving. Stopping in a live lane to have an argument puts you stationary in traffic, which is more dangerous than what just happened.
• Look around, not at the driver. The vehicle that cut you off is now a known quantity. The one you have not seen is the risk.
• Brake and steer before anything else. Shouting takes breath and attention you may need.
• Do not chase. Nothing good has ever come from catching up to a car to explain something.

The hard part is that adrenaline arrives after the danger has passed, so the urge to react peaks at exactly the moment reacting is least useful. Knowing that in advance genuinely helps.

The answer is that road riding cares about the size of the steps between gears, and mountain biking largely does not.

On the road you are usually trying to hold a steady cadence at a steady effort for a long time, often in a group where the pace is set by somebody else. If the next gear is a 15% jump, you are either spinning too fast or grinding — there is no correct option, and you feel it for the next hour.

On a mountain bike the terrain changes constantly, the effort is intermittent, and you are choosing between roughly-right gears while picking a line. A big jump between ratios costs you very little.

So a single ring with twelve sprockets, which gives a wide range with large gaps, is a good trade off-road and a poor one on the road. Two chainrings let you keep small gaps and a wide range, because you get two overlapping sets of ratios rather than one sparse set.

The practical reason a dedicated adult product does not sell is that you can convert any bike into one in about five minutes.

Drop the saddle until the rider can sit and put both feet flat on the ground, and take the pedals off with a spanner. That is an adult balance bike, and it is precisely the method used by the adult learn-to-ride programmes that exist in a lot of cities.

The learner scoots, gets the feel of balance and steering, and then the pedals go back on and the saddle comes up. The whole progression happens on the bike they will actually ride, which is better than transferring from a separate machine.

Given that, a manufacturer would be selling a product that competes with a spanner.