Tomas

Worth adding a preventative that costs nothing: lock through the frame and the rail in a way that leaves no room for a second lock to pass through your frame.

A tight lock with little slack, positioned high on the frame triangle, is awkward for anyone to accidentally include. Most of the innocent cases happen because there was an obvious gap that looked like part of their own bike.

Worth mentioning the option that removes the routine almost entirely, since you are riding daily: waxing.

A chain stripped of factory grease and immersed in hot wax comes out dry to the touch and stays that way. Grit does not stick because there is nothing sticky on the outside. Drivetrains stay visibly clean for thousands of kilometres and wear rates are excellent.

The cost is real: a proper degrease of the new chain, a slow cooker, and re-waxing every few hundred kilometres, which means a chain off the bike each time. Most people run two or three chains and rotate them.

It is a lot of faff for a casual rider and genuinely worth it for a daily one. Worth knowing it exists before you commit to a lifetime of wiping.

One preventative that costs nothing: fit mudguards if your bike will take them.

Most of what ends up on a brake track is road spray thrown up by your own front wheel. A front mudguard with a decent flap cuts that dramatically, and the difference in how often you need to do any of the above is large enough to notice within a fortnight of wet riding.

The category to search for is touring or expedition bikes, and the reason is directly relevant: they are engineered for a rider plus a substantial load of luggage.

A touring bike rated for a total system weight of 150 kg or more is designed around exactly the loads you represent — it is just that the designers assumed 90 kg of rider and 50 kg of panniers rather than all of it being you. Strong wheels, wide tyres, low gearing, robust everything, all standard rather than special order.

Tandems are the other place to look. Tandem components are built for two riders on one frame, so tandem-rated wheels and drivetrains carry loads nothing else in the catalogue does.

It is worth saying that this is changing at the edges, and where it is changing tells you the trade clearly.

Single-ring setups are common on gravel bikes, where the terrain is rougher, chain retention matters again and riders accept bigger gaps. They appear on time trial bikes, where the range needed is narrow so a single ring can cover it with small steps. And they show up on commuter and utility bikes, where simplicity and low maintenance beat perfect cadence.

What has kept them off performance road bikes is that cassettes with twelve or thirteen sprockets still cannot deliver both the range and the spacing that two rings give. As sprocket counts keep rising that gap narrows, and the transition may well happen eventually — for the same reason it happened off-road, once the compromise stopped costing anything.

There was one, it was the first bicycle, and it lost.

The running machine of the early nineteenth century — the draisine — was exactly an adult balance bike: two wheels, a frame, a seat, no pedals, propelled by pushing off the ground. It was a genuine fashion for a few years and then vanished essentially the moment pedals were invented, because pedals are enormously better at the only thing it was for.

So the category existed, and the reason it does not now is that it was superseded rather than never tried. Which is a useful hint about why it has not come back as a teaching tool: the object is not the missing piece.