u/markvauxhall

My wife is looking to get back in to cycling after many, many years of absence. Her experience primarily with hybrid-style bikes.

She's looking to use it for two use cases:

• Personal fitness - e.g. laps of Richmond Park in London (100% asphalt)

• Riding with our kids (6 and 3), including on occasional gravel / woodland trails

For context on the latter - our 6yo currently does up to 10km rides with me on a mixture of road and trails. I do this with my endurance road bike on 32mm GP5000s (which is just about OK ish - but I'm quite cautious)

Budget is about £1000-2000. We want an aluminium frame vs cheap carbon (it will be stored in the garden shed, too much risk of it getting knocked). Ideally want total weight of less than 10KG as we'll have to manouver it through the house to get it out.

We're weighing up gravel bikes (e.g. Trek Checkpoint, Liv Devote) vs getting a more traditional endurance bike (e.g. Trek Domane) and potentially fitting chunkier light gravel tyres to it.

Any thoughts on balance between Endurance vs Gravel? Any other bikes we should be considering?

My local gym is in a classic "out of town" retail park.

Nearest dockless bike parking is a 7 minute walk away.

There's suitable space for a dockless bike parking bay right by the gym entrance. I'd love to talk to the site manager about getting one installed. Does anyone have any experience / pointers on how to get a dockless bay installed on private land?

Looking on the rental companies' websites there's no clear guidance.

So there's a whole bunch of closed road cycling races around the City of London in two weeks' time; this includes professional crit racing, as well as amateur events including Brompton racing and penny farthing racing.

What made me laugh is this year there's a dockless bike race, the rules of which include:

> Voi bikes will be positioned in a parking area past the finish line on Queen Victoria Street.

> Participants will be assembled on the start line and will run to the bikes and use the Voi app to unlock a bike and start riding.

> Participants will race across 5 laps of the Nocturne circuit (approx 15-20 minutes).

> Riders must obey the rules of the road and stop at red lights at designated junctions on the circuit - failure to stop will result in disqualification.

> At the end of the 5 laps riders must park their bike properly back in the designated parking area to complete the challenge and take a photo using the app. A parking official will be on hand to approve the parking.

> The first rider to complete the challenge and correctly part their Voi bike will be declared the winner.

> Failure to follow the rules and ride responsibly will result in penalties by the race officials.

Love it.

Details at: https://www.racenocturne.com/the-races