Your Bike Is Enough Bike: There are lots of fancy bikes featured on YouTube channels and review sites. But you already have a bike and it’s probably perfectly fine. Really, it’s not the bike which is holding you back.
This is not an article trying to argue that you shouldn’t buy a new bike. I like New Bike Day just as much as the next bike nerd. Last year (2025) I had New Bike Day twice in a couple of months, after no new bike day for more than 10 years.
No, the premise of this piece is that all your bike wants is for you to ride it. Your bike — whatever type of bike it is — probably isn’t perfect. That’s fine, you’re not perfect either.
Your bike probably has some quirks. There’s a ding in the top tube, there’s quite a lot of accumulated dirt behind the fork crown, and sometimes it doesn’t shift exactly perfectly. The rear tyre profile is squaring off cos that tyre is pretty ancient and you should have replaced it a couple of years ago.
But that’s part of its charm. You have quirks too. You do and you know it.
But you know what? Any fancy new bike you buy just ends up being that old bike that sometimes you love and sometimes you hate. Regardless of whether it’s a new bike or your old faithful, you never can get away from the fact that to make your bike go somewhere, you have to pedal it. To go up a hill you gotta dig in and suffer, doesn’t matter if your bike is made entirely of carbon and you are made entirely of balsa wood. As Greg Lemond is supposed to have said: “Bike riding never gets any easier, you just go faster.” (Until you don’t go faster, you go slower).
Never let the siren call of New Bike Day deter you from getting outside and on the road, trail or path with the bikes you have now. Because each day that you spend going on a bike ride right now is exactly one million percent better than each day you spend planning your budget for how much you think you can get away with spending on your next bike.