Tri bike or Road bike? How to choose
buy, a tri bike or a road bike?” This question overwhelms so many people new to triathlon, and rightly so. Living in northern New England makes this decision even tougher. Let’s start with the basics. At the heart of this issue, almost always is finance. Most people start triathlon, not knowing how involved they’re going to get. A somewhat typical sentiment is: “Well if I start doing a lot of races, I will spend more money, but I’m not sure how much I’m going to like this, so I don’t want so spend a lot.” While it is true that you can get an adequate road bike for less than you can get a tri bike, the gap is getting smaller. Unless a tri bike is out of your price range, this should not be the biggest concern.
The first question that should be answered is how you plan on using the bike. If you know that you are going to use the bike for triathlon exclusively, then you should strongly consider a tri bike. If however, you think you might enjoy doing some riding that doesn’t qualify as triathlon racing or training, then you should be looking at a road bike. While you can compete in triathlon with a road bike, the same cannot be said for competing in road races with a tri bike.
The second thing to determine is the rider’s experience level. Tri bikes are designed for speed in a flat, straight line. Road bikes are designed to be able to go fast in many directions, up, down, around corners, and to handle those maneuvers with precision. If you are new to cycling, I will almost always reccomend starting with a road bike regardless of any other factors. Tri bikes purposefully put the rider in an unbalanced position, which makes the bike feel “twitchy” to most inexperienced riders. Also, the aero position is not condusive to climbing hills. I find that most new riders are better off starting out on a road bike, that is going to handle better, be more comfortable and be easier to ride to start off. This will provide more enjoyable training, and thus make the person want to ride the bike more, which ultimately results in a faster bike split. It also will make the rider more confident riding the bike, which will also make a faster bike split.
Lastly, the person should consider the geographic area that they live in. As already discussed, tri bikes are meant to go fast in a flat, straight line, if you live and compete in a hilly area with a lot of twisty roads, a road bike may actually be faster. At the very least, you will not loose significant time. Consider that the aerodynamics of the bike don’t have a significant impact on speed until you are traveling over about 13mph. When you couple that with an inefficient climbing position, you may loose more time on the hills than you would gain on the flats. As another note, if you were to simply add a set of clip on aero bars to a road bike, you will gain about 80% or the aerodynamic benefit that you would gain from being on a tri bike.
As you can see, for most new cyclists, especially living in northern New England, a road bike makes more sense than a tri bike. As you get more experienced, that may change, or it may not. After all, Bradley Wiggins won a pro level TT event last year riding a Felt AR (aero road) bike. At that point, it may make sense to have 2 bikes anyway.
