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I am a funny guy when it comes to finding motivation. Some guys can get up in the morning and ride all day like crazy because that's what they're wired to do. I'm sorta wired like that, but I also need to have a tangible reason to punish my body day after day. Sure, health and fitness are the number one reasons and the most important ones. But I needed a stick as well as a carrot. So I began upgrading my bike components, partly as a reward to myself for keeping up routine for the past two months, but also because I knew I would feel guilty as hell if I sunk good money into my gear and then never used it. Luckily for me, Shimano introduced its new line of 10-speed components, which meant they dropped the prices of their 9-speed components.
Trouble is, you can't just buy a new front derailleur or just a new set of brake calipers. Everything is made to work together as a group, this the brand name "Shimano Total Integration" or "STI". Actually, I think STI stands for "Spend That Income". Which is what I ended up doing. Everything was on sale, mind you, but it was still expensive. When I got done, I had upgraded everything from Ultegra to DuraAce. And boy, did that make a huge difference, especially the crankset. My bike felt a lot lighter and quicker with the new crankset; I thought that hollow-body stuff was just a bunch of marketing, but it turned out to be true. A lighter crankset means less cranking resistance. A couple months later I traded my triple crankset in for a double crankset and that made an even bigger difference.
I had also started working on my bike, rather than bring it into to shop for repairs. I bought a bike stand and a bunch of tools and cracked open a book on bicycle repair that Todd had given me for my birthday a few years back. I ended up overhauling my bike a couple of times and doing all my upgrades myself. Since then I won't trust my bike to anyone, except the folks at Chain Reaction in Cupertino where I purchased my bike. It felt good to fix something, ride and know that the fix worked. Over the next few months my tool collection grew as well and I could fix just about anything except wheels.
More than anything, I started taking pride in my machine and in keeping it in good shape. So I guess you could say that I paid well for my motivation, but the payoff was more in the huge increase in enjoyment that I got from cycling, even out of the saddle. And the more I enjoyed cycling, the more I wanted to cycle.
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Author's Note: I wrote this article in the Fall of 2004 and since then I have received great feedback and a request to make it more available. Since then, I've lapsed into some old (bad) habits but I'm on my way back. A new "Re-Reinventing the Cyclist" is in the works. For now, I hope you can find some nugget of usefulness from this archive. - Carlo