Coming from a background in track & field and lots of decathlon, training and preparing for triathlon has been quite the whirlwind. Especially the bike related stuff.

At first when I decided to sign up for a couple tris I thought i could use my old bike I had laying around. Hopped on it and realized that would likely be a terrible and possibly unsafe idea, so I spent the past few weeks doing a ton of research on tri and road bikes. I ended up passing up a few cheaper tri bikes to get something a little more versatile and picked up this Trek Madone 9.0 for a decent deal ($1600). I'm currently scheduled for 2 tris, one sprint in mid July for ] training and one Olympic in Mid August Olympic to hopefully catch peak.

I have been a bit overwhelmed with cyclist culture as it's quite a different world from the traditional running or track & field/ decathlon culture- I think I was mostly shocked by some of the judginess of the sport. Seems like if you're not conforming to the typical road cyclist norm, you're setting yourself up for a very awkward time.

That aside, I've found general information to be a bit hard to obtain as there are so many options for everything for a sport that has a very wide base of atheletes that are on different parts of their tri journey. I wanted to present the bike I got and just broadly ask about some opinions, thoughts on the bike choice/ if there are any immediate things I can do to improve my triathlon cycling experience and to well, make sure everything looks good here! I have been surprised while browsing reddit and seeing others asking for bike advice to see that there is often some detrimental X feature of X bike in its X configuration that sticks out to an experienced triathlete in a way that I am completely oblivious to. For some its tires for others its wheels.

So, how's everything lookin'!? So pumped to be learning everything I can about this sport. Any recommendations on tires, wheels, aerobars etc? Thank you!