Wheel Envy

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while, and now I’m finally getting around to it.

All last year during the triathlons I competed in, I had major “bike envy”.  I’d show up and rack my off-brand road bike next to all of these beautiful and rather expensive road and triathlon bikes.  I’d admire all of these bikes while getting set up for the triathlons.  Then all of these bikes that I had admired would typically blow right past me during the bike portion of the race (because I’m such an awesome swimmer…ha!).  I think Eric got sick of me complaining about how I wanted a better bike!

Anyways, fast forward to now…..I have a beautiful and awesome bike coming my way (hopefully – I am still waiting on it, and I really need to call the shop here in a couple days to see what the status is on that beautiful and awesome bike).  My “bike envy” has been squelched for now. 

Never one to be satisfied with what I have, my “bike envy” has transferred itself into “wheel envy”.  My wheels are decent -

Fulcrum Racing 7’s.  I got these last summer when I was having all my broken spoke issues with my Bontrager wheels that came with my road bike.  The bike shop happened to have these wheels because someone did not want them for their tri bike, so they sold them to me at a discounted price. 

When ordering my new bike, I just went with the cheapest wheels possible since I already had the Fulcrums.  I figured I’d train with the wheels the bike came with and then race with these. 

But then I started reading forums about Ironman Louisville, and people were talking about the wheels they were using for the race…and that’s when I started to get wheel envy.

People were talking about Zipps and HEDs….

…and all sorts of different styles of these. 

Too bad these wheels are insanely expensive! 

I know I can’t afford brand new wheels…so I’m keeping my eye on ebay (but even those wheels get up to really high prices) and craigslist to see if I can get lucky.  Eric doesn’t think I should buy off of either of these sites since I don’t know how the wheel has been treated, but other people have recommended using these resources. 

I probably won’t end up buying new wheels this year.  If I make it through the Ironman and decide that this is something I want to continue doing in the future, then maybe I will invest in new wheels.  For now, I will just suffer through my “wheel envy”!