Wanna ride a $10,000 mountain-bike?

It's my doctor who started me thinking during my last physical. He said that each pound can make a significant difference in the way I feel when I'm climbing on my mountain-bike. I didn't think too much about it since, until recently when I began shopping for a new bike.

Depending on the available frame and components technology, a full-suspension mountain bike will range between 26 and 32 pound, which span over a whole 6 pound! The cost of taking down the overall weight of such a machine can be quite costly

and range from $2,000 all the way to $8,000 and even more, which means that – on average – each pound gained will set you back some $1000 on average. Reality is quite different, as past a certain threshold, each ounce gained can literally cost its weight in gold.

Now, you contrast this with shedding weight. If you're an average male rider weighing say, 170 lbs, how hard is it to shed 6 pound or less than 4% of your total body mass? Not that big a deal, and yet it could be worth that $6,000 difference.

The morale of today's story: Buy yourself a cheap, 32 pound mountain bike and make a conscious effort to use it twice as much as you had originally planned. Very soon, it will feel to you like a $10,000, 25-pounder!