Diet & Fitness 

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Mountain biking vs. road biking

You have a lot of options. The easiest thing to do is to buy new tyres and put them on your current mountain bike wheels. Fat, bumpy, off-road tyres are heavier and have greater rolling resistance than road ones. Since you don't need a raised-tread tyre on pavement as you would for earth and grass, you can switch to slicks (tyres without a raised tread) for riding around town and training on paved roads. Avocet, Specialized, Ritchey and Tioga all make 66.2 centimetre (26 inch) tyres (the size of your mountain-bike wheel) that are intended primarily for road use. You need to be sure that the smaller, narrower models will fit on your current rims.

Another tyre option is a semi-slick tyre. They have a flatter tread pattern in the middle, which cuts down on rolling resistance on hard-packed trails, and knobs at the edges for greater traction while cornering, where a slick tyre would lose adhesion and slide out. Many off-road trails are hard and you don't need grooved treads in these conditions. You really only need the deep tread when you're riding on loose or muddy trails. Ritchey, Continental, Panasonic and Corratec all make tyres of this type.

Switching to semi-slick tyres will make your bike easier to accelerate and able to maintain speed over undulations that would normally slow you down if you used tyres with a large tread.

The next step up would be to get a new set of wheels built so that you could switch back and forth. That way you could ride a lighter pair of slicks on the road during the week and switch to your heavier off-road wheels at the weekend.

Your most expensive option is purchasing a road bike, but this is something you should seriously consider. If you're going to ride on paved roads exclusively until at least April, that's really almost half a year. If you live and work in a city, your off-road riding is probably limited to weekends and vacations, even in the warm months. So if you’re going to put in most of your mileage on the roads, why not have a road bike too?

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