The wife's bike

So any healthy relationship has to have balance. The past few years my wife has been in the enviable position of getting to ride a different demo bike every year, and sometimes having a choice of multiple bikes.

The downside is that in this situation, you don't get a perfectly fit bike most of the time (unless you're lucky, like me, and most size 54/55s are usually pretty darn close. She does have some shoulder problems, however, and that usually causes her to sacrifice her low back in order to maintain a comfortable reach to the bars. Suffice it to say that she tends to leverage a bit more through one side of her lumbar spine, especially when she climbs.

So, finally this year, I decided to surprise her for her birthday with designs for a custom bike "all for her." I decided on Seven's Axiom SL (double butted titanium), which is their workhorse model, a SRAM Force group, FSA K-Wing carbon compact bars, Selle Italia Lady Gel Flow saddle, and I had a pair of Zipp 404 rims lying around that I had Mike at Bigwheels (www.lacemine29.com) lace to some DT Swiss 240s hubs.

I don't have a great creative streak in me so I gave the Seven designers some themes to work with: Ethiopia (our kids are adopted from there), gourmet cooking (my wife, who is a Nurse Practitioner, loves to cook enormous meals on the weekends to the delight of our friends. The painters at Seven cam up with the scheme you see below:

there is an outline of the country of Ethiopia on the top tube, and there are two "Electric Blueberry" panels on the seat and down tubes that have a fleur de lis pattern on them. the fleur de lis has many meanings and references, but it is also the cover for Julia Childs' Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

I think they did well: