For most of us, well-intentioned but casual bike riders who secretly believe we might be Lance Armstrong’s heir if we only had a few more hours a day to spend on our bicycles, buying a new road bike is tantamount to buying a road bike frame. The frame is what we’re thinking of, something new and shiny and colorful, something we suspect even car drivers envy when they see us flash through the snarl of traffic. Truly, a road bike frame is a beautiful thing and part of the reason we love bicycling.

When you have the good fortune to be looking at new bicycles, though, you definitely want to look at a few elements besides the color of a road bike frame. Face it. When you’re on your way back home from a long Sunday ride and you’re riding your thirty-fifth mile smack into a stiff headwind, the fact that your frame is cobalt blue or even Bianchi green is not going to help you. The length of your seat tube is going to help you and the length of your top tube and even the angle of the three main tubes all put together is going to help (or hinder) you, but color is not.

If you shop at a discount store or even a general purpose sports store, if you get any help at all in choosing a bike that fits you, it will probably consist of a clerk instructing you to stand over the top bar of the frame and see if you can comfortably straddle it with your feet on the floor. This is not really particularly helpful, especially if you happen to have anything unique about your physique, like long legs combined with a short torso. If you have long legs, you can straddle almost any bike, but will your body be able to relax comfortable in the stretch between your saddle and the handlebars? The whole geometry of the road bike frame matters a lot to fit. And fit matters excessively to comfort.
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Barring a serious crash or the most frequent bike accident of all—entering the garage with a bicycle on your car roof rack—your bicycle rims will probably last as long as you can stand riding the same old bike. Usually made of aluminum, rims are lightweight and strong and are hardly ever the source of trouble on a bicycle, even in the most arduous riding conditions.

In fact, most bicycle riders probably never give a single thought to their bicycle rims. The circular band of metal that holds in the bike tire and connects it to the wheel hub via spokes is easily overlooked. Unlike spokes, a bicycle rim hardly ever breaks. Unlike the hub, it hardly ever causes problems. Unlike tires, it never goes flat or explodes. Serious bicycle racers have some pretty fancy rims, full of the same outrageously colorful advertising that covers their clothing usually, but most riders really don’t need these. Even the fanciest rims, the flattened out, wide, presumably aerodynamic rims you’ll see on the wheels of the pros, are not certainly all that much better. They are, however, flashier, and in the world of bicycling, this apparently does count for something, maybe for intimidation.

Do you need to know anything special about your bicycle rims? Not really. Most bicycles come with rims appropriate to their overall quality. You can spend as much money as you want on a rim—like everything else associated with the sport of bicycling—but what comes standard on a bike is probably sufficient. Customizing your rims will bring you fancier rims, maybe lighter rims, probably stronger rims, but the research on what constitutes the best rim weight, strength and shape is still largely inconclusive, and since this feature causes so few problems to the recreational rider, you can leave this issue to the professional mechanic who services the bicycles of world class racers. When they’ve resolved the issue, you will know about it!
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