Karen writes: Reflections on bike gears

Just been for a bikeride to Clevedon and back.  I was meant to do 75 minutes of strength work on the spin bike, but as it wasn’t pouring with rain, and I still had a bit of daylight, I couldn’t resist a real ride in the open air.   It was very nice, apart from embarrassing myself thoroughly by greeting the only other cyclist I saw with a cheery “good morning”…it was 6pm, I wonder if she noticed?   My 'brain-in-neutral' thinking topic however, was actually about gears this time, mine were making alarming noises when I changed going uphill and at such times you remember you haven't been very good with the maintenance.

My granddad and bike and dog

When I was young…(I wave my walking stick for emphasis here), you had 3, no actually, you had 4 speeds on your bike.   Pedal slow, pedal fast, stand-up pedal, and get off and push.   At some point, some of my more up-to-date contemporaries acquired Raleigh 20’s which were magical things with a couple of gears if I remember rightly.   By the time the 10-speed came along, I had already given up on two wheels, and didn’t get reacquainted with them for a long time, by which time gears, the more the better, had become the norm.

The end result was I never actually got taught how to use gears properly, and as a consequence transferred my self-taught bad habits through a succession of increasingly sophisticated (and underused) bikes over the years.   I only ever brought one bike from a shop, which might have been the ideal chance to learn something, but they didn’t check if I knew how the work something like the gears, and I wasn’t going to ask.  I do remember that I cursed that bike as being a piece of rubbish for over a year until I figured out that if I did a half click with that lever-thingy on the left handlebar it got rid of the awful clattery noises in certain gears.   I also had to go through several bikes to figure out that it wasn’t that I was having an abnormally bad run of luck with faulty bikes whose chains fell off frequently at the bottom of every important hill, it was actually my gear changing technique.

So I have learned (not to be taken as technical advice)  

1)      Your chain and the spiky round bits shouldn’t be so crusted up with grease and road-grime that you cant see what they are made out of.   They also ideally shouldn’t be rusty, have bits of grass stuck in them, droop excessively, make really nasty noises, allow gears to be missed, or be completely devoid of lubricant. 

2)      There is a really cool chain lubricant which promises to ‘self clean’.   I like this, but find it only works if I use it.

3)      Sometimes things like chains, spiky round bits, wires, etc, need replacing, especially if you got a bargain deal buying your bike 2^nd (3^rd, 4^th) hand off someone else.   Find a nice person at the bike shop and make sure they understand you aren’t just interested in high speed (unless you are), but in them checking that nothing important will fall off when you least want it to.  I get a service before important races.

4)      It is a good idea not to click all the way down to the lowest gear on the rear cogs (right handlebar lever) at the bottom of a hill, then suddenly try to click over to the lowest gear on the front chainring (left lever)…your legs end up going round really fast and you slow right down and look like an idiot.

5)      If your chain repeatedly falls off, check out doing things differently, like try being in a different (higher) gear on the rear cog before shifting the chain on the front chainring.   Try moving the lever more slowly, make sure you are actually pedaling at a reasonable speed when you change (not under pressure though), change slightly earlier than you need to on hills, check points at 1) and finally blame the bikeshop.  Sometimes your derailleur (the bit which moves the chain) can be at fault, especially if like me you have fallen off and bent it regularly.

6)      When you put your chain back on, take a moment to turn the pedal a few times to make sure it is going to stay on.   It’s not fun to hop back on the bike, push down hard to take off and find there is no resistance because the chain isn’t on properly.  You guessed it...you fall off.

7)      Bikes are all different.   The more you use your gears, the more you develop an instinctive relationship with them.   Sometimes it can help to have someone follow you and yell at you to “change up” while you are figuring out a new bike, especially those ones (most road bikes) which don't have convenient little indicators telling you what 'number' gear you are in.
8)   Not a good idea to try to change gears while you are pedaling standing up...

9)      Gears are your friends if you learn how to use them, but they can only do so much.  If you are in the lowest gear on the bike and you are part way up a big hill…pedal hard no matter how much it hurts!  You do NOT want to walk (especially in cycle shoes), this is guaranteed to be more painful than any amount of pedaling.

10) Technical people say try to avoid something called crossover, ie, don't be in the highest gear on one cog and the lowest on the other or vise versa to avoid damaging your bike.  Don't know why they built bikes with however many gears they claim to have then say you cant use 2 of them?