richtea78 said:
Thanks for all the messages. I plan to do another 2 miles today but will wait for it to be a bit cooler first.
Gaz - I have read through most of your blog now, I am going to email you with some questions once I finished reading it, hope this is ok.
Can anyone direct me to a simple guide about gearing please as the last bike I rode had one front and 5 rear cogs and this one has a lot more. I know I should be able to understand it but I cant get my head around it and it seems that one minute im struggling like mad the next theres no effort at all.
The late great Sheldon Brown's website is a good place to look for any technical info
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/
What do you have now? 2 or 3 front cogs and 7,8 or 9 rear ones?
The front ones, by the way, are 'chainrings', the rear ones are 'sprockets'.
At the back, the larger the sprocket, the lower the gear - you need to select these for going uphill, or into a bad headwind. The changes between them will be relatively small. At the front, the smaller the ring, the lower the gears - there will probably be a bigger jump between these gears.
It depends on how hilly it is where you live, and of course on your fitness, but I tend to use mainly my middle chainring, and just go up and down a few of the sprockets - 3,4 and 5 get used most. I tend to get down to 2 on the middle, and then if I have to, go down to the smaller chainring, and I still have my very very bottom gear (small ring, and biggest sprocket) if I need it, but by which time, I'm probably walking anyway. Other people have different ideal ways of shifting up and down.
Experiment a bit, and practise changing at the right time so that you don't have to resort to grinding hard. It's better to try and keep your legs spinning at the same rate - that's what the gears are for - as you go up a hill for example, and feel it getting harder, you change down a gear, and your legs carry on turning at about the same rate, but the bike goes slower. (and of course, as you speed up, you change up gear, so that the bike goes faster without you having to spin yor legs in a blur).
Something to avoid is to run your chain between the biggest ring and biggest sprocket (high gear at the front and low at the back), or the smallest and smallest (vice versa) - you don't need to, as you'll have these gears elsewhere (probably on the middle ring), and it's bad for the chain as it makes it run across at a sharp angle.