Shifting gears, or not

Finally, I'm posting not about my old found love of new found low end bikes, instead shifting to discussing the LACK of shifting riding a single speed. 

In 2006, my last year of racing on a regular basis, Coyote Hill Camp, one of my supporters and one, two, or three times employer, turned their race into a two day event, adding short, grass track competitions on Saturday. A whole additional day for a short event made for a lot of time to hang out and chat with the other biker types, and while talking with Jill Logan, the New England series promoter, and one of the names I successfully, finally remembered on my ride to Keene a few weeks back(!), I mentioned that I'd finally put together a singlespeed, the recent hot new trend for the last couple years and even an official series championship category.

Jill, as was the case for anything singlespeed related those days, excitedly asked what I thought of it. My simple answer, "It may be one of the stupidest things I've done!" One of the gents in the group, whom I hadn't yet met, broke into a big grin and a hearty laugh, which latter made sense when I later learned: 1) He was one of the top singlespeed racers, and 2) The singlespeed group in general had the admirable outlook of not merely not taking offense, but actually finding a comment like that really funny. 

Yup, we became pretty good friends, and after the end of the season, I was invited to join a band of singlespeed riders for what I consider one of the best all-day rides I've ever done, connecting large swaths of Arcadia in Rhode Island and Connecticut's Patchaug State Forest. And yes, I joined that convention on the singlespeed of my own.

That bike, years later I realized it was the bike I'd owned longer than any other, although that can't be credited entirely to my love of it. When a bike has zero market value, it makes neither sense nor cents to pass it along to a new owner. Plus, yeah, I did rather like it.

With the singlespeed trend garnering enough enthusiasm to earn the title "craze", everyone, their brother, and their half sister-in-law was converting one of their old bikes to singlespeed with one of the myriad of chain tensioners on the market, but I'd steadfastly refused to do that. In addition to disliking adding the minor complexity of a tensioner to what should be the simplicity of a bike with one gear, I'm heroically (and heroes have a history of stupidity) too cheap to buy a tensioner.

Of course, a singlespeed specific frame with horizontal rear dropouts lets one slide the wheel forward or back for tension. Of course, I did mention I'm cheap, so if I wasn't going to buy a little tensioner, I definitely wasn't going to by a whole frame, and to their credit, my then bike sponsor never jumped on the raucous band wagon to produce a singlespeed frame they could give me. Of course, old, old bikes, from the early days of mountain biking, also often had horizontal dropouts!

I like to wander on foot, and one of those walks had me wandering around Middletown, CT, south of the center, over a bridge that I'd never even noticed as a span when zipping through at bike riding speeds. That's one thing I like about walking: noticing. And hey, look! Looking over the edge of the bridge, I saw someone had performed the proverbial Huffy-Toss! But no, wait, look again, closer. That isn't a Huffy!

I backtracked, climbed over the guardrail, and clambered the thirty feet down to stream, and the bike partially submerged in it, a Schwinn Mirada! Yes, it does share a brand name with my latest infatuation, but this was an old Schwinn, a bike shop Schwinn, dare I be haughty, a real Schwinn. It was definitely real heavy, proudly wearing a sticker that proclaimed, "Chromoly Seattube," which of course translates to: mostly cheap hi-tensile steel everywhere else. But in addition to that sticker, it had the horizontal dropouts of my singlespeed dreams, or at least minor nightmares!

I'll take it! I took it home, stripped all the parts, and even treated the rust spots to some black touch-up paint next to the oh-so-suitable poo-brown stock color. I had a singlespeed, in fact, a lot of one. Even with minimal drivetrain parts, and no darn tensioner, at thirty pounds, it was heavier than my 120mm travel full suspension bike, but as the saying says, more to love! A few years later, I even added some mystique by winning the inaugural Eel race in Hartford on "a bike I found under a bridge!" 

But credit where due, the second place finisher Russ (who also became a friend after a random road meeting six months later) had out-handicapped me by racing with front bags filled with what we said was his "civil war cannonball collection". He never did give a more believable answer to explain the severe heft, and despite the delay until our second meeting, we became good friends, with the perk that I have someone else I can visit now in Colorado.

What can I say, I seem to write A LOT when I post about my free Schwinns, and I did eventually brake the rear dropout on the Mirada, and years after that, I finally sent it to the scrap metal pile rather than move it to Massachusetts. Happily, before it broke, I'd already decided that fewer atoms of weight might be a worthwhile investment when fewer gear choices were on offer, so I'd bought a used BUSS, which stood for Butt Ugly Single Speed, with far more svelte Easton Ultralight tubes, and yes, sort of sticking to theme, poo-brown paint, that so bothered the former owner that he'd had it repainted black. Yes, I celebrate every scratch and scuff that exposes the shite below.

Even before getting bumped last year, I'd converted that bike to more road use, with a taller gear, more stretched position, and a bit less tread on the tires. My knees, while shockingly low on complaints, aren't getting any younger, so I figured swapping the narrow gear range of a road bike for just one would be more benign that giving up the wide range in the, well, mountains. Plus, now I get to add damage to my knees by running!

Well, after I and the bike was on were bumped last year, it's this singlespeed that has the most fender coverage of my operational bikes. It's now my rain bike, and yesterday, it rained. And surprisingly, to the same degree I found with a fixed gear, even on a bike that coasts, when I have only one gear, picking that gear perfectly, have a tremendous impact on my joy riding that bike. I've progressively dropped the rear cog gearing from a 16 to a 17 and finally an 18. That's a 12.5% decrease, and I really like it, and not just because I can easily divide 2 by 16 in my head. Sure, I'm little less zippy at times, but it's still plenty quick, works ok with loaded panniers coming home from the market, and at the point where a hill is too steep to pedal, I'm not much slower walking. Now I want to try singlespeed touring!