Sold!

Many, many, many years ago, through warmshowers.org, I stayed two nights with a host family in Poughkeepsie as way to explore a segment of the Hudson River Valley. On my up and down out there, since there's no flat riding between central Connecticut and New York, my newish headlight had leapt from its handlebar mount, losing on impact with the ground the just-right-size magnet the manufacturer had used to operate the power switch. A magnetic switch was a neat design for keeping the light sealed without a using fragile rubber grommet, certainly better that the weak mount that had failed to do it's job.

One of my hosts was a tinkerer, so when I shared that disappointing aspect of my first day's trip, he invited me down to the basement to see if we could find a suitable replacement. "Just-right-size" was important, not just to fit the molded plastic bits, but also because too small wouldn't trip the switch, while too big would make it double or triple fire and not function consistently. When we found one that worked more than half the time, after an attempt to weaken a bigger magnet with a resistive welder he was trying to home brew (I wasn't kidding: TINKERER!), he exclaimed, "Sold!" as in good enough, we'll take it.

I rode the single speed bike yesterday with the new 19 tooth cog for longer than a scenic route over the nearby ridge, and SOLD! I never had a sense of it being too, too low a gear, and my body was quite pleased with not having to huff so hard on the uphills. Even more years ago than my Poughkeepsie trip, I'd ridden a number of my last three years worth of races with a single chainring before that was standard ewuipment. Narrow/wide chainrings for keeping the chain and wide ratio rear cogsets didn't yet exist, so I made my own chain retainer with a block of wood and an outer chainring ground toothless, and for gears, sufficed with a 12-34 range. The chain stayed on, and I learned a valuable lesson about not pedaling on downhills.

Overall, not pedaling can be really fast! Wind resistance increases exponentially, so for a bike going twice as fast, there is four times the wind resistance. On the few higher-speed, smooth downhills on few New England mountain bike courses, I'd lose contact with my competition that could pedal their big gear bikes down the hill, but then as soon as the trail would turn upwards again, I'd ride back up to them with ease. This surprised me because I'd been working hard to race them, and having gapped me, it seems they'd push extra to keep that gap, but then I realized, they'd worked A LOT harder pedaling down the hill to move just a little faster, while most of the extra energy was dissipated as heat from the friction of wind resistance. Trust me, it worked. Coasting and resting was really fast!

So, one speed, a little smaller, I'm not finding it annoyingly small, my body is finding it less abusive, and while I have no plan to test myself with a stopwatch, it's conceivable that the smaller gear might be a wee bit faster at the end of the day. Regardless, I'm not buying a bigger one! Sold.

Smaller gearing is also happier

for wandering sections like this,

and wandering SHOULD have sections like this!

But wait, there's more. I failed to mention one other realization when I was replacing my broken chain. I'd said I carry a tool to repair a broken chain, but that was only half true for the singlespeed. Unlike a multigear bike, there is no slack in the chain to allow removing the broken link, so now, along with the tool, that bike's bag also has a spare link of chain. Happily, I didn't figure that out the hard way last summer, walking home from the White Mountains!