Disregarding my Schwinn Typhoon, I started keeping score with my 1976 Peugeot PX 10 LE. It came with a Stronglight 52 x 45 and a 14 x 21 five speed freewheel. I always thought this Peugeot was set up for the pavé of northern France with those gears and wire-wrapped and soldered 3x tubular wheels. Yet according to Peugeot’s advertising, this is what the boys rode in the Tour de France. Chapeau! Since this was my first real bike, the coolness of this Rule #5 rig was lost on me. The uncoolness of Mafac brakes and Simplex derailleurs was not lost on me and over time I swapped out many of the French components for Campagnolo ones but the Stronglight crankset was worthy and it stayed the longest. I found a drilled-out 42 inner ring. Surely Bernard Thévenet would approve of that. It was not such a taskmaster as the 45 and scored very high on the cool scale.
Eventually the 52s went to 53s and the 42s to 39s and there they stayed.
Post-Peugeot I lived on the sandy moraine called Cape Cod. It is rolling, easy-to-ride country; there were no steep, long climbs and the default 39 inner ring was too small for the Cape. Some switched back to 42s but our LBS had a handful of Campagnolo 44 tooth inner rings and a few of us installed them. It didn’t occur to me at the time but I was reverting to a more modern version of my original Peugeot gears. This was not a chainring for the early season but once summer arrived, it made perfect sense. The shifts between the front two chainrings were subtle and smooth. It was all good until we ventured over to a proper climb on the nearby island of Martha’s Vineyard. That climb, known to us as the hill-o-death, started off steep and never eased (this was pre-Garmin world, an estimated 15% grade). It actually was the kind of climb where if you were going to have a heart attack, it would be here. The 44 worked, it just meant most of it was done out of the saddle and the pain cave entrance was lower down. But, it may have been a faster way to get the job done. There was no in-the-saddle spinning going on; it was just more heaving of bike and body trying to turn over the shortest gear the 44 would give up.
I came to Maui armed with the 53 x 39. Earlier on Kauai, I once felt shame and horror as an older dude with stick legs passed me on the Waimea Canyon climb. Those sorry sticks were whizzing over a vile compact crankset. It gave me pause. But on Maui the 53 x 39 got the job done, until I did Maui’s version of the hill-o-death, The Wall. I got up it, but it wasn’t pretty or easy. Something was going to break doing that: knees, heart, chain, pedal, more likely part of me, rather than the bike. I was on Maui for the long haul and the Wall was not going anywhere so I opted for a compact crank.
My above prologue leads me to this, my theory of relativity. The terrain dictates the chainrings. You want a 52 x45 on your bike, stay away from the Pyrenees. If you have a compact crankset on there, there had better be some big ass climbs out your front door. But here at Velominati we like to quantify our suffering. My math is as weak as my VAM but I’m working on a calculation with correction factors which would determine what kind of crank one should have on their bike.
((GL2 x %Gr) 1/age) Bf x BPf x Df
Where:
GL = length of toughest grade encountered on Sunday ride.
Gr = Steepest sustained section of GL.
Bf = Belgian Factor, also known as Museeuw. The need to always ride in the large ring, always.
BPf = Big Pussy Factor, inverse of Bf. The inclination when a climb begins to sit when one might stand, to shift down rather than up.
Df = The Dutch factor, this is a terrain correction for sea level riding, as the Dutch do along the North Sea.
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@ErikdR
nah it would probably take less than 5 minutes to ride around the whole island...but if you want to try that climb I'm pretty sure our fishy friend has that lined up to start the Cogal in February (should give you enough time to organise flights to escape the Danish winter).
@Chris Ha ha! Nice one. Good point re the budget - I've had mine for longer than I have been back into cycling (which is actually quite a long time). So that is my only excuse for not better investing the money.
I agree with the 10 mins though - tends to be my maximum mental endurance too. Though on the bike I use a turbo rather than rollers. The thought of getting it wrong on rollers and suddenly going from zero to infinity and beyond in the conservatory didn't seem a good idea when I bought mine. So I don't have the form to concentrate on.
Of course the other thing rowers might say is that they always like to arrive in the future with a surprise (not that I'm a rower).
@Mikael Liddy
I had a quick look at 'Google Maps' to check the place out - it did, indeed, look somewhat under-whelming. I'm puzzled, though: if the island is that small (and there's not all that much going on, from the looks of it - apart from that Café and gift shop on the East tip), why have they built that whopper of a causeway? is it a huge tourist attraction of sorts, by any chance?
@Chris
Well, 'tis. But you know a sport's retrograde when cyclists write it off as old fashioned. And slow, boring, for exceptionally tall freaks, slow, and boring. Cycling's way better.
BTW, the glutes/quads thing can be positional more than training - the further back your saddle is, the more active the posterior chain, the further forward your saddle is, the more our quads are activated. The sweet spot is in there somewhere.
@Mikael Liddy
Yep - East coast of Jutland, that's the home turf, at the moment. (I live about 90 km south of Aarhus - i.e. a bit closer to the German border - in a town called 'Kolding'.
As you probably know, the West coast of Jutland is pretty flat and marshy - and gorgeous, in its own way - but the East coast has some nice rollers (carved into the landscape during the Ice Age, if I'm not mistaken). Worth a visit - Some nice rides to be found here.
@norm Nice Elastica quote slipped in there!
@wiscot
Sleeper?
You're a big man
But you're out of shape
I could help you
Get it back again
We should both go to bed
Till we make each other sore
We should both stay in bed
Till we make each other roar
You're delicious aha
You're delicious aha
You're delicious aha haa
@minion Posterior chain? I'll have to look into that. Will a google search on that turn up NSFW results?
@wiscot
@Chris
I was actually referring to the get carter carpark for @Teocalli's great carpark climbs of the world.
Will I be immediately excommunicated by the keepers for suggesting a single ring (so lighter with no front mech)? eg 46 up front and 11 / 28 out back? Essentially the same range as my old school 53 /42 with 13 / 28 that took me over European ranges with camping stuff.
I look forward to my flogging.