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.
I know as well as any of you that I've been checked out lately, kind…
Peter Sagan has undergone quite the transformation over the years; starting as a brash and…
The Women's road race has to be my favorite one-day road race after Paris-Roubaix and…
Holy fuckballs. I've never been this late ever on a VSP. I mean, I've missed…
This week we are currently in is the most boring week of the year. After…
I have memories of my life before Cycling, but as the years wear slowly on…
View Comments
@unversio ...evidence.
@Pedale.Forchetta Now I understand. No cage. Nice.
@Pedale.Forchetta Behind the lens or in front, your photos never disappoint.
My knees are aching just thinking about climbing that on my 53/39 x 12/23. It's pretty flat round my neck of the woods so I'd go 12/21 to get rid of the gaps if there were other any alternatives to the extortionate dura-ace option.
I can swap the spider to a compact on my crankset. My knees are to far gone for big gears in the mountains. (i've dropped about 8kg this year and there's a bit more to come so that might improve things)
Two bikes, one standard, one compact.
Horses for courses.
@Martin
Yes, I don't even have to do the calculation. That is a proper weekly ride.
@Pedale.Forchetta
I would expect nothing less from you! Hold out for as long as possible, it will only slow you down.
I was just traveling to visit my mother. My older steel bike stays at her house but no bidons. So I said, who needs a bottle? I will be like Pedale and ride all week without. And I did and it was great.
Great article....you had me, right up until the introduced the maths!
@Gianni - Beautiful. Funnily enough I was having a similar thought to your opening a few days ago as I was putting together bits for my retro rebuild. The bike still has the original 5Sp 14 x 24. I don't know what the Chainset was when the bike was new as it was only 5 Sp and I upgraded it to 10 Sp in the 70's. However, I was musing that either I was a lot stronger in those days or simply had more V as I don't remember failing to get up climbs and as my two patches in those days were Somerset and South Wales they were not devoid of hills.
So it was about as I got to the bottom of the posts above that I suddenly thought - Cripes I hope there was an age factor in the equation - Fortunately there is, so I'll use that to make it an age thing and not that I had more V back then.
When I get the bike back on the road I have a vision of that moment when the guns give up and I fall sideways to the ground. Just leave me on the bike and bury me here please just as I landed..
@Chris
I can go slower in a smaller gear sitting. Who knows. Maybe I need another correction factor, something about roller optimized pedaling efficiency. ROPE for short.
@ChrisO
Damn, that is the easy solution to all this.
Compact here all the way. Plenty fast enough on the flat, but low enough to cope with steepest climbs the Gorge has to offer.
if I want to torture myself I get the Fixie out!