Night before in Fitchburg I stayed up too late to watch the Celtics game and (unrelatedly) started having some...intestinal difficulties. So next morning I woke up feeling not so hot and set off on another drizzly day: bit more than 50 miles through some pretty intense hills. To give you a sense of it, here's the elevation chart from our cue sheet (the handout we get every morning that has directions and other pertinent information) for that day:
Around mile 15 I seriously crapped out and reluctantly called the van to come pick me up. I didn't want to give up for the day but as soon as the van came I climbed in and passed out in the backseat. After a nap and some food and a solid two and a half hour break, though, I was feeling much better. It took a lot of arm-twisting, but as the last riders were rolling out from lunch break I convinced Kyle, one of the trip leaders, to let me get back in the saddle.
Best decision I ever made.
I started out with a few other people but after less than a mile I pulled a little ahead and rode the rest of the day by myself. It was an incredible afternoon, and I rolled into town in a fantastic mood, even though physically I felt far less spectacular. I also learned two very important lessons. The first: granny gear is there for a reason.
Let me back up a little. In fact, let me back up all the way to the beginning. Most bikes these days have multiple gears, just like cars, so that you (or the engine) can have an easier time at low speeds or going up hills, but then get more bang for your buck at higher speeds with a higher gear. My bike has 27 speeds: 3 gears in the front and 9 in the back.
I thought I was a pro at cycling up hills because I lived in Providence for five years (and rode a crappy mountain bike that weighed about seven times as much as my new road bike). The best strategy for Providence-style hills, i.e. very steep but only a couple blocks long, is to get up as much momentum as possible going into the hill and then not give up an iota of it until the last possible second. This means that you start the hill in a very high gear, and downshift as little as possible. This strategy works great for short hills, but it works not at all for long hills. This is where granny gear comes in.
Granny gear is our fond term for the absolute lowest gear your bike can be in, which is pretty low when your bike has 27 gear combinations. Until the other day I had never used the granny gear on my new bike--I had never even gotten close. But chugging up those hills all by myself on the way to Amherst I realized that sometimes you can't power up a hill, because sometimes that hill lasts a full half mile. Sometimes you have no choice but to put it in granny gear and just crank away at 6 miles per hour till you get to the top.
This sounds obvious, but it's not because if you have a choice, it's much easier to get up a hill if you can go faster. If you're in a higher gear you can get more distance for each pedal revolution, the tradeoff being that it's harder to pedal. If a hill is short enough it's worth working harder to get up that hill a little sooner, but these hills went on and on and on. So I learned the very important lesson that there's no shame in using granny gear, and that going 6mph gives you more time to enjoy the scenery anyway.
The second lesson I learned?
I can do anything.
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