As of the first of the year, whenever I’m going out on a mt. bike ride, I’ve been using the single speed. At first it was for the workout, then just because I enjoyed it more.(yeah, I know glutton for punishment, suffering builds character, blah, blah, blah)
Well last week, my rear hub started making some weird grinding noises. Figuring it might be just dirty I tore it apart, cleaned and greased it, then put it back together.
For the first few minutes of the ride, it was better, but about 5 minutes into the first long climb, it started up again.
Needless to say, it’s now beyond my skills to fix it so into the shop it goes.
The result is, that on last night’s ride, I had to take out the geared bike. And you know what? It was kinda nice to just park my butt in the saddle, drop it to the small ring and spin up the hills. Plus that whole full suspension as opposed to full rigid left my wrists and arms feeling a LOT better afterwards.
I also noticed that by the end of the evening, I was tired in a completely different way than when I’m on the ss bike.
I used to think riding the ss bike was harder but now, I’m not so sure it’s harder as much as just different.
My legs for instance, I’m not used to spinning high revs to get up the hills so by the time we got to the top of the first climb, they were burning pretty good.
My lungs though, which are usually about to fly out of my mouth and onto the trail in front of me when on the ss, felt fine. I wasn’t even really winded.
My lower back was tired from sitting hunched over trying to keep the front wheel down whereas on the ss, my upper back and shoulders are tired from pulling up on the bars and hanging on through the downhill.
All in all, it was a pleasant experience to ride a geared bike again and was just one more justification as to why I need to own so many bikes.
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