Of friends and noses
You can pick your nose, and you can pick your friends, but never pick your
friends' gear. In fact, you need to concentrate more on what gear you are going
to use than the contents of another persons nasal passages.
Bikes, like noses and friends, come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors.
There is no specific set of rules for using your gears, but there are some
guidelines you can go by no matter what type of bike (or nose) you have.
Yes, mountain bikes are assumed as our discussion topic.
Your MTB actually has a drivetrain. Similar to that of a car. Like a car, you
can use a transmission to change gears to affect speed and torque. In a
higher gear, you have less available power at the wheel while having
more speed in the rotation of the wheel. In a lower gear, you pass the majority
of power to the wheel while having a minimal amount of speed in the rotation
of the wheel.
When a car is raced competitively, the way a driver shifts will
undoubtedly make the difference between winning and coming in third. When
racing a motorcycle, I would miss a shift and not be able to get in
the 'groove' for at least 2 or three turns. On a tight track, it can take as
long as a whole lap to get yourself together again.
When you ride your MTB, things are the same - to go fast and safe, use your
gears efficiently. Efficiently means that you want to use the least energy
to turn the pedals, and choose the best gear to do it in. On the surface this
seems simple, but after 7 years, I can say that it takes more practice than
anything else. (and yes, I still suck!)
Ever had one of those little climbs which were somehow in the wrong place
in your ride, like - at the beginning?
It was usually only an altitude change of about 50 feet at
the most, but it was a real back-breaker when you were just starting your ride.
You found that you had the lung capacity of a small tree sloth.
This trail was typical of the usual "ups" you have to deal with on a MTB ride.
It was just long enough to make you sweat, and to get your legs to a point where
they felt like they were going to burst everytime you pressed the pedal.
Correct gear selection is fairly important because you took this hill at the
begining of your ride - you do not want to burn up your legs or lungs in the
first ten minutes. If you caught the right gear, you could hump to the top with
little trouble. One missed gear or slipped wheel, and you would have to
dismount and walk the rest of the way.
With most of the inclines you will be able to ride, your cadence and your
traction will make or break a run to the top of anything, and the amount of
energy you expend will dictate the length of time you can ride for a given
day. These three components - cadence, traction, and energy - will need to be
precariously balanced to get to the top of everything you try to conquer.
Traction is more than your tires.
We've discussed tires thoroughly. You will need
the appropriate tire for each terrain. With the wrong tire, you
will never be able to get traction enough to keep you in the seat. If you are
used to climbing in the loose stuff, make sure your tire is set up for a 'soft'
trail or adjust your air pressure downward. If you have to go
up on a surface with rocks make sure you have a tire that can handle the
harsh rocky surface you have to climb - and try to stay out of the gravel.
Speed is a good substitute for good tires. If you have the wrong tires (you
may notice you slide with every pedal-stroke), you may be able to attack a
hill with more speed to make up for it. The idea is to get enough speed so that
you will almost get to the top before you really have to grind the cranks to
keep moving. This is an advanced technique, and if you fall you will hit
hard.
Besides tires, traction can be gained by positioning yourself in such a way that the
amount of weight on the tires is correct for the incline you are trying to
tackle. If you have a standard, non-suspended bike you will probably need to
get out of the seat to get your body weight even between the front and rear
wheel. To achieve the best traction, you want your weight such that the front
wheel does not come up (wheelie on a hill once - once), but the rear wheel
is not spinning over the trail surface. Your weight should be resting on your
legs, and not in your back, hands, or arms. If you are on a suspended bike, you
will need to stay in the saddle to load down the suspension. FS bikes need to
have the suspension weighted down, and they can climb up the side of a tree
if you have big enough thighs.
I use a technique I read about when the trail gets slippery. Sometimes, no matter
how hard you try, you cannot get the bike balanced and you slip
or wheelie. When this happens you may be able to go by cranking in a real
low gear, and rocking front-to-back slightly to load the front tire between
pedals, and load the rear tire when you are at the top of the crank. This
takes some practice. Even hen it is raining, this procedure can keep you
moving.
With the bike well balanced, you want to maintain that balance with the minimal amount
of effort. This is what those climbing bars are for. No, these bars are
not for you to rest your hands on when they are tired. Tired hands are the
result of too much pressure on your wrists, and you need to adjust your equipment
or set up your bike to better fit your person. The climbing bars (when
they are correctly adjusted) will require you to lean forward
to get your hands around them. When you do this, (viola!) you are
almost in the perfect position to handle a serious uphill.
Why climbing bars you ask???
If you try to lean forward out of the seat, without the assistance of your
climbing bars, you will find that you get real tired real fast. This is because
you either have to use your upper body to keep the bike balanced, or because you
are leaning back/front so far you are going nowhere. And by the way, the
90 degree angle position of your climbing bars is better for your hands and arms
when you are cranking hard.
To best adjust your climbing bars, you must first remember that they will never be perfect for
all hills. Try to get them in the middle between a position that is out of the
seat, and a position as far forward as you would be on your steepest climb.
Again, if you can comfortably get to the climbing bars without getting out of
the seat, they are not adjusted right. Also, remember that when you are using
your climbing bars (or your handlebars for that matter) use a light touch
whenever you can. The 'grip of death' is great if you are hanging on, but if
things are going well, you and the bike are working together to get somewhere
and you do not need to expend energy into the hand grips. If you are climbing
right you should be as relaxed as possible, keeping your elbows slightly bent and
relaxed at all times.
This will take some practice, both to use the climbing bars correctly and to
get them adjusted in the first place. This is another reason it pays off to have a controlled
area to ride in. At least try to practice climbing somewhere where you can
go back and monitor your progress. You need to be able to see you are 'doing
better' to get the most out of your personal training. You really will feel
great when you set a personal goal (like climbing a certain hill) and you attain
it after repeated practices.
If you want to conquer hills, and handle them well, get climbing bars. Make sure they
are strong enough so that they do not shear off when you pull on them real
hard. (in other words, do not buy carbon-fiber climbing bars unless you know
someone who has had a set!)
Cadence is more than a CAD thing:
I think I just got used to this concept when I gave up my use of the Shimano Bio-Pace
gearing for the round gearing of the ProFlex. The beast has a Bio-Pace, or elliptical, front gear
set and the ProFlex does not. When I had the Bio-Pace gears, I only had to
press down hard on the pedals for a short stroke of the cranks. This also
meant that too much power on a climb resulted in a wheelie or a spun rearend.
Without Bio-Pace, you have to spend more of the crank cycle pushing on the
pedal, but you get a more even contact between the tire and the trail surface
because the amount of force on the cranks is more even throughout the stroke.
I used to think that the idea of cadence was useless with Bio-Pace gears. This
is true to some extent. With Bio-Pace, you want to keep things turning well
enough so that you do not feel it in your legs. If you pedal too slowly,
the elliptical gearset will bog your legs down when you try to push through the
stroke. Thus, with Bio-Pace the best cadence is any pace that can keep your
legs turning. If you want to improve your climbing traction, get rid
of your Bio-Pace gears. Yes, get rid of them.
An Example:
So, beyond the type of gears you have is the fact that you have gears at all.
Back to our drivetrain analogy, let's look at transmissions.
If you are lucky enough, take a rear-wheeled-drive car out to a fire road where
there is a ton of dirt and no cops. One could take a smaller car if
preferred, but the more horsepower you have the better this works. It also
helps if you have a manual transmission (It needs a stick-shift; a VW Shift-o-
matic is not recommended.).
Fire up the car, stab the accellerator and drop the clutch. What happens to the
wheels? Spin-o-rama! What happens to the clutch depends on the car. (If you
have a bad clutch you should have thought of that before you drove out to
an empty fire road with no emergency services around for 50 miles.)
Now fire up the car and slowly feed the car power as you engage the clutch. If
you practice, you will eventually be able to get the car moving fairly fast
without spinning the tires at all. You will need to do this same type of thing on your
MTB, use your legs as the means to control power to the drive wheel while using
a low enough gear to keep moving. If you press too hard, you will spin the rear
tire and rapidly go nowhere.
So pick your gear!
Choosing the right gear for a climb is a compromise between your forward speed
and the speed you would like to go up the hill. If you want to go up a hill
fast, you need some major forward speed, and a medium or large gear. If the gear is
too low, the minute you hit the hill you will spin your legs wildly until the
bike comes to a halt at the bottom of the hill! If the gear is too high, you
will not be able to maintain any sort of pedaling cadence and you will stall
before you barely get started.
Lets assume we have a 21-speed. You have three gear rings on the front, and your
rear cogset has 7 small gear rings. Thus, try to think of your gears as three
sets of 7 speeds - easy, medium, and hard. Within each gear set, you have 7
difficulty settings you can choose from.
The concept of 'sets' will make gear selection easier to assimilate.
Let's take a hill.
You want to start your approach with three things in mind: attack speed, grade
of the climb, and your starting gear. If you are not sure of these things, try
attacking the hill with the front gears on the middle ring, and the rear
gears on the smallest ring (This is the highest gear in the middle gear set).
This means that you can stay on the front-middle ring all the way up the hill,
and use the 6 lower gears on the rear cogset to keep your cadence on the hill.
This is the best way to quickly plan an attack on a hill.
As you approach the hill, get yourself going in a cadence, that is, make sure you
have some timing relative to when you step on the pedals.
1 - 2, 1 - 2, 1 - 2, ... Keep a count of the times the crank goes around and try
to be consistent with that count. Use brakes and gears to keep that cadence.
The real trick here is to keep that crank timing (or cadence) as you approach
the hill, attack the hill, and climb the hill.
As you hit the bottom of the hill, be prepared to go to a lower gear on your
rear cog set. As soon as your cadence in interrupted by the climb, go to a lower
rear gear. If you still cannot keep cadence, go yet again lower on the rear
cog set.
This will take some practice, but you will be able to attack the hill by just
using one of the three gear sets you have - this will make things much easier
than sorting out all 21 speeds.
You may find that the incline dictates that you need more power than you can get from just
a single gear set. If this occurs, you can use another trick to get from the
approach speed you need to a lower, cranking gear which will facilitate "lift."
When you make an approach like this you have to use the easiest gear in one
gear set, and then change down a whole gear set just as you attack the bottom
of the climb.
Start with the front gears on the middle ring, and the rear gears on the smallest
ring. This is the highest gear in the middle gear set. Use this gearing to
approach the hill. This will allow you to make some speed over land before you
have to hit the hill itself. As soon as you hit the bottom of the hill, change the
front gear from the middle set, to the innermost set (the smallest ring on
your front gears). Be prepared to pedal like crazy for a few seconds, but soon
you will "come on" to the cadence of the hill, and you will have 6 lower gears
on your rear cog set if you need more power. This type of climb will almost
always work, and you will be able to climb most things with a little practice.
You will not go as fast as you could, but at first, worry only about getting to
the top of a climb without bursting a lung. You can work on speed later.
Thus your selection of gears can have a
positive effect on your ability to climb. I researched a number of various gear
combinations, number of speeds, number of teeth per gear, and so on. I learned
two things: there is no special combination of gears, and one will usually use the gears
that came with the bike. According to bike shops, most people buy new
gears when they need replacement and not for performance.
I could expound upon the virtues of gear ratios by explaning the relationship
between the size of the gear wheel and the number of teeth, but this information is not
important to about 98% of the people who ride a MTB. If you are worried about
your ability to climb, you probably need practice and not better gearing.
There is an effect which you can get if the gears on your bike are 'too close
together'. By this, I mean that the number of teeth in your rear cog set
has little variation in it. This means that your gears are not optimally spaced
and you may want to get better ones. This generally happens when a part for
a 'road bike' somehow gets on a mountain bike. A way to test for this is to ride in a
low gear on a flat surface. As you shift down, you should notice a
difinitive change in the amount of effort you need to pedal. If you shift and
notice that there is very little change, you probably have gears which are
too close together. This rarely happens anymore as most bikes are sold with
a standard Shimano gearset. STX, LX, XT, Alivio - they all have fixed gear
spacing for their type.
The De-Rail-er
Before you go off half-cocked about changing your gear ratio, think about your
derailleur first.
You can do more for your bike by getting a good derailleur than you can by
adding any other component (with the possible exception of a suspension!).
Are you used to the grinding noise when you shift? Do you have a gear you
try to avoid becuse it slips and is noisy? If you have an index shifting system,
do you find that the gearing exactly matches the indexed position of the
shifter? Most bikes will have all these problems - even new ones.
Why? The reasons are related to the indexed shifter and the derailleur spring.
You need an indexed shifting system which has NO play in it. There are only a
few. Most of the standard shifters are a bit sloppy, so as you bang-about over
rocks and stuff, the derailleur will slightly move off the gear and you get
slippage when you pedal. Also, this situation is made worse because most of the stock
derailleurs have weak, single springs. Remember that it is the spring which
makes the derailleur move in one direction. If the spring is weak, you will
not feel the gears acting the same way every time you shift. If the derailleur
has a weak spring and a sloppy index shifter, you can be assured that you will
never get the thing adjusted perfectly. (Does this sound familiar?)
Take $75 and go down to a local bike shop. Buy yourself a Shimano XT derailleur.
Accept nothing of lower quality. Look in the bike mags to get
reviews of better derailleurs if you want, but the XT is the baseline REAL GOOD derailleur.
If you get the XT hooked up, you will see something remarkable. Your
gearing is as tight as a pair of shrunken pantyhose and it will stay that way! Even after 60 HARD
miles on the ProFlex, I have not had to get my derailleur adjusted. It is as
tight as the day I bought it. Even when I crash or get weeds in the
shifter, the thing is as smooth as a babys butt. The XT also behaves the same
in all conditions such as rocks, mud, and gravel. The bouncing bike does not effect my
gearing anymore!
E equals MC-squared man:
The last and most important part of climbing is the way you use energy.
Earier I mentioned that using climbing bars to help you climb easier. This is
partially due to the fact that you are holding on to the bars and not using your
arms or back to hold you up. The secret to using your enery is to use the
minimal amount needed to accomplish what you need to do. This results in your
abilty to ride longer and handle harsher terrain.
One thing a suspended bike will do to you is teach you how to stay in the saddle
and not upset the suspension. You want to stay
in the saddle as much as you can to keep load on the suspension with a FS bike.
The non-suspended bikes require that you get out of the saddle to maintain
balance, but you do not have to tense up when you are climbing or riding.
Two of the biggest mistakes made when riding an MTB is the gear being used, and
the energy a rider is losing to stiff arms, a fixed stare, the riding position,
and the amount of effort being used to appear upright. You can make this better
by just relaxing a bit.
If your bars and climbing bars are setup right, you should be able to completely
relax your arms when you are riding and even when you are cornering. I have a
habit of flapping my elbows in the air to verify I am loosened up. Sometimes
I will attack a turn and I will start a two-wheeled slide. Usually this is
because I have a death-grip on the bars, and I am actually pushing the front
end away from me. If I relax, I can take the same turn with 30% more speed and
no slide.
Your body is important too. If you have relaxed arms and hands, you can place some of
the weight from your body on the bars. The rest of your body and head should
be held up just because of the way your bike fits. If you come back from a ride with
a sore neck or back, you need to adjust something. If your bike fits right, you
will not get sore and not expend energy into your upper body.
You will also need to learn to put your energy into your legs only. Think of
this as if you were on a suspended MTB. You want to pedal to keep moving, but
you want to pretend to keep the pedal motion from moving your body. If you
find your head or torso is bobbing about excessively as you pedal, you are not
putting all the energy into your cadence, but instead you are putting energy
into your upper body again.
If you don't bob-about violently when you are pedaling your tires will not bob-about
on the trail surface. You will get better traction, climbing will be easier,
and you will not get tired so fast. You want to use your legs to pass energy
to the pedals/wheel but not to pass energy into the frame or your upper body.
This sounds hard at first, but, if you practice you will notice that you
have a buttload more traction and you do not tire as fast.
(This is why you should get rid of your BioPace gears. They cause you to place
force on a small part of the stroke. This overpowers the wheel for a second and
the amount of energy you have to put out is changing at too fast a rate. Without
BioPace, you put out even energy throughout the stroke. You actually do not
get so tired, do not slide the rearend on a climb, and your knees last longer.)
There are bolt-on devices which can help you immensely in the "save energy"
department - clipless (SPD) pedals. These pedals clip into metal 'cleats' in
the bottom of the SPD shoes you have to buy also. The thing that is so cool
about them is that they remove inefficient motion from your foot and ankle.
The shoe is also reinforced to minimize flex
in the sole. The result is that you put about 10% more of your energy into
turning the pedals, and that much less energy into keeping you foot on the
pedals. Also, the reinforcement means that none of your effort is wasted on
a flexible hiking boot. When you push down, it's all getting to the chain
now baby!
An Example:
The best place to learn this "energy" concept is in gravel and on a flat surface.
Start at one end of the gravel and try to pedal through it. If you are relaxed,
you will go in a straight line. If you are not relaxed, you will be fighting
the bike to get traction and go straight. If you grip the bars too hard the
front end will slide on you. If you press the pedals unevenly the rear end
will slide on you. If you bounce in the seat you will not be able to go
straight at all. You can also try this in mud if you want, but a fall can
require an hour or so of personal hygiene.
Gearing is one of those things you have to keep working on. You will not be
able to understand your gearing completely, but after a while, your eyes will
be able to look at the terrain and Your brain will get you in a gear which you can use. Picking
the right gear can also save you from having to walk your bike. The motion you
use to pedal is not the same as you need to walk. If you have to walk a section
of a trail, you will feel your legs really
cramping up when you get back on your bike.
If you want to spend money on the problem, get a new derailleur, SPD pedals,
and make sure your chain and cogs are in good shape.
Never change your chain without changing your cogs at the same time.
Worn cogs will eat
up a new chain, and an old chain will eat up new cogs.
If you happen to be going down a trail at a nice pace, shift to a harder gear
and see if you still can maintain a good cadence. You will find as your legs
get stronger you can use higher gears and keep more forward speed. Higher speeds
will give you options when you approach obstacles, whereas lower speeds usually
mean you have to eventually stop and walk around.
Keep a good cadence and minimize the use of your energy. If you are doing this
right, you will have excellent traction on the trails as well as the hills.
It will help your nose and your friend's nose also.
Flyin Al
Got a question for Flyin' Al?
If you have any fishing or mountain biking questions for Flyin' Al,
you can send an email to:
aeb@adobe.com
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