Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Choose a single speed or a single speed will choose you

I’ve been starting to wonder lately. I’ve been wondering- if you don’t get on the bandwagon and choose a single speed will a single speed just choose you?

This is when I said frig it

Single speeding. You didn’t buy in did you? I didn’t either. The theory seems good. Darn good right? Stronger legs, fiercer climbs, the nods from all your riding buds- well, she’s doing it all on a single speed.

But… I didn’t buy or make a single speed. Mainly because I’m not that handy and I didn’t have the cash to fork over for a pre-made model. Instead, I just continued riding my riding the trails and roads on my trusty two wheel, multi geared rigs. Turns out that the bikes must have been talking and they decided to plant one of them with me.

That’s right. A single speed. My road bike decided it would be wicked cool to just stay in one gear even though I was only 18.8 miles from home with only a few dozen killer steep hills to go.

“Okay,” I thought up the first hill. “I can do this. It will be just like riding a single speed. Just like I keep saying that I want to try."

Well near the top of the third or fourth hill, when I still hadn’t really recovered from the first hill in the heavy gears, I was starting to think, “f…..f….forget about single speeding. Give me my darned gears back!”

Ah well, looks like I’ll be mainly mountain biking for a while now.

4 comments:

Red Bike said...

Thankfully my single speed bikes doesn't feel like geared bikes do when the gears have decided to play up.

I'm going to try and stay single speed (MTB and Road) during winter. It will be intresting to see if I can keep up on group rides!

Betty Mountain Girl said...

You are hands down, a pure killer. I honestly thought to myself, I could not ride ss if this is how it feels. But....maybe it was the tease of starting with gears and then loosing them half way. Eventually, I must ss.

trio said...

Nothing like a real singlespeed as you have none of the avantages of direct transmission, I tried riding a bike in one gear first and it was so much harder!

kate said...

sounds like we're choosing singlespeeding for you ;) as trio says you didn't get any of the advantages. try it for real some time, i recon you'll love it :)