gyozadude

Maiello:

From the looks of your bike, you're probably over 183cm (6ft) tall, yes? Are you skinny like a toothpick? Or medium build? Or chunky? I agree with the others on reservations about upgrading just for a couple of pounds of weight. Big guys, unless endowed with tremendously good VO2 max are going to languish on long hills due to limits of relative aerobic capacity to smaller folks. It's not even aerodynamics so much because you're going much slower up hills. Usually, it's just power-to-weight that is important for climbing, and little riders have much less weight, and fractionally less power. But on flats and downhills, it's more power-to-surface-area ratio. So you do better.

But more training on hills is likely to really help build aerobic capacity and get you to be able to ride more comfortably close to your physical limit than just riding on the flats. Personally, I'm a fairly big and really heavy guy, and at my best fitness in grad school, I rode 12 - 30 miles daily up mountains with grades of 5 - 17% sustained for 2 - 4 miles at a time. Even though I blew past most commuters slogging it up the hill. The small club riders still smoked me. And my best times weren't achieved with a 40x32 gear ratio, or even a 34 x 32 granny, but a 42x21 or 42x23.