Originally Posted by slickrcbd

My speedometer broke over 10 years ago, so I'm basing my distances off known destinations. I've tried to get an app for my android phone to measure distance, but none seem to be giving accurate results based off known distances that I've clocked over the years. I have little knowledge of my speed and even if the phone worked I couldn't look at it while riding.

I used to rarely use my gears. I used to keep it mostly in high-4 or H-3. That was when I'm a kid. Now, I can't seem to get started unless it's downhill unless I'm in H-5 or H-6. Then I almost immediately need to shift lower. I think the gear names and numbers have changed, since on my bike, it had two gearshifts. The one on the pedal has a big one and a little one. The little one is labeled "L" and the big one is "H", and the manual called them low and high. My dad's 10-speed was the same, only his only had 5 on the back. The rear gears have the biggest gear labeled 6 and the littlest one labeled 1.
So H-1 is the hardest to pedal but is theoretically gives you the highest speed. I can only use it going downhill (even as a kid).

Today I'm rarely going below H-3. At the start of the summer I had to keep the bike in low gear, but I'm using what I could do as a kid as yardstick and am trying to use the high gears. I'm pretty sure I'm not going as fast as I used to, which was a steady pace of ~10-12mph (I had a speedometer until the spring of 2000 when it broke while at university).
As for how I use the gears, to start I need to be in H-5 or H-6, then once I get going I shift a bit. I'm not able to handle H-2 or H-1. I think I'm spending most of my time on level streets in H-4, and shifting whenever there is a slight slope to H-5 or H-6. If I'm going up a hill, which is very rare in the short range I can reach (I can only think of one SMALL one) I have to switch to low gear.