I started riding "seriously" when I was 21; all the books said to learn to spin, so I stayed in the small ring and learned to spin. The funny thing is, once your nervous system gets used to spinning at 90 rpms, you can go into a race, on the big ring, and your legs are still comfortable pushing the bigger gear at 90 rpm. You can't help it; the body just gravitates to spinning at that tempo as long as it can.

You can always tell it's a beginner because they're in the bike's biggest gear. Some can hammer away and keep up with your 90 rpm speed on the 39x15, but once you pop it into the big ring and quickly wind back up to 90 rpm, they don't have the leg speed to keep up. Same thing on the hills. I'll often have beginners in the big gear pass me when I'm on the 42x16 fixed gear. I spin up and sit on their wheel, crank it up to over 150 rpms on the descents, then when we hit the climb, I keep the fixed gear going, dropping maybe a half-dozen rpm, but the beginner doesn't have the leg strength to maintain the huge gear on the climb, or if he shifts down, he doesn't have the leg speed to keep up.

I just love keeping up with dudes on their carbon fiber frames with the fancy wheels and 10- or 11-speed drivetrains while I'm on my steel Rodriguez fixie, and then dropping them on the climbs when I'm not even a climber! Oh, and then there's always the young guys getting dropped by some 59-year-old guy on a fixed gear; I love it!

But then I'll sometimes run across a real racer who spins a 53x18 at 90 rpms in training, and I'm left like a dog in the dust...

L.