On your Cannondale T1 you are doing much what I went thru on my tour bike. There are so many ways to look at this and of course you need a low range for climbing loaded and pulling the trailer etc. and it’s tempting to look at that top gear and see how basically useless it is. You start changing the ring gears smaller to bring down the top and then in my case I found the center ring became my problem being too small to give me the best range against all the cassette cogs. This dawned on me when I tried a mountain crank that put me in the perfect range overall but split my normal riding gears between the two biggest rings and I hated doing that front shift right around cruising speed. Also anyway you set it up the harder shift will be between the center and the granny, and when going that direction I’m climbing to some degree and making that jump back up to the center I don’t want to be doing while climbing. When I started factoring it all together for me I started thinking about ranges of gears and not just the high and low point of the overall range. I figured on my 9 cogs I wanted to be able to use all 9 off the center ring and cover as wide a range of tour riding as I could without a front shift. I wanted the granny ring to give me another wide range of climbing gears and use the 6 largest cogs. I began to see the large ring as mostly useless and many on here told me it’s just there for one or two more high gears. Others said they just don’t use it or take it off, use it like a double etc.

I started doing a bunch of what if’s on a gear calculator program and remembering what cadence I actually ride at in different gears on different grades. I also started seeing how I could make good use of the big ring if I matched its size to the middle ring to allow half step with the cassette of choice once I came to the conclusion what center ring was right for me. I ended up back with my original road gears the 52, 42 that I started with only with a 12-36 cassette. I then surprised myself by trying a 24t granny with that setup and found the shift 42 to 24 wasn’t that bad as long as done as a soft shift. And I loved the granny range once I got down there. The 100 GI and the 116 GI are pretty high and I don’t anticipate spinning out in them, but once again I took some advice from a member here who suggested using them at a slower cadence rather than coasting on longer down hills. I really never thought about doing that but once I did I found keeping the legs moving and warm was good and I also felt more in control while adding a little speed still. I’m always finding new uses for those two tall gears. The other night I fought a head wind out and with the tail wind helping on level ground I started working my way down the cassette on the big ring and lowering my cadence just a little. It felt really easy doing about 45 RPM with the 52/12 combination. I didn’t feel at all that I was mashing or wrecking my knees with a 20MPH tail wind.

I’m finding spinning for me is the best way to go as the gearing gets lower. And under some conditions less spin gives a nice change of pace to the ride. I also have found we are not all equal and you have to evaluate yourself and adjust as required.

I don’t do the half step a lot but every now and then because the cassette is widely spaced I’m grinding along on the flats and wanting just a little more or less cadence than the next gear gives and I will do the double shift. That for me is far outweighed by having a real tight cluster but not the range on a touring bike. On my much lighter road bike with a double I like the tighter spacing.