Originally Posted by cocar

So, I had an interesting experience this morning. I went on group ride...it's a casual/social group of roadies, mixed bunch of ages and abilities. We were over in Safety Harbor/Clearwater, riding partially on the Ream-Wilson Trail. The only reason this got interesting is because part of this trail has 10% grades. Now, I know this doesn't count as "hilly" to most of you, but this part of FL is as flat as a pancake. This is as hilly as it gets for us, and this is extremely rare. I've only been cycling about 6 months. I've had zero instructions on how to do anything. If I do something well or correctly, it's totally by accident/dumb luck. Anyway, our leader stopped us to regroup at the bottom of the first of these hills, and when took off, everyone was cursing him. But I either had to slow down to avoid running into the person in front of me, or start passing people--which is what I ended up doing because I didn't want to cross wheels with anyone. Again, I have no skill at this, I don't have a clue what I'm doing. I caught a bunch of (good natured) $hit for passing everyone. Some guy asked me later where I learned to climb like that...um, I didn't.

So my question is this...is this just a function of size/weight? Because I'm so much smaller than everyone else? The next smallest person is probably 40lbs heavier than me. If I actually did want to learn to climb properly, how would I learn to do that, being that I have no one to teach me? I mean, how to people learn this stuff initially? Sorry if these are basic, stupid questions...I did do a search, but didn't quite find what I was after.