Originally Posted by
mrodgers
How are you pedaling? I started this a month ago. I had no idea what I was doing, I lived on a bike as a kid so I just started riding. I'm now 41 by the way. I have a flat bike trail that I ride 6 miles up and 6 miles back. There is a bridge at 3 miles and I was stopping on the bridge to take a break, I had to take that break or my legs would be like rubber a short time later.
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Moral of the story is, go lower in the gears and pedal faster. I didn't understand why since everything I searched for talked about racing, but creating that thread and getting the great responses about it on the forum here really helped me understand and got me to go into lower gears. I started out taking 3 breaks on my normal every night ride of 12 miles and had I not wiped my eyes because of it tearing up in the cold tunnel last night and pushed my contact into the corner of my eye, I would have just gone the whole 12 without a break last night.
Again, I've only been doing this about a month. Not only am I not as winded and legs not as tired by pedaling faster in a lower gear, but I've added about 2 mph to my speed because of it. I was riding 12 mph up and 14 mph back and now I'm riding 14 mph up and 16 mph back.
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.