Originally Posted by
Carbonfiberboy
A rather fun thing to do is to ride all of one of your standard routes in say, a 70" gear, and try to ride it as fast as you usually do or ride it with one of your buddies who's shifting. Shows up your weaknesses pretty well.
I primarily ride a single speed, 77.5" gear, and find it far harder to take hills slowly. Every hill becomes a stand up and hammer over. The biweekly group ride ends with a 10% climb, which is usually a pain but not undoable. Mid-summer, I took a bee sting to the tongue at the half way point of the ride, and tried to ride home without pegging my heart rate (and breathing past a swollen tongue was inconvenient). I tried to take that 10% grade slowly, and it was miserable. Hindsight was I would have been better off hammering than riding 20 rpm.