Many of you have heard this story before. One winter, as ride leader, and as an experiment to test assertions that big gear riding make you stronger, I decided to subject my group to a few months of SS/FG riding on our usual geared bike routes, 40-60 miles, 50'/mile, 7%-12% hills, lots of very high cadence on the flats. After this ride series, we all agreed that our big gear riding had gotten a lot better, but our geared bike riding was not improved. The experiment was not repeated, to the applause of all. It was frigging torture.

What to take from this? I think our usual training adequately addressed issues of strength and endurance. We've always done a lot of competitive hill and other accelerations, to the limit of everyone's ability, and I think that has been our key to success. Limiting our muscular efforts by restricting gearing was not successful. That's not to say that doing big gear low cadence intervals is not a good idea. One can always run out of gears and find that one is doing small gear low cadence efforts just to get up that hill, which is probably even more difficult the big gear efforts because of less momentum and the uselessness of standing in tiny gears.

Corollary: it's even better to find really steep hills and climb them in a low cadence max effort gear, and especially when one is really tired. I've climbed a couple of memorable 18% grades near the end of 300k and 400k brevets.