Climbing Hills aka Getting It In Gear
By
Rosemary Hollinger
Posted: 2020-06-11T01:06:00Z
Blessed with a son who knows more about biking hills than I do, I related my misadventures trying to climb the Bainbridge Island hills in Washington where I now live. He humored me and asked, sweetly, if I was using my gears correctly. I knew what I had to do. And, I did it--when he wasn’t around.
I turned to Google for help using my gears on steep hills. As a former Midwesterner from the Palatine area, challenging hills were not a real issue. So I was accustomed to using my right-hand gears, but only had a passing acquaintance with the left-hand gears. I had no idea how to choreograph both hands. It turns out Google and YouTube have lots of good information for fledgling cyclists.
The next morning, I was excited to try out my new theoretical knowledge about how to properly use my gears while scaling the steeps of Bainbridge Island. If you are expecting me to say that my gear skills transformed my riding overnight, you will be sadly disappointed. In my view, gearing is a very personal thing. You have to follow some general guidelines and then figure out what works for you and your bike.
For me, the proper right and left-hand gearing on my SRAM trigger shifters looks something like this:
RH: 1 LH: 1, 2, 3, or 4
RH: 2 LH: 3, 4, 5 or 6
RH: 3 LH: 6, 7, or 8
And that doesn’t take leg action into account. Yes, it turns out that while I was thinking about using my hands to change gears, it was really my legs that were calling the shots.
Gearing is all about cadence, the number of RPMs your legs spinning the pedals. The goal is to maintain a steady cadence while you go uphill. To do this, I have to downshift - switch to an easier/lower gear - as the hill gets steeper. My bike speed slows down, but not my cadence, so the strain on my legs is fairly constant. As I crest the hill and it flattens out or drops, I have to shift up into a higher gear. In effect, I try to maintain the same cadence regardless of terrain, and let the gearing power my bike.
I haven’t mastered that yet. But, I am getting up more hills. I’ve come to realize two things about gearing. First, when my cadence starts to falter, I immediately change gears. Second, there is no shame in moving to lower gears to climb a hill. I still have a long way to go to conquer the Bainbridge Island hills, but each week I attempt steeper ones. Like anyone learning a new skill, sometimes I make it and sometimes I don’t.