Interesting bicycle discovery
I must be getting stronger. Last fall, when the Trek was still a bobtail bike, I would spend the bulk of my cruising time in the 52:17 gear (82\“, dropping to 70” when an upgrade or headwind hit me.) Today, after doing a 107km ramble in Clackamas County, I got home and looked idly at the rear cassette when I was putting the bicycle away – it was sitting at 53:13, or 107\“. I’m still not going particularly fast (I pedal at between 50 and 60 rpm, only speeding up when I’m trying to punch through a green light or see if I can make trees blueshift on a downhill [45-50 pounds of bicycle may not accelerate that quickly, but if I give it half a chance it descends like a bomb]) but that’s a disconcertingly high gear to be sitting in at the end of a 100km loop.
I need to figure out how to carve out 11 hours of free time. If I can do a >100km loop (in 5h45 minutes, including stops for donuts, dust mites, and railroad bridges) and still be sitting at a >100\“ gear, it’s probably time to see if I’ve still got the capacity to do a R200-length loop.
Of course if I’m going to do this I’ll have to pry myself out of the house earlier in the morning, instead of sitting around until 11:30 waiting for the sun to warm things up a bit. I can, after all, always pile on extra layers and peel them off when I go into runaway exothermia – the Trekracycle may be slower and heavier than a bobtail, but it does not lack for cargo space, and, at least until I reach the donut shop, there’s nothing getting in the way of me wadding in several layers of sweat-soaked woolen clothes.