Now that my BikeFriday is out of the picture for a couple of weeks I’m back to riding my Rivendell Quickbeam. I’d thought this might impact my training for RAGBRAI in that I’m less interested in doing hills. As it turns out it’s not nearly the problem I thought it might be.
I’ve ridden the QB long distances before and never really had any trouble. I do change the gear ratio for hills, but it’s still higher than the lowest low on my Friday. I guess I was just hoping I’d found a way to avoid hills until my Friday is whole again.
In any case I did very nice 32 miles today incorporating my “after work” route around Diamond Head and back through Manoa with a loop around Sand Island. The parts that seemed tough on the Friday were, oddly enough, not much trouble on the QB.
I know part of that is because I’ve been riding that route on the Friday so much that I have gotten stronger. I suspect part of it is also because if you’ve no choice you’ve no choice. Since I can’t really change gears (well, not to the degree I can with the Friday), I just go. Yes I spun a little slower and had to mash a little, but it wasn’t nearly as hard as I’d imagined. Tomorrow I’ll be back to my after work route (Diamond Head/Manoa) once again. Yeah!
Slower, cheaper, less useful…