Gearing

What did the nerdy cycling fraternity do before the age of the internet and Sheldon Brown's website? I don't believe cycling existed before him. Is there anything related to cycling the man doesn't know?

Today I've been wasting away my (torrential downpour and galeforce winds, non-cycling) day looking at Sheldon Brown's gear calculator. Revealing my extreme geekiness, I find it really interesting to look and see what different speeds I would be doing in various gears whilst riding at my usual, overly high, 100 RPM (probably more like 105 RPM in reality) cadence. I might just be someone with too much spare time on his hands but by jove I could easily obsess about the gearing calculations if I let myself.

Admittedly, some of it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Once Sheldon Brown starts to write about crank lengths and gain ratios, I get a little lost. I think, in truth, I'm too lazy to want to understand it and would rather simply see what numbers come out at the end of the calculator without having to do the maths for myself. Either that or I'm a bit thick (which isn't unlikely either).

Getting back to the main crux of things, it was interesting to see at what points our gears start to 'cross over' and quite pointless it is yanking your chain (that's not a euphemism for anything) across opposing cogs. Oh how it sends unpleasant shivers through me to see someone with his/her chain on the big chainwheel and the lowest gear. It's as much as I can do not to let out a girly shriek when I see such things.

All the results from the gear calculator seemed to be pretty much what I had found to be the case whilst cycling. The speeds shown agreed with my cycle computer, more or less. I imagine there are variables we encounter whilst cycling in the real world which make slight differences to our pace but I'm impressed by the gear calculator and recommend it to anyone who is a bit geeky too.