Gears for the Cycling Dummy... Again

bicycle gear combinations

Remember the old joke about the patient who tells his doctor, "Doc, it hurts when I do this"? And the medic says, "Well, stop doing it"? We decided to take a day off from the Leaf Group/eHow.com family and really put a hurt on our collective brain by visiting EzineArticles.com. That venue is where we encountered Barbara Greene. Barb cranked out 43 sports-related articles at Ezine (11 of which included the word "venue" in the title). If they're all as bogus as "Tips On How To Use Bicycle Gears Efficiently For A Better And Faster Ride," then Barbie has some 'splainin' to do...

Well, perhaps "bogus" isn't the right word. Maybe "doofus" would be better, or just "almost incomprehensible." Greene opened her little opus by explaining (if you can call it that) that,

"Bicycle gears were invented to help the rider pedal at a steady rate without exerting too much effort. However, these gears are often misused and wrongly combined resulting to [sic] the rider pedaling faster and exerting too much energy only to find out they are not getting anywhere."

Our many trips down the very popular hike-and-bike trail near AN HQ suggest that riders don't pedal faster; no, they're usually in too high a gear instead of too low. Oh, and Barbara? "pedal at a steady rate without exerting too much effort" is a rather strange way to say "maximize efficiency." It's sort of right, but Word! is it clumsy! Greene continues in the same vein, suggesting that perhaps she is less familiar with cycling than she'd like us to think. For instance, she doesn't use the word "cadence" until the last sentence:

"It is crucial that a rider practice riding at different rate of pedaling or what they call as [sic] cadence."

It's our opinion that the whole idea of multiple gear combinations is to allow a rider to maintain the same cadence in different gear combinations, but what do we know? [hint: a lot] On the whole, Barbara seems to be attempting to point beginning riders in the right direction. It's just her execution that pretty much sucks. Here, see if you agree:

• "...[in] low gear. Its front gear should contain a small chain ring while the back part should have the largest sprockets..." – That writing's so ugly we wonder if it's spun!
• "The usual terrain can be best pedaled by your bike when its middle gear is being maximized. This means that the middle gear is set up properly with the middle chain ring on triple. Its front gear should contain a small chain ring on double or compact and the back being contained with the middle sprockets." – More of this "contain crap. Plus, Barbie clearly doesn't know that a compact is a double...
• "...[in] high gear. Its front should have the big chain ring and the back having small sprockets. Actually, this setup is not only good for descending terrains but also for ascending ones." – Make up your mind, Barb: high gear for climbing or low?

		"If there is the right gear, there is also the wrong combination of gears. Experts advised to avoid the combination of smallest chain ring on the front gear and the smallest sprocket on the back gear." – While true, that warning has nothing to do with efficiency. It's crystal that Ms. Greene simply copied this text from somewhere else and reworded it without a clear understanding of the principles. She says nothing about working through the gears, nothing about shifting on the fly, nothing about accelerating vs. steady speeds, nothing about winds. This crap reads like third- or even fourth-generation freelance bull, making Barbara an even worse Dumbass of the Day than the usual dumbasses.

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