Gears ain't gears, ain't gears....

About a month ago i climbed the notorious Mt Kembla just south of Wollongong. The climb statistics aren't that impressive, 9km at an average of 4.5%. However 4km of the climb is either flat or downhill, making the remaining 5km at well over 9% average gradient!!

As usual i ran my usual 53/39 chainset with 27/12 cassette. Things started ok, but pretty quickly i found i was in my lowest gear and my cadence gradually dropped from 80 to low 60's!! Needless to say my ample bulk was hauled at around this pace for most of the grueling ramps... After i finished the climb i promised never to attempt this climb again until one of two things happened.

1. I was fit enough to turn my lowest gear at a minimum 70-75rpm.
2. Change my gearing so that my minimum cadence was 70-75rpm.
   

Later that week a set of shimano R700 compact cranks were installed on my bike. Now with these cranks, and a 27 tooth rear gear it is plausible to scale a wall... In fact my good friend Elliott who followed the Giro D'Italia recently used this exact combination to scale the incredible Monte Zoncolan with its average gradient of 11% and intermediate ramps of 15-25% !

After tinkering with GearCalc Pro I found out a few interesting things.

1. 39/27 is practically identical to 34/23.
2. 53/12 is slightly slower than 50/11.

So now, with a trusty 50/34 compact cranks matched to a 23/11 cassette i have identical top and bottom end speeds BUT the 23/11 ratio spreads are much tighter. This, I hope should optimise my cadence/power control when climbing and time trialling and hopefully gain some extra time.... Tomorrow is a morning time trial up Mt Keira where my recent best times have been around 23minutes flat. It will be interesting to see how far under that number i can get with this gearing.