The year was 1958. The occasion was my father's 39th birthday. The birthday present was a nice new bright green Rollfast sport bike with a Bendix 2-speed internal gear unit. Dad named the bike "Trigger" and got all dressed up in horse-riding clothes and went for a ride. He discovered that the gearing was so high that low gear did level ground and high gear did down hill, so when he came to an uphill he had to get off and push. About halfway up the hill there was this ancient geezer a-standin' thar a-leanin' onta his mailbox and a-chompin' on his see-gar and he calls out, "Hey thar Young Feller! Is pushin' thet thar bike makin' t'enny easier ta walk up this here hill?" Well, Dad couldn't think of a snappy comeback quick enough so he got all upset and took the bike home and stuck it in his basement where it stayed for 39 years. Finally, in 1997, declaring himself too old and decrepit to ride a bike, he let me take the bike to do a restore & rebuild job which included re-gearing the bike lower so that someone of mere mortal strength could make reasonable use of the gears.

I often see 1-speed cruiser bikes with what looks like Olympic flat-track gearing: a type of bike eminently suitable for leisurely cruising at about 8 or 9 mph but geared so high that you don't muster a reasonable cadence until you're going well over 15 mph. I guess that must make sense to somebody, but I'm just too narrow-minded to appreciate the logic. Bikes like this don't get ridden much. The owners often blame themselves, saying they are just not in shape. Well, I suppose you could build yourself up to pedaling this sort of bike, but I always thought that the quote at the top of this page would seem to imply that things oughta be designed for how people really are instead of people re-training themselves to use wrong-designed things. A bike can be re-geared, of course; all it takes is to put on different size sprockets and perhaps insert or delete a few chain links; a pretty easy job for somebody who's reasonably savvy about bikes but not very appealing to somebody who just wants to ride a bike without having to rebuild it first.

Some of us hotshot bike jocks use our bikes for century rides and other outrageous feats of endurance, for which we buy bikes with lotsa gears and astronomical price tags. We select our own gear systems at purchase time, so you'd think we'd get it right, wouldn't you? Wrong! I remember finishing a century ride through mountainous country and one of the other riders stumbled off his bike complaining about all the hills and he went painfully staggering over to the medical tent to get his knees bandaged up. I glanced over at his bike and it was one of these super-go-fast road jobs with lotsa high gears and no low gears and so I pretended to sympathize with him while thinking, you numb-wit, you sink buckets of bucks into a bike like that when you know you're gonna be riding in hilly country. I couldn't resist calling his attention to the gear system on Blew Miasma (my blue Miyata touring bike) which is sorta like what they use on mountain bikes. It's a bit gappy by road standards and I don't use the lowest few gears very much, but they're sure fun to have when you're about 90 miles into a century ride and your legs are starting to feel like lactic acid repositories and the stretch of road in front of you suddenly bears a distressing resemblance to the side of the Washington Monument. It's great to finish a century ride and be able to head for the dance pavilion instead of the medical tent.

And now a word to all you bike shops out there. Here's a customer: a grubby little teenager who looks like he's barely got a tattered dollar bill to his name. He's trying to explain why he wants different size sprockets to some tangle-tooth nerd of a salesman who's hanging his ugly mug over the counter and yelling, "Lookit Here Sonny! Your bike was geared Correctly at the Factory! If You don't know how to ride it, that's Your Tough Bananas!" Now here's a second customer: a well-dressed Gentleman of Means. You're savoring the delectable aroma of his fat wallet bulging with credit cards. Oh Look! He's scrutinizing that Litespeed Vortex with the Campagnolo Record gear system and all the latest glow-in-the-dark upgrades. Wow, man! Clinch this sale and your family will indeed dine well tonight! But Wait! Reality check time. Maybe that first customer has a daddy who looks a lot like that second customer. Maybe the way you treat the first customer determines whether you ever see the second customer. You certainly don't want to come down with a case of Cycle Sell Anemia.

Drool over bikes you can't afford
Drool over bikes lotsa folks can't afford
Drool over bikes most everybody can't afford
Drool over bikes that don't even exist until you've forked over serious cash
Drool over bikes just to drool over bikes
Drool over a nice way to gear your bike