Single Speed Sickness

<===Yes. It's true. I like single speed bikes!

Way back when I got my first mountain bike, (An 18 speed!), I had a gal friend that liked to ride bicycles and she always admonished me for not shifting. You know, I would just find a gear that felt right and mash it! She said I wasn't being efficient. I said I just needed to pedal harder.

Hrumpf! It's no wonder we're not together today!
(ha ha!) Well.........anyway....I just was raised on single speed bicycles. Those shifty bits were foreign stuff to my mind of one gear.

Of course, over time I realized that gears were okay. I managed to come to embrace that part of cycling too. But......there's just something about a single speed. I'm not going to try to write what a million other passionate single speeders have tried to write for decades about the "one gear thing". Nope! I just am going to say, I've got the single speed sickness. I just like them, and that's that.


<===Just to prove that I ain't agin it.....

So, I put the Dos Niner back together again. It's been in various states of disassembly for months now, but here it is. A 2 X 9 actually. I put on an Origin 8 crank, a new product, and thought I'd see if the 2 X 9 thing was any good for me.

So far it seems as though it might be a good thing. The lack of the really low granny gear will not be too big of a deal, I don't think. I have a low of 29 X 34 right now, so that should suffice for most climbs around here.

Of course, if I get into that really low gear and find I am starting to grind, I'll just have to go into single speed mode! Ha ha!

Seriously though, unless I'm tapped out, this should work fine around here. It has a 44T big ring too, and that sits in the spot on the crank where the middle ring would be on most mountain crank sets. It allows you to use the full cassette in the rear with decent chain line. Of course, that means the inner 29T ring is in the normal "granny" position, and you start to get some cross chain, derailleur rub issues if you shift into the higher range of the cassette. But.....you probably should be back in the big ring for those gears any way, eh? We'll see once I get this rig out to the Camp.

Anyway, if you run a single speed, geared, or both types of bikes, it is all good. I'm just partial to my single speed 29"ers, that's all.