53-15 is too much. I got greedy.
One of my most vivid childhood memories is the first time I went from a tiny, single-speed Canadian Tire BMX bike to a 3-speed. I might have been eight or nine years old.
All 80’s bikes were bad by any modern standards, but even by the standards of the day, that old 3-speed was bad.
At the time basically all bikes were bad, of course. Most of them were were more of an homage to the choppers and beach-cruiser motorbikes of the day than bicycles in their own right. Mine came to me second hand, chosen because it was exactly the same as my best friend’s 3-speed: swooping cosmetic piping, heavy chrome fenders and cheap steel gears, Raleigh or Supercycle or who knows what. I don’t think my dad cared much about the difference between proper grease, machine oil and WD-40 even if any of that would have helped, so the whole thing rattled and squeaked. Now that I’m sitting here dredging up those memories I even think the grip tape on the drops was really electrical tape that melted on shifted on hot days.
It was beautiful.
On that little BMX, I could be pedalling as fast as I could and often it wouldn’t be enough; cyclists call it “spinning out”. Maybe going down a hill, when I just couldn’t pedal fast enough to engage with the rear wheel; I still remember that feeling too, it felt like being in a huge hurry and still having to run up a flight of stairs one at a time.
But when I graduated to gears on that heavy, rattling three speed with bigger tires? Oh my God.
Did you have that moment of revelation too? Spinning out in your lowest gear, pedalling as fast as your little legs will go, and then you drop down a gear, the machine locks in you can fly? And then you start to cap out your middle gear, and if you have a bit of tailwind you can do it again?
And you’re maybe 8 years old and four foot almost and the bike is rattling and the wind noise and every ounce of muscle your tiny legs can muster is going straight into the wheels and you’re probably going like 16kph but that’s so much faster than you’ve ever gone before and it feels like you’ve just launched yourself down the street at Mach 2.
I have been chasing that feeling forever.
Ryan Knighton, a blind author, once talked about getting lost in his own hotel room; he said “When you’re blind, you just can’t assume anything. And the problem is you get a picture in your mind and if you get it wrong, you just live inside the mistake.” I think about that basically every day, particularly when people are explaining how and why they measure things. So I’m deeply suspicious of anyone who describes their experiences in grams or watts.
I know people who find joy in that, but it’s not what I’m after. Or at least, I don’t want to start from the assumption that’s what matters, or trap myself in incrementalism. This is why none of my plans look like itineraries, I suppose, and more like a pin on a map and a list of contingencies to pack for. If I already know where I’m going and exactly how I’m getting there, what’s the point of making the trip?
Cinelli stopped making them last year – I suppose the market for entry-to-mid-level track bikes was already full to bursting – but my now-beloved Tipo Pista shipped 48-17; that is to say, with a 48-tooth chain cog on the crank and a 17-tooth cog on the wheel, a ratio of about 2.8.
If you like to tinker with things, you want the tooth numbers of your gearing to be coprime to keep tire wear even. For example, if you’re riding with a hypothetical 40 teeth on the front and 10 in the back, every half-rotation of your pedals will be exactly two full rotations of the rear wheel, so when you’re locking your legs to stop you’re putting all that stopping power on same small patch of rear tire with every time.
The 40-10 example is extreme, but once you understand the idea you can intuit that 48-tooth gears are notably unhelpful on this front.
48-17 is a decent starter ratio, though. If you’re new to riding fixed – which means, there’s no ratcheting mechanism on the rear wheel to let you coast, you pedal as long as you’re moving – it’s an accessible setup, not too big to get rolling, not too hard to get up a hill and not too terrifying to stop.
That ratio matters, because riding fixed is very pure experience as far as mass and velocity are concerned. You wrestle the bike to go faster, you fight it to stop, and the faster you want to go (and the faster you want to stop), the harder that gets.
It’s so good.
You get strong fast, you really do, but I can definitely understand why “a pure experience as far as mass and velocity are concerned” might not seem compelling to everyone. Mechanical advantage has its place, too! Many people enjoy inventions such as “the lever”; they’re popular for a reason.
But I’m idiosyncratic, and I like to tinker with things. And my first real hit in years of that drop-down-and-launch sensation – what turns out to be a Very Fixed Gear Feeling – was when I switched the rear cog out for a 15-tooth.
My friends, I swear that I started yelling like Saitama. Yes. Yes, this is it. This is the feeling I’ve been looking for.
But then I got a little bit stronger still, and a little greedier, and I wanted more and the only gear up that anyone had in stock was the 53-tooth front gear I’m riding now.
That gear is actually meant for electric scooters. Not battery-assisted e-bikes, but those electric-vespa jobs with the vestigial pedals that keep them just this side of legal.
A smarter man than myself might have seen that as a clue.
53-15 is too much. I can get around on it fine, though the modest hills around here are Not Fun, but it doesn’t really fit. That first moment of effort is there in spades, but – at least at my current strength, on these roads – it takes just a moment too long manifest, and once I’m up to speed it never slides into that sweet spot in the cadence where balanced, near-effortless motion seems to manifest itself.
It looks like Blackspire, a Canadian company whose work I’ve enjoyed, has the right rings back in stock so I’ve ordered a 49-tooth. It should be here next week, when I can dial myself back down to only what I wanted all a long.
But… you know, those Vigorellis look pretty good…