Three cheers for gears!

Cycled out from Perth to Murthly this afternoon. It's a pretty steadily uphill trip. It's not all that steep, but today it was into a constant headwind, so pedalling was hard going, or at least it would have been on the type of single-speed bike I had as a teenager. Thankfully, my bikes of today have gearing systems which provide me with the opportunity to maintain a more or less constant pedalling rhythm.

With three chainrings on the front and 8 or 9 sprockets at the rear, my bikes have a wide range of gears that I would have killed for twenty years ago when struggling uphill on my 5-speed "racer" (crawler, more like!). And of course we now have the ability to alter the range of gears on our bikes with little more than ten minutes work in the shed. Just replacing a close-ratio sprocket with one with wider spacing gives me the range to tackle even some of the hairiest hills in this lovely part of the world.

So let's have three cheers for gears and ignore the luddites who moan about "all those unnecessary speeds" on modern bikes. The more the merrier say I!