There will always be a climb that’s not ideal for the gearing you have. I totally understand that.
My point here was that if you regularly find yourself struggling with low cadence up climbs and have the option of lower gearing, I’d go that route first.
It sounds like this isn’t a regular thing for the OP, and had they not been in a group, they could have avoided the situation altogether, so changing a crank or cassette may or may not be worthwhile for them.
I think that if I were going on a trip with a bunch of people and knew I was going to be riding different terrain, I’d 100% be up for changing my gearing to have the best experience.
With that being said, I’m perfectly fine muscling up climbs from time to time. The change in pace keeps things interesting.
It was my first trip abroad and I regularly ride with the same group but wasn’t prepared for such low cadence, we don’t usually ride like that on home soil. For future trips I’ll look at my gearing when I know there will be a lot of climbing
Do you think it would have been a 20 minute wait? I’d have sacked it off climbing in a group, climbs are fair game and you need to go the pace you are comfortable at.
Ha! I’m riding ALPI4000 audax over there soon with crazy 36 x 11-51T. I wasn’t intending to, normally I’d use 2x 46/30 x 11-42 for pretty much everything these days, but it was fitted for Race Through Poland and I left it on.
Even a proper Compact (34) with a SRAM cassette of 36T would be better. I’ve run that setup for TCR with a normal Di2 RD. Grinding up climbs sucks. I’ve not experienced any altitude effects though, not sure why, I’m London based. The first time I was over there I had a 53/39 road double with maybe a 28T on the back as that was the most 7800 DA would cope with. Brutal. Don’t know how I climbed anything.
As for spinning out on the flat… I don’t think so. I can still do 40kph with my stupid 36x11 gear so if you had a 50 outer ring on a compact you should be able to easily sit >50kph in 50x11 and the only time I’ve seen people doing that is A road TTs
This! When we do trips to the European mountains we do 40-ish minute climbs which can easily become 50+ mins if you’re trying to stay in low Z2 (aka already dead). Generally split into subgroups and some of us wait. It is what it is and you pack your gear appropriately for it. Unfair to the strong guys for the weak ones to hold up the parade. And personally I am sometimes first by 10 mins, sometimes last by 10 mins…
Pretty much every Dolomite col has a hotel or restaurant to keep warm whilst you wait. If not, when you get to top, descend again to below your group, and start riding up:again.
Thanks, we got around quite comfortably. My conclusion with the gearing though, is it’s probably ok for very hilly stuff (Race Through Poland, etc) but the shifting is annoying enough that I’m going back to 2x 46/30 with 11-42 cassette. It’s a similar low gear to what I was running but 2x makes it a bit nicer with shifting and I can do things like swap in an 11-36 for flat events (1000k around Belgium next month). For really steep stuff on ultras / audaxes I’m just going to walk anyway, it’s a nice change of position and I’ve started carrying thongs, sorry, flip flops for this kind of thing (and it’s nice when off the bike).
What I might do is move the silly low gearing setup to the gravel bike I have that lives in Poland, maybe just run 32T up front because most of the time I’m not pedalling much on descents anyway so top gearing is irrelevant.
Hello, we also did 5 days in dolomites and we did ride almost every day. Brutal climbs over and over. My weekly TSS in trainer road was around 400-450 and that includes running cycling and swimming, I did 700 from just cycling in a week. It has been 4 days since our return and I’m cooked. Trainer road suggests 6.5% ftp drop to continue since my legs cannot take any intervals right now. Did you get back into your usual numbers and how long did it take?
That’s going to be very individual - I have a habit of doing back to back ultra races for years now so I can perform adequately for LSD stuff forever, if you’re older, dug deeper, etc you’re going to take a lot longer to climb out of your hole. But for focused training or short distance races, well, I’ve not been doing any training since ALPI so don’t have any real data. But for short rides afterwards I felt ok. We had a few days off afterwards. It’s pretty hot in the UK so the last thing I want to do is sit on the turbo! I’ve got a 1000k in Belgium coming up but I probably won’t bother doing any training for it as it’s pretty flat and I’m a big rider that makes a lot of power normally, so it’s my “bread and butter” event type, so to speak.
. Thinking 34/34 