Last year, I started to cycle into work. The idea was to
lose weight, get fitter, and at the same time save a bit of money on bus fares.
At first, all I could manage was once a week. I had an old Trek mountain bike,
which was slow and heavy. Cycling into work was pretty easy. Sheffield is
famously built on seven hills, and I live most of the way up one of them. It
means I have to go up my hill first, but only for a few hundred metres, then
there is a long fast downhill and after that it is about 8km of very slightly
downhill into the city centre. Easy.
Cycling home, well, that was a different matter altogether.
The first 8km is now slightly uphill; OK (though I needed a couple of rests
when I first started) but then that long fast downhill becomes a long slow
climb up to the top of the hill before the short drop back to my house. I never
quite got all the way up that climb, in fact I barely made it past halfway
before having to stop and push – but only once my legs had stopped shaking.
In case you are thinking I am using poetic licence here, that
hill is 1.4 km long, and climbs from 400 ft above sea level to around 700 ft.
The traditional measure of a mountain is 1,000 feet, so you have to cycle up about
a third of a mountain! It is ‘only’ 5.6% gradient on average, but has sections
that reach 17% that suck all of the energy out of your legs and turns them into
jelly.
Trust me, it is seriously
tough.
Then; a revelation. I figured it out. I was trying to do
this on a big, old, heavy mountain bike. Obviously, the bike was the problem
here. Of course I couldn’t get up that hill. Clearly, what I needed
was ... a
new bike!
Luckily, my work has a cycle to work scheme, and before I
could think too much about it, I was picking up a brand new bike. This wasn’t a
mountain bike. No, it was cool, it was modern, it was “urban”.
Look at it! I was in
love!!
For those that like that kind of thing, it is a Giant Roam
2, has a lockout suspension (I really had no idea what this meant, but it
sounded cool, so I figured it must be a good idea) and has disc brakes (which
don’t sound cool but are the best thing I could have ever got). It is much
lighter than the mountain bike and has a much better range of gears.
First time out, I made it all the way up that climb. See, I told you it was the bike.
