A northern harrier in the Lower Keys. MARK HEDDEN/Keys Weekly I woke up the other morning thinking of Sugarloaf, specifically the south end of the old highway, partly because I’d gotten a new bike. Twenty years ago the bike might have been considered fancy, what with its disc brakes, carbon forks, internal cable routing and aluminum frame. In modern times it’s a midlevel Trek, streets ahead of a Conch cruiser, but about as far as you can go in the company’s offroad line without some kind of suspension.
I never liked the idea of a suspension on a bike. It always seems a little too much like riding a wheeled pogo stick. They are great for the off-road trail in places like Utah or Montana, with twists and jumps and whatnot, but here in the flatlands of the Florida Keys, they are basically useless.
The main difference between the fancy mountain bike I bought in the ’90s and this one was the gearing. The old bike had a triple front ring, with the third cog being a tiny one called a granny gear, engineered to let you ride up pretty much any hill as long as you were willing to do it slowly and possibly without dignity. With the seven cogs on the back cluster, you had a choice of 21 gears.
The new bike only has a single chainring on the front, but 10 on the back cog, basically covering the same range of gearing options with fewer gradations. The biggest […]
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