sore knees

[Crackle]

K what bike do you have. We may be able to simplify this somewhat.

 

[k turner]

Apollo CX10 S from Halfrauds. The name on the gears is shimano tourney sis index on the back and the plastic cover on the long pedal thing is sr suntour. on the handle bars gripshear max.

Hope that gives you a good enough idea, is it standard stuff or are they using weird things to save money on build? in other words can I get parts if need be?

thanks so much for all this help I think it has been a challenge for both of us. lol

 

[Crackle]

Well I can't find any technical info on the CX10, so I'm afraid you'll have to count the teeth if you want to be absolutely precise. It's honestly not too bad to do.

Anyway looking at the info you've given me and the picture and style of bike, my guess is it's somehting like a 13-15-17-20-24-29-34 cassette with a 44/32/22 chainring.

This means you are roughly doing a cadence of 70-85 in the gears you say you are using.

For the purposes of the sore knees discussion, this is perfectly adequate and you should aim to keep that up.

Get those toe-clips, dig out those excercises, keep riding and at some point think about adding some small loops to begin to increase the distance - Good luck and well done so far

 

[Andy in Sig]

If you want to count the teeth on a cog, keep one finger on one of the pointy bits and move the other finger over all the others one at a time. Alternatively put a mark with a felt tipped pen under every fifth one and then tot them up. (One mark needs to be longer than the rest so you don't count it twice.)

 

[Ludwig]

If you ride very much on your toes you will not suffer any Knee soreness.

 

[k turner]

Crackle thanks for the info, will have a play with the spreadsheet again tonight.

Andy I have thought about increasing the distance, and with all these hills I can take the long way home which gives me an extra .3 of a mile which is nearly all flat, but going that way will also give me another hill. I did it twice this week in the evening but sticking to short route in the morning.

I was forced to go much further today as I had to get all my meds from the pharmacy and they wont deliver, so although it was not much further, it is down to the village, and UP UP UP home again.

So I will forget about increasing the gears and just keep doing this then. I will also start having short bursts on the in-house recumbant.

With regards to foot position, I should have asked months ago really, in the ponys stirrups I use toes and ball only so as not to get stuck with heel down stretching my calves. I assumed from watching the little girl that comes with me on her bike that I should use the middle/arch of my foot. Today in fact I did heels down to stretch them and realised that they would be shortening if I use toes and balls and didnt know which was best.

I am glad someone put me right on this, may find it easier now. Going to put the seat more forwards again, the last 2 days have been worse with it back. If I stay in the present set of gears for winter when it gets colder and my muscles and joints may hurt more, then in summer I can give increasing gears again. Better to be safe than sorry I suppose.

Once again, thanks all.

 

[Auntie Helen]

Well whilst husband was mending the 4 punctures we picked up yesterday between the two of us he also counted the chainring gear numbers and I plugged them into Crackle's spreadsheet.

Interestingly although Uncle James has a Trice Q too, his is three years older and the gearing is quite different. It turns out I have a higher highest and a lower lowest gear than him.

I've plugged in the cadence numbers at 80 and discover I should be hitting 25mph in my top gear when cycling with the correct cadence and I'm only getting about 20 at the moment so my cadence is clearly too low (which I knew anyway from timing it).

Armed with the spreadsheet duly filled in we're off on a 30 mile ride today together and we'll see how we do at a higher cadence. I do find I'm jiggling about more on the seat at that speed but I suppose I'll get used to it as someone said above.

Thanks again Crackle for the very helpful spreadsheet!

 

[Crackle]

Auntie Helen. If there's any differences in the figures on my spreadsheet and actual on the road readings, then it will be down to the tyre sizes entered on the spreadsheet. For your wheels I've taken the 20x1.7 tyre size as 19.7 inch diameter but depending on which tyres you have that value can be anything from 18.2 to 20.2, which could make a difference of @0.5mph either way on your cadence chart in your highest gears.

Now that you're familiar with it, you'll understand what I mean. To be 100% sure you need to check your tyres for the exact markings, preferrably the ISO markings i.e. 47-406 corresponds to the 19.7 in your spreadsheet.

I had put this link in the spreadsheet but I hadn't made it clear, nor explained why it's important.

http://www.ctc.org.uk/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabID=3802

It's a table of tyre sizes and size markings. As you can see there's a lot of potential confusion, so some careful looking at your tyres is needed. Hopefully they've got the ISO markings on them. If so use them.

It's because of the tyre nomenclature confusion that different gear inch calculation websites will give you different results. You think you've chosen the correct tyre size but in fact it's an American website so you haven't or vice versa.

Apologies that I didn't really make this clear before but I thought I'd better had now as you're using it as a calibration tool in a far more precise way than I'd ever bothered with myself. That's the perils of handing out things you've developed for yourself to others.

 

[Auntie Helen]

Ah, I'm not really using it REALLY properly as a calibration tool, more as a tool to help us get the hang of cadence and have more of an idea what we're doing. We've discovered that the trip computers are fairly dodgy anyway, having cycled side by side at the same speed and having readings 1mph different. But it all works together to give us an overall idea of how we're doing and I certainly need to increase my cadence.

I will check on the tyre site but I'm probably going to switch my Marathon Racers to some Big Apples shortly so it'll all have to change again!

Thanks again for doing it, Crackle.

 

[Crackle]

Ah, I'm not really using it REALLY properly as a calibration tool, more as a tool to help us get the hang of cadence and have more of an idea what we're doing. We've discovered that the trip computers are fairly dodgy anyway, having cycled side by side at the same speed and having readings 1mph different. But it all works together to give us an overall idea of how we're doing and I certainly need to increase my cadence.

I will check on the tyre site but I'm probably going to switch my Marathon Racers to some Big Apples shortly so it'll all have to change again!

Thanks again for doing it, Crackle.

I can believe that but did you put the same tyre size in both and if so do you both have the same tyres?

On my mtn bike, I swopped the off-road to on road tyres but I forgot about changing the computer and didn't twig until I compared the speeds and time of previous rides and realized that despite my supposed better average speed I was still taking the same amount of time to do it. Then it clicked.

It's really essential to put the tyre sizes you have in. Put them in to small and your computer will over read, too big and it will under read and on a longer ride it will be significantly different.

 

[purplemoon]

Ok, been out for a ride this arvo and tested out the gearing and cadence

My bike's gearing is 28/38/40 front and 11-13-15-18-21-24-28-32 rear.

I was using gears 2(38) and 5(18) which gives me a cadence of 80 and I covered 6.5 miles in 30 mins, stopping just a minute or two for a drink of water halfway, so your speed of 14.07 mph is pretty accurate too

Oh, forgot to mention there was also a fairly steep bridge en route which I crossed twice without stopping or changing gear on the way up