Went down to a 17T cog
During the week I had been noticing that my gearing felt a lot harder. Was it due to the hills in SE London or that I’d got a little bit heavier? This haven’t changed that much over the last couple of months and I’ve been happily covering 150 miles a week with no problems at all. But I’ve been feeling it in my knees so I thought it best that I took a look at my drivetrain. It could be the bottom bracket or it could be the hub bearings. You never know. So I took it all apart and cleaned up all the gunk. That was quite satisfying in itself. One of my wheel clients had let me keep an old flip-flop hub which came with a fixed sprocket and that sprocket happened have 17 teeth. A dab of grease and on it went. The bottom bracket and hub were fine but the teeth on my current sprocket looked extremely worn like witches fingers. I know what you’re thinking: you should change all three parts of the drive train together. I know that the chain needs doing and I do have a new one but I’ll do that next week.
To test it out I went for a short shopping trip to Lewisham to bank a few cheques and get some ink for my morning pages pen. Wow, what a difference. It felt easier, smoother and a lot less irksome on the knees. I was spinning at a cadence that I only normally reach at higher speeds and the overall experience was a lot more agreeable. So I’m 43×17 now. I think that’s 66 gear inches. But you need to get away from those figures and just go by the feel. It feels good now.
The other thing that went well today was my sausage casserole. I was going to make a chicken curry but suddenly decided to make a sausage casserole instead. I have new Le Creuset pot from friends who came to visit a couple of weeks ago. All I did was fry the sausages gently, add onions and then carrots and mushrooms. Salt and pepper and a couple of teaspoons of cornflour. That was it and it tasted amazing.