Pedaling is how we propel our bikes down the road or trail. We do it; We just don't talk about it. We talk about diet, equipment and training.
So imagine my surprise when a young woman asked me about spinning versus big-gear pushing. By spinning, she meant pedaling her road bike at high cadences, not "Spinning," the stationary health club workout.
"I'm gonna race," she said. "What I don't know is how many weeks or months I should train in low gears, spinning, and when I should start pushing bigger gears the way I'll have to in races."
It'd been a long time since I'd thought much about spinning. Back in the '70s, all cyclists thought about it a lot, and about "ankling," rotating the foot at the ankle to better put power to the pedal.
To ankle correctly, you pushed the pedal over 12 o'clock with your heel down. You brushed the pedal past 6 o'clock, toe down. Then you flattened out your foot as you pulled the pedal back up toward 12 o'clock.
Everyone knew all that back then, just as everyone knew about spinning. Magazines ran articles about both. Smooth, fast pedaling, we agreed, was the hallmark of an accomplished road cyclist. Good cyclists spun. Black-socks dweebs pounded big gears.
The cyclist who could ride with the group in a gear two teeth lower than anyone else...was the classy cyclist. But that was years ago.
So as I answered the young woman's question, in my words and phrases I heard voices from those days, echoes from the clip-'n-strap crypt.
Spinning, the old-timers told us, taught you to apply force all around the pedal circle. Your legs learned to cooperate, not fight each other. Spinning made your leg muscles loose, "supple." Suppleness was the goal.
If you weren't a supple, smooth pedaler, at high cadences you'd bounce in the saddle for all to see. You chain would jump and whip. Your bike would jerk and move all over the road.
Pushing makes you a cart-horse, old-timers said. Pushing big gears teaches you to pedal "square," applying force only on the down stroke. You become a one-speed laborer-at-the-pedals, not a complete bike rider.
Training for miles in big gears makes you tired. It may make you strong but you need lots of rest between efforts. If you "die" in a big gear in a race, they'd tell you, you take forever to recover.
Spinning makes you a race-horse, they'd say. If you train in low gears, it won't make you weak; It'll make you efficient. When you need to turn the big gear, you'll be ready to do it.
We listened. In the winter, many of us put on lower gears, gears that forced us to spin. Wintertime spinning broke bad big-gear habits we'd formed in the racing season, and it kept us warmer on winter rides.
Those same old-timers talked about "snap," the ability to increase your pedaling cadence from 85 rpm, say, to 105 rpm in an instant, without standing up, without a sign of strain.
Tourists, triathletes and time-trialists didn't need snap; they chose their own road speeds. Racers in packs (on road or track) had to respond to frequent sudden accelerations or be left behind. Snap was essential.
You developed snap, those old-timers said, by doing miles and miles of fast pedaling. Pushing giant gears at 60 or 70 rpm deadened your snap.
And spinning won't hurt you, they said. You can do it for a lifetime. We heard that. Cycling for a lifetime was what we had in mind.
We were pretty committed. There weren't so many of us. We were kooks in shrunk wool shorts and puckered wool jerseys, way, way outside the mainstream. We liked it outside; We intended to stay there.
If riding was weird, we wanted to do it forever, or until some doctor said we couldn't. We were determined we'd ride to that last appointment. Women rode to the hospital to have their babies. Couples rode directly from their receptions to honeymoons on solos or tandems.
We wanted to ride forever. How could we do that? If you believed the old-timers, and we surely did, we would bend our elbows. We would wear long tights until the thermometer read 70 degrees, and we would spin low gears. Any questions?
Not much about pedaling has changed since then. We don't pull up against toe-straps anymore, our feet can rotate a bit or a lot, and some of us ride slightly longer cranks. And no one talks about pedaling at all.
Maybe we don't talk about pedaling because we can't do anything about it TODAY. We can't change our pedaling style TODAY; We can't buy anything TODAY that'll improve our pedaling in time for tomorrow's ride.
It takes time and practice to learn elegant pedaling. Not money or gadgets, not technology. You have to learn it on the bike, not the web. We're not so patient these days as we were. We'd rather buy things.
Most of us guy cyclists couldn't buy things in the '70s. Things were cheap but we didn't have much money. We shared dumpy apartments and worked part-time in bike shops. We borrowed cars or drove old VWs on borrowed gas money.
Once we had good bikes and a set or two of spare wheels, we needed money mostly for tires and entry fees. Pancake mix and bananas. Girlfriends, bless 'em, paid for movies.
We did have time, and old-timers who advised patience. "Takes five years to make a bike rider," they said. We didn't want it to take five years, but we trusted them. They'd been right about so many other things.
So we bent our elbows. We wore tights until it reached 70 degrees, and we spun low gears for miles and miles. Most of us are still spinning today, 20-odd years later, and we will be, until some doc says we can't.
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