February rides

[north woods gal]

Good idea on the bicycling gear, Crankin. Also a good time of year to do some rebuilding or even start thinking about changing or adding bikes.

My Salsa Fargo is a good example. It's a drop bar mountain bike with 29er wheels/tires, kind of a cult bike for those of us who have them. Love the bike in every respect with one huge exception. It has SRAM Apex shifters with I HATE. The problem is the single paddle that is used for both upshifting and down shifting on SRAM. In order to down shift, I have to move the paddle twice the distance in, compared to moving it a short distance for a higher gear. With my hands, I struggle to reach in far enough when I need to downshift and if I don't reach in far enough, I actually shift to a bigger gear, not a lower gear and that completely kills things when I'm in a climb. Even when I do it right, it's still slow and awkward to downshift. MUCH, MUCH prefer Shimano 105, Ultegra and so on because downshifting and upshifting is on different levers and I have enough reach with both. Much more manageable for me.

At this point, it's either convert everything over to Shimano - and that won't be cheap - or trade it in on another bike. Decisions, decisions.