Hi,

You've gotten lots of good advice about saddles and gears. Until I started riding seriously earlier this year, I really didn't understand bicycle gearing at all. I thought of gears in terms of shifting in a car, you start with 1st, go to 2nd, etc. But with bikes you can pretty much shift to where ever you are comfortable.

I started with 21 gears (3x7). After reading a little on the internet about how to shift, I put the front in the middle (2nd) and rode shifting just the back gears until I felt comfortable. Then I started working in the shifts on the front gears as I rode up and down hills. Sometimes I would end up spinning madly or pumping so hard that I turned blue in the face, but that's ok. It was how I learned.

HTH