Based on my recent discovery of MMM and this forum, and my desire to get healthy and save money, I bought a bike and started riding it to work.
Whoo boy!
It's been a rough week. I'm 41, 6'0", 270 lbs. And I haven't biked since I was a kid. Although pleasantly surprised to find that you really don't forget how to ride a bike, I really had no idea it would be this difficult.
Congratulations on making this change! You wont regret it.
I think I'm shifting wrong. I can't shift while pedaling hard uphill. If I try to shift, usually nothing happens at all, and then all of a sudden the chain jumps off the gear. Do I need to stop pedaling before I can shift? I don't want to stop pedaling because I'll lose all my momentum heading into the hill.
It is a bit like driving a manual transmission in that there is a definite art to shifting. I do think it is worth your time to go out on some nice long (moderately flat at first) rides where your whole goal is to develop some intuition about how your speed and effort should corresponds to which range of gears you’re in and how to gradually shift across all the gears. A general rule of thumb is that you always want your chain to be, more or less, straight ; this means that while there are 21 speeds on your bicycle, you really only use, I don’t know, maybe 2/3 of them (imagine how not straight your chain would be if you were in what amounted to the easiest gear in the back and the hardest gear in the front; you could find this same resistance by picking some other combination of back and front gears (like both back and front in a moderately difficult position)). With regards to stopping pedaling when shifting: you don’t actually stop pedaling, but you do need to ease up on your pedaling as you shift; this takes tension off of the chain and allows it to move across the gears without the stress that is causing it to jump off the gears. The degree to which you need to ease up depends on how good of a job you did setting yourself up for the next gear (in other words, do you have to jump across all the gears because you didn’t gradually move into easier ones? Then you’ll probably need to almost stop pedaling).
In my past experience the chain would come off when I found my legs grinding to a halt on some tough hill causing me to make a drastic shift across a bunch of intermediate gears trying to find the easiest one; instead of doing that you need to be anticipating the difficulty that your legs will face and preemptively (but gradually and successively) shift to gears that allow you to maintain the pace you were keeping in a tougher gear.
I shift all the time. My bike has 21 speeds (3x7), so I'm constantly shifting up or down, based on the slightest change of grade. Is this normal, or should I be using my speed to shift less often?
The slope of a street can change a bunch in a short period of time, and if you don’t yet have much leg strength then each new gradient will be difficult for your legs (since they’re probably weak from not cycling in a long time) and you’ll want to shift a lot. As your legs get stronger you’ll be able to achieve the same effect of shifting just by pedaling a little harder for 20 seconds or so; in other words, shifting your level of exertion will become something that’s easy for you to do and you’ll shift gears a great deal less. The best thing to do is use this time where you feel the need to shift a lot to figure out how to shift artfully.
I have a giant hill I have to climb to get to work. This hill is a real bear. I mean it is seriously steep. I walked to work a few times before trying biking, and it is extremely difficult even without a bike. I wish I had something to compare it to... it's like them hills in San Francisco - a lot of cars even have trouble getting up it. Is there any hope for me? Will the hill get easier as I lose weight and get in shape?
The hills will become a lot easier. Since we don’t know whether the stretch you’re talking about is actually a mountain or if your legs just think it is a mountain, it is hard to say if it will ever become a trivial thing to pedal up it or not. Either way, it will become easier and you will become stronger because of it. There are techniques to climb really steep grades (think tacking in a zig zag pattern (that is as large or small as you need it to be) like in sailing). But, in a physics sense, the lighter you are and the stronger your legs are, the faster you will go and the easier it will be come. So you can count on things getting better.
I had to figure out how to carry my stuff. I brought a bunch of protein bars and instant oatmeal to work, because I can't eat breakfast before leaving. Figured that one out pretty quick! I leave my laptop at home and use my work computer and TeamViewer to log into it. All I'm carrying now is a change of clothes and lunch, in a backpack.
If the cycling is something that sticks, you can justify purchasing some panniers which will allow you to carry quite a bit of stuff with very little increased effort. Also, there are creative ways to add carrying capacity. Just look up DIY panniers. As a matter of fact, look up something like "how to shift properly" on youtube, you'll def find tutorials that will help you out.
My thighs are burning and I lost 2 pounds! Pretty much constant burn. I'm hoping that will go away. But if it does go away, won't I just pedal harder and bring back the burn? My weight has fluctuated between 272-278 for several years. But when I got on the scale yesterday, it read 270! Man, I sure would love to lose 2 pounds a week for the next year or so!
I have traveled the same 10 mile round trip on my bike 5 days a week for the last two years and I can still get as intense of a burn as I did the very first trip—provided I push myself hard enough. You can guarantee that even with no burn you’re doing your heart a huge favor, but the big hill that you have to ride up will always give you an opportunity to give your body a fat-blasting/muscle building type exercise if you want it. Or you can just casually ride up it sipping coffee and laughing about the days you used to have to walk up it. I imagine that if you are eating well (depending on the distance) you could easily lose two pounds a week for quite a long time.
