For the last year and a half I have been under the impression that my bike was an 18 speed bike--2 chain rings in the front and a 9 speed cassette in the back. Here's the story of how I found the hidden 19th gear.
I decided to do my Sunday ride from my parents' house in beautiful Mokena, IL. I dropped the wife and dog off at the pool and proceeded to do a loop that included parts of the Old Plank Road Trail along with some of the backroads between there and eekaknaK.
What the bike map I had didn't tell me is that most of the backroads are gravel--not terribly comfortable on a road bike (skinny tires). C'est la vie. Somewhere around mile 19 on the loop map above, riding around 20mph, I hear a growling coming from a yard that I'm passing. I don't think a whole lot of this as this happens often--I'll hear a dog in a yard and they may bark and slam themselves into the fence trying to annoy me or something (dunno, my dog doesn't really bark).
Then out of the corner of my eye, I see this dog snarling and growling, tearing down the driveway and into the street. Now he's got a decent angle, but I'm going at a decent clip. I decide to up the speed to around 22 and leave him behind. Except there's one problem. He's fast--and he doesn't look like he wants to make friends. He's running off my wheel at 22 mph. I bump it up to 23-24 and he speeds up a little bit, but he's starting to falter. I think at this point that he'll probably still catch me if he wants to.
This is where I kick it into adrenaline gear. I really don't feel like being an angry dog's lunch. I'm already on my large chain ring up front, so I drop it into the smallest cog on the back and start hammering. Uphill. My heart rate monitor is beep at me like crazy (it does this when I'm out of a training zone that I set for myself). I get to the top of the hill and finally look back and it appears that the dog is gone.
It takes me about 10 mins or so to settle back down, but unfortunately I'm spent for the rest of the ride. I bonk about 5 miles out and am miserable the rest of the way. When I get back I look at my HRM. I got my heart rate up to 187 (I'm guessing that this is my max--or pretty darn close to it), and my max speed was 30.2. Not bad for uphill.
