Why Everyone in My Family Has Gears Except Me

I have a trail-rating system that works a lot better than the usual green-circle, blue-square, and black-diamond one.

A beginner trail is one my six-year-old can ride. An intermediate trail is one my nine-year-old and wife enjoy. An advanced trail is one my nine-year-old can't ride and my wife remembers, in some detail, that I picked the route.

An expert trail is one that makes mountain biking disappear from the family calendar for a few weeks.

This system is not recognized by local land managers, the International Mountain Bicycling Association, or anyone else with access to liability insurance. It also changes all the time, because kids get better fast, trails change, and what I think is a fun techy bit is not always what my wife thinks.

Still, it tells me more than "blue."

A blue trail in one town might be smooth, rolling singletrack with a few roots. A blue trail in Colorado might be loose rock, exposure, ledges, and a sign at the trailhead to make clear that nobody forced you to keep going. Official ratings are useful, but they depend on the trails around them, and on how bold the locals are.

My family scale is simpler. Did everyone ride it? Did everyone have fun? Did anyone spend the drive home going over my decisions?

Those are useful things to measure.

Everyone Else Has Gears

The important part is that everyone else in my family rides a bike with gears.

My wife rides a geared mountain bike because I want her to enjoy cycling. My nine-year-old rides a geared bike for the same reason. My six-year-old just moved from a single-speed 16-inch bike to a seven-speed 20-inch bike, and he likes riding more now that not every hill has the same answer.

He didn't give up the purity of single speeding. He got six more ways to be less miserable.

This has gone great. He can ride farther, climb easier, and spend less time attacking short hills with the cadence of someone mixing concrete by hand. The bike fits him better, the brakes work better, and the gears let him decide how hard a climb has to be.

None of this has hurt his character.

Kids don't need bike hardship handed to them by adults who already own too many bikes. They need bikes that fit, trails they can ride, and enough good days that they want to come back.

Same with my wife. She doesn't need a single speed to do mountain biking right. She needs a bike that lets her climb at a comfortable pace, rest when she wants to, and deal with the terrain without every hill turning into a fight.

I want riding with my family to be fun. That's why they have gears.

I'm the one who took the useful bits off on purpose.

The First Single Speed Was Supposed to Help My Wife

My first single speed wasn't built because I'd found some deeper form of cycling. It was built to make riding with my wife work better.

I had more experience and more fitness. Riding the same trail on similar bikes, I either went too slow for the bike to feel fun, or I got out ahead and waited at intersections, which is technically riding together but doesn't always feel like it.

The fix wasn't to tell her to get faster.

The fix was to make my own bike slower.

I found a cheap On-One Inbred frame and built it up with cheap parts and whatever I had lying around. It was rigid, simple, and nothing to baby. Taking the gears off made familiar trails more fun at a slower pace. Climbs took work, momentum mattered, and I had fewer chances to drift away from the person I was supposed to be riding with.

The single speed was never meant to make her ride harder. It was meant to make me easier to ride with.

This worked remarkably well.

It also created a problem.

I liked the bike.

Cheap Parts Become Expensive

Single speeds can be cheap. You can convert an old hardtail with a cog, some spacers, a tensioner, and a willingness to spend an evening fiddling with the chainline. There's less drivetrain to buy, fewer parts to break, and no derailleur hanging under the frame waiting for a rock to teach it a lesson.

That was part of the appeal. The Inbred gave spare, cheap parts somewhere useful to live.

This is still one of the best reasons to build a single speed. An old frame that doesn't make sense as a modern geared bike can turn into a great one-geared bike. You can pull wheels, brakes, cranks, and forks off a bunch of unrelated bikes and build something that works. It might not be pretty, but you don't need pretty to climb slowly.

Single speeding can save money.

It can also turn into a way to spend a lot of money to end up with fewer parts.

My cheap parts-bin bike led to hand-picked frames, better wheels, expensive hubs, a pile of cogs, a few chainrings, and enough ratio experimenting to blow the whole "it's simple" story wide open. There's now a Krampus, a Karate Monkey, and a setup that lets them share drivetrain parts depending on which bike is allowed to have gears that week.

The bikes are simple.

The stuff around them is not.

This happens to a lot of people who ride single speeds on purpose. Cost got us in the door, but it doesn't explain why someone eventually buys an expensive rear hub that only holds one cog.

At that point, we're not saving money.

We're expressing ourselves badly through hardware.

Chosen Difficulty Is Different

The whole appeal of single speeding comes down to choice.

A limit you pick on purpose can make a familiar ride more interesting. The same limit forced on someone who didn't ask for it just makes the ride worse.

That difference matters.

I know what I'm giving up when I pick one gear. I know some climbs will be harder, some roads will have me spinning like a cartoon, and some parts I'll have to walk. I picked the ratio. I put on the cog. I had every chance to make a smarter call and did it anyway.

My wife and kids didn't ask for this problem.

A kid grinding miserably up a climb isn't finding the calm purity of one gear. He's grinding miserably up a climb. A rider who can't catch her breath because the only gear is too hard isn't feeling mechanical simplicity. She's on a bike without enough options.

Inconvenience you pick can be fun.

Inconvenience handed to you by your dad or husband is usually just inconvenience.

That's why I don't preach single speeding at home. I'll explain why I like it, but I don't treat gears as some moral failure or single speeding as a stage everyone has to go through.

My family gets to enjoy bikes without picking up my particular defect.

Why Make the Same Trail Harder?

The obvious question is still there: if gears help people enjoy riding, why do I take mine off?

Part of the answer goes back to riding with my wife. A single speed made slower group rides more fun without asking anyone else to change. We could ride at about the same pace and still have it feel harder for me.

That's still useful.

The bigger answer is that picking the harder way changes the ride.

A familiar climb turns into a puzzle. Momentum matters more. Your line matters more. A little rise a geared bike wouldn't notice takes real planning when you're stuck in one gear. You learn where to speed up, where to stay seated for traction, and where you're going to have to stand.

Sometimes you learn where to walk.

One gear also takes a whole decision off the table. There's no hunting for the right gear, because you picked it back in the garage. Once the ride starts, the gear talk is over.

You pedal when you can, coast when pedaling isn't doing anything, and push when the hill has finished its argument.

The simple part is mechanical, but it's also mental. The bike gives you fewer answers, so you have to do more with the one you've got.

This doesn't make single speeding better. It makes the trail feel different.

That's enough.

Difficulty Is Personal Anyway

Trail ratings act like they're objective, but every rider shows up with a different bike, body, skill level, and tolerance for bad decisions.

A smooth climb can be easy on a geared cross-country bike and awful on a single speed with big tires. A rocky descent can feel fine to my nine-year-old and terrifying to an adult who started riding last month. My wife can clean a technical section and then get annoyed by a loose climb I barely noticed.

The trail didn't change.

The rider did.

So did the bike.

That's another reason my family rating system works better for me than a symbol on a map. It's about the people I'm actually riding with. It tells me whether a route is likely to make a good day, instead of whether someone once decided it counted as intermediate.

Right now the system looks something like this:

Beginner: My six-year-old can ride most of it without a lot of negotiating.

Intermediate: My nine-year-old and wife enjoy it, and nobody asks why I picked the route.

Advanced: My nine-year-old can't ride big chunks of it, and my wife starts keeping notes on my involvement.

Expert: We should have gone bowling.

There's also a single-speed modifier.

Single speed: Any of the above, but I made it harder on myself.

That one only applies to me.

Gears Are Not a Failure

Cycling has a long habit of turning gear choices into personality tests.

Flat pedals are for beginners. Clipless pedals are for serious riders. Suspension makes sense until someone decides rigid bikes build character. Carbon is too modern. Steel is too heavy. Electronics are pointless. Dropper posts are a must. Whatever you own is right, and whatever the other guy owns has apparently ruined the sport.

I already spent a whole article arguing that nobody needs to be shamed into clipless pedals, so I won't rehash all of it here.

Single-speed culture is just as bad about this.

Some riders talk about gears like they're a lack of discipline instead of one of the best things that ever happened to bikes. This is mostly for show. The same people usually drive to the trailhead in a truck with an automatic, power steering, air conditioning, and enough electronics to talk to a satellite.

Gears work. They help people climb, go farther, and ride harder terrain. They let tired riders rest and new riders learn without fighting the bike on every hill.

My family uses gears because gears are useful.

I ride a single speed because useful isn't the only thing I care about on every ride.

Sometimes I want the challenge. Sometimes I want the quiet. Sometimes I want a short local loop to feel bigger than it is. Sometimes I just want to ride the bike that makes me smile when I pull it off the rack.

None of that means anyone else has to do the same.

Everyone Gets to Choose Their Own Problem

Single speeding started as a way to slow myself down, use up spare parts, and make riding with my wife more fun. It did all three.

Then, like a lot of simple hobbies, it got less simple. The cheap bike led to better bikes. The spare cogs turned into hand-picked ratios. Trying to spend less somehow ended in a few bikes built around having fewer parts.

But the reason it started still holds.

The limit is mine.

My wife has gears because I want her to enjoy riding. My nine-year-old has gears because they help him ride farther and take on more. My six-year-old now has seven gears, and he's so into it that he makes a better case for gears than any diagram could.

I have one gear because, for reasons still under review, that's how I enjoy mine.

The gears aren't the line between serious riders and everyone else. They're tools. My family uses theirs to make the trail easier. I take mine off to make the same trail interesting again.

For me, one gear is enough. For everyone else in the house, it's optional.

Everyone gets to choose their own problem.

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