Is my gearing fine?
I'll try to make this short. My bike came with a 50-34 crankset and an 11-34T cassette (8-speed). I don't live in the mountains and I very rarely used the 34T cog. A few months ago, I replaced it with an 11-28T since I was struggling with the large gaps between gears. Recently, I've found myself frequenting a short but steep climb here in my area. It's under 7 km long, 614 m high with an average gradient of 9.1%. It has a couple of super steep areas that are 20-30%. Looking at my data, my cadence hovers around 40-60 in the duration of the climb, which is low. However, I don't experience any knee pain (and never have since I started cycling more than 2 years ago). I do feel out of breath, which goes against what I read that lower cadence is more taxing to the muscular system than the cardiovascular system. My best time is 45 minutes.
Do you think my present gearing is fine, or should I swap it out ASAP? I do plan on going to 11-30/32T in the future, but that's a long way from now and maybe by then, I'd have bought a different bike. Side question, do low cadence workloads make me a stronger cyclist?
Keep in mind this is the only prolonged climb that I ride. I used to do centuries without even breaking past 1000 m of elevation gain. I hope that's a good illustration of the terrain here.
Last edited by djdelarosa25; 09-09-21 at 07:24 AM.