Originally Posted by
Carbonfiberboy
When I was first doing long rides, I was out on my steel DT bike and got dropped by a guy with brifters. I was holding his wheel fine as long as the slope stayed steady, but he easily dropped me in rollers when he just outshifted me. Besides the weight, that was a big reason I bought a modern bike...
This.
My only road bikes have had downtube shifters. My first, in the 1970s. Well, that's all anyone had then. When you hit the rollers you did what everyone did -- sit and mash or stand up and dance. There was relatively little shifting. If you needed to shift you sat, shifted, then either stood again while trying to minimize the loss of momentum, or double shift down and sit awhile to mash.
Tricky business with 10 speeds -- meaning, two chain rings, five cog freewheel. Especially those corncob freewheels. That's when I discovered why all the grand tour racers did that painful looking rock-and-roll thing, bobbing up and down, side to side, grinding everything they had into a 21 tooth "big" gear. No wonder they looked constipated.
I remember Lance Armstrong switching back to downtube shifters for some mountain stages, supposedly to save a bit of weight. I watched him powering up those climbs, moving seemingly effortlessly between sitting and standing, rarely shifting, and never doing that painful looking 1960s style rock-and-roll thing with hands clutching the top bar (basically, how Chris Froome *always* looks on climbs, like he's trying to pass both gas and competitors simultaneously).
Ah, to be that naive again. Turns out all I needed was the confidence of youth, EPO and cooperative insider help to go with those downtube shifters.
Despite it all, when I got my only other road bike, ever, last summer -- an '89 Centurion Ironman with 14 glorious speeds and a bike weighing only in the low 20 lbs and with indexed shifting -- I figured I was ready to kill on the moderately fast-ish local B group rides, despite my grey hair and creaky knees.
Nope. Not even close.
Oh, I did okay on the flats and modest continuous 1%-3% grades. For about 10 miles.
But as soon as we hit the rollers at the 10-20 mile stretch I got dropped. Every time. By folks pretty close to my age (60), not just younger, stronger riders.
I was losing momentum with the downtube shifters. I watched the others and they could seamlessly, effortlessly shift up and down, climbing out of the saddle for a few strokes to maintain momentum, then shifting *while* standing or as they sat. I couldn't do that.
Yeah, okay, the carbon frames and clipless stuff probably helped, compared with my old school stuff.
So roller by roller, one 50 yard long 6% climb at a time, over the miles, I dropped farther and farther back, until I couldn't bridge the gap anymore on the downhills and flats. Usually I could hang on for about 20 miles of their scheduled 50-60 mile rides before I fell off the back and went my own way.
Gimme brifters. I may keep my Centurion Ironman stock, but my next road bike will have brifters, if only for those fast-ish group rides (hey, I'm old and asthmatic, and 17 mph over a 50 mile ride is fast for me).