Bicycling

... and keep pedaling without coming to a complete stop. If you don't have gears to shift down to, you won't be able to pedal uphill for very long. The steeper the hill, the harder it will become to keep the pedals moving, unless you have gears to shift down to.



Basically, if you're going uphill and it's getting too hard to pedal, you'll want to start shifting the gears down. If you start going downhill again, the pedals will start spinning too fast and you'll want to gradually shift the chain back up to bigger sprockets. As you shift the gears down to smaller sprockets, the strength required from you to keep pedaling uphill remains the same. The bike will be going slower but you'll still be able to pedal.

As you shift down while pedaling uphill, the gear shifter switches the chain to the next smaller sprocket. If it's a steep hill, you'll gradually shift through all of the available smaller sprockets to keep your bike moving. Once you reach level ground again, or even slightly downhill, you'll gradually shift the gears back up to bigger sprockets The bigger sprockets will make it so that your pedals don't go so fast that you can't keep up. The bigger the sprocket, the faster your bike will go on level ground or downhill.

You don't need a 27 speed bike for the kind of riding you'll be doing but more gears is definitely better.

I realize my explanation of gears is repetitive. Hopefully it makes sense. The words "speeds" and "gears" mean the same thing. If you have a 10 speed bike, you have 10 gears on your bike.

One option for you might be to look for a good used mountain bike in the classifieds. That's probably my next move.

TYY