single speeds for achy knees

My 42nd birthday approaches. At this point I've got well over 3o years of sometimes not-so-smart riding under my belt, up my sleeve, and possibly down my pants. What this means, for all practical purposes, is not that I'm a far superior rider. It means that the collective bangs, bashes, crashes, creaks and tweaks are beginning to take their toll. For me it's the knees. One of these days they'll have put some fancy titanium joints in me. But until then I have to take care of what I've got.

For the past 7 years or so I've mostly ridden a couple of single speeds, with an occasional jaunt on a tourer with bar end shifters. Suddenly, last fall, I decided to rebuild my favorite old rigid mountain bike with all updated modern gear. It's the first trigger-shifting bike I've ridden in quite some time. By February, I had my first knee injury in ages. I should have seen it coming.

Why? Because I was always in just the right gear. Sound crazy? Well, it ain't. Instant shifting into a truckload of different gears means the rider can almost always maintain essentially the same level of pressure on the pedals. Going up hill becomes a lot like going downhill in terms of the stress it puts on joints. And the constant pressure with no change may be great for efficiency in racing, but not so much for just riding when speed really doesn't matter so much.

When you ride a single speed you're almost never in exactly the right gear. Sometimes you pedal hard and slow and sometimes you spin like wild. If you're getting a little creaky in the joints, that helps to prevent repetitive stress injuries.

Now, I'm a bit of a stomper. I always have been. In days of yore I couldn't get a high enough gear on a standard MTB drivetrain. And the fact that I'm always a gear or three too high is definitely part of the problem. I could certainly learn (couldn't I?) to shift regularly into a gear that's 3 lower than the usual and that would be better, if not quite perfect. But it's awfully hard to reprogram that kind of thing.

If you're having that problem, a nice single speed might help. Give it a shot. If you already have a bike you love, the ENO eccentric hub from White Industries is truly a thing of beauty and lets you single-ize your bike without modifying your frame or using a clunky tensioner. The folks at BikeMan built me an ENO wheel a couple of years ago and it has run beautifully all along.

If you can't go the ss route because of the local terrain or because you just can't bear the thought, try going with one of the new-ish cranksets like the FSA Comet (or anything else that has something like a 27/39 double setup). They don't have a granny gear, but they also don't have a 44 toother either. You'll spend most of your time on the 27 and probably find it quite pleasant.