drossall wrote:Oh enjoy
And if we should meet and you show it to me, I'll be genuinely interested and I'd love to have a go. I just saw the funny side
There is, though, an argument that a better understanding and direct control of a tool (a bike for getting the pleasures of cycling, in this case) can greatly increase the pleasures found in using it. I think this is true of learning in a direct fashion, via an understanding of the control modes, for bicycle gearing.
It's certainly true in many crafts. I learnt all about the advantages to be gained from hand tool woodworking over machine-only woodworking via many hundreds of hours of errors and corrections. The hand tool use gives a great insight into how wood is best cut, planes, shaped, glued and otherwise turned into furniture. I believe the same approach works for cycling.
This is not to dismiss stuff like electronic gears or any other automated mechanism of cycling. But if you understand the base operations and principles intimately, from having to arrange and operate them yourself, this still allows improvements to cycling such as knowing how to best select a gear ratio and when .... even if you eventually do so with an electronic thing and a button. I use machine tools as well as hand tools in woodworking but understand much better how to employ the machine because of what I understand it to be doing at it's interface with the wood, from my learning with the intimacy of the hand tool to wood interface.
Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes