When I’m not with my daughter, working at the radio station, working the race track, or working on side jobs, you can usually find me riding my bicycle. I haven’t written much about it on FM.com, lately (thanks, Twitter & Facebook), but I am pretty big into cycling and I have been riding seriously for a little over a month, now

When I was a kid, I used to ride my bike all the time. There wasn’t much for a kid to do in Eagle, Wisconsin, besides swim on the lake and ride all over the damn place. There was a loop that I used to ride that would take me from Eagle to Mukwonago to East Troy to Elkhorn to Palmyra(ish) and back to Eagle. It took me about three hours do to on my mountain bike and it was roughly 38 miles long.

Recently, I finally ditched my old Schwinn mountain bike (that I got when I was 13) and purchased a new Trek FX 7.3 hybrid road bike. It’s a road bike with straight handlebars. Don’t get me wrong, I like it, but now that I am hooked on cycling and riding some serious miles, I am considering trading up to a true road bike. From the last week of June through today, I have ridden over 300 miles, and while the bike feels good for the first 20 miles, it is really not very comfortable thereafter.

Back to my point of this article. When I was a kid and we had our mountain bikes, we used to call each other sissies if we would change gears out of the big chainring (gears by the pedals) when going up hills. We would put the cassette (gears by the back wheel) onto the biggest cog in the back while going uphill, but if we changed to the smaller chainring we would ridicule each other.

Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t switched my new bike off of the biggest chainring.

I have been logging a lot of my rides on Map My Ride and DailyMile.com (best fitness site, ever). While perusing those sites, I have come across a lot of good forum posts and articles by people who ride a heck of a lot more than I do. One of the things that I learned is that the technique that I was using, above, is completely wrong.

Cross-chaining is when you are riding your bike with the chain on the big chainring and the big cog OR the little chainring and the little cog. Those are no-nos, apparently. After about the 200th mile on my bike, I started hearing a lot of chain rubbing and the gears weren’t changing like I wanted them to. It turned out that I had been messing up the settings by frequently cross-chaining the drivetrain.

From what I’ve read, you should be using the middle chainring for everything except for instances when you want to go really fast (use the big chainring and the smallest three or four cogs) or you are going up a very steep hill (use the little chainring and the biggest three or four cogs).

Who knew? I didn’t. Now that I do know, I am shaving a lot of time off of my loop routes and I can smoothly transform between a fast downhill and a steep uphill. It’s a lot easier when you do it the right way.

Just thought you should know.