Some of you know this, but maybe some don’t. The bikes we are using have no gears. The pedal is directly connected to the wheel by the chain – if you stop pedalling, you stop! No free-wheel. Actually, if you stop pedalling at anything remotely looking like speed, then it will end badly – with your face in the ground! Essentially the pedal acts as a brake.

There is quite a trend for fixed gear (or single speed – which is the same but you can free-wheel); a kind of grungy, courier-type look that many people are adopting. It does make for leaner, cleaner looking bikes with much less kit, but I think there is also a joy to be found in “fixies” which you don’t get elsewhere. For one, the control you have over the bike is greatly increased – you can start to use the pedals for direction and stopping far more than with gears. More than that though, there is a connectivity with the road. You feel, as you pedal, as if the road and you are one thing, joined through the rubber of the tyres.

The late, great, Sheldon Brown has much to say on fixed wheel bikes on his website, including history and how to build one. It is well worth checking out if you are into bikes. Be warned though – there are some gruesome pictures of finger injuries (no free-wheel means the back wheel in motion is fairly brutal – so whilst cleaning or repairing you MUST keep your fingers out of the way of the spokes!).

Of course, one of the other fantastic things about being fixed is no matter what terrain, no matter how fast you are going, uphill or downhill, the distance travelled with one revolution of the pedals is always the same. People more clever than me can do the math, and the wonderful folk on the forum “London Fixed Gear and Single Speed” calculate that Mr Bear and I will do somewhere in the region of 4,500,000 spins of the pedals on this trip! Equally amazing and daunting!

We have been doing a bit of publicity of the blog – and have created a Facebook Group (with many of you already joining – thank you!) and writing on various relevant forums and websites. We are getting lots of hits now – which means we need to raise the blogging game – and rest-assured that each and every time someone reads a page both of us are spurred on in our mission. I have added some buttons to the right – so feel free to Digg, Stumble, Reddit or RSS us. Thanks for all the supportive comments from friends, colleagues, fellow-cyclers, manufacturers and everyone else from around the world.

Keep it fixed. (picture from Stacy Innerst/Post-Gazette)