Bicycles can be equipped with very different gear ranges quite easily. Manufacturers try to guess what sort of gear range their target customers will prefer, but the same bikes are sold in flat Florida and the mountains of Colorado. It is entirely reasonable to customize the gearing on your bike to match your particular strength, endurance, terrain and load, among other variables.

I can't tell you what gears you need. Gearing is a very personal matter, and it is difficult to give good specific recommendations for someone I haven't actually ridden with.

The best gearing for you depends on a large number of variables, including:

• Your weight
• Your strength
• Your endurance
• How far you'll be riding in a day
• How hard you're willing to push
• How much baggage you'll be carrying
• The steepness of the terrain
• The nature of the road surface

There is no magic formula for this, only experimentation will let you determine what gearing suits your needs.

You may find my online gear calculator useful for comparing with your present gearing:

You can have wide-range, medium-range or narrow-range gearing. There is no free lunch here: these options involve a tradeoff. Note that the number of gears the bike has is much less important than the relative sizes of the front and rear sprockets. The various ranges are available in all different numbers of gears.

• Wide-range gearing will generally have lots of nice low gears for easy hill climbing, but big jumps between adjacent gears. If you have very wide-range gearing, you may find there are times when you will be cruising along, and one gear will be lower than you would like...but the next gear up will be too high for comfort.

  Wide-range rear clusters will generally have a largest sprocket with 30 to 24 teeth.

  Wide-range cranksets will generally have small chainrings with 28 or fewer teeth, and will most often have triple chainrings.

  Marketing hype: Wide range gearing was formerly called "touring" gearing, but in the late 1980s, the marketing "experts" decided that "touring" was no longer a useful marketing term, so they re-named these parts as "mountain" equipment. This causes a lot of confusion, because it gives some folks the incorrect impression that wide-range gearing is not appropriate for road use.

• Medium-range gearing offers a compromise, good for general use in rolling terrain, for riders who are not carrying significant amounts of baggage.

  Medium-range rear clusters will generally have a largest sprocket in the 26-29 tooth range.

  Medium-range cranksets will generally have small chainrings with 30 to 36 teeth teeth, either double or triple.

• Narrow-range gearing will allow you to fine-tune the gearing, but narrow-range gearing is not good for climbing unless you're a strong, vigorous rider on a light bike. Narrow-range rear clusters will generally have a largest sprocket of 25 teeth or fewer.

  Narrow-range cranksets will generally have small chainrings with 39 or more teeth teeth, with 52 or 53 for the larger ring.

  The marketeers call narrow-range gearing "road" gearing, rather an oversimiplification. Narrow-range gearing is a good choice for riders who live and ride in flat terrain, and for folks who want to race.