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5 comments
You may not need to change a thing, depends on your pedaling style and fitness/power. If you made it up twice without dying I'd say it can't be too bad.
I'm not a youngster and not especially fit, and I would think your set-up is about right. Maybe when your chain-rings become worn you could swap them for a 50/34 compact but you might not even notice the difference.
As Rod says, mountains are supposed to be hard. Ventoux in particular.
Firstly, it isn't necessarily true that you could make your life easier by changing your set-up - too low a gear can be just as tiring as too high a gear. My rule of thumb for big climbs was to find a comfortable gear at the bottom, then change down a couple of sprockets and that would be comfortable all the way up. If you could do this, you don't need to change anything. If not, it will have to be a smaller chainring or bigger cassette.
Secondly, mountains aren't easy, whichever set-up you have.
You can also try a slightly bigger cassette with the compact - Miche do at least a 12-30 for Campag, although 2T more may not be worth it on its own, and I think IRD do higher (although they're bloody expensive).
I'm not a Campag man, but I'd assume you could replace the semi-compact chainset with a compact (hopefully just the rings themselves) pretty easily. I.e. get a 50/34 rather than 52/36.