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There are three separate costs and they are worth separating, because they have very different severities.

Immediate risk. This is the real one. Shifting the front under heavy load can drop the chain, and if you are standing and pushing on a climb, a dropped chain means your foot goes to the floor with nothing under it. People fall this way. A dropped chain can also wedge between chainring and frame and scar the frame, which on a carbon frame is not a cosmetic problem.

Wear. Real but slow. Shifting works by deliberately letting the chain climb sideways off one sprocket onto another, and doing that under tension grinds the ramps and the chain plates against each other harder. It accelerates wear on cassette, chainrings and chain — measurably over years, not noticeably over months.

Sudden failure. Rare on a well-adjusted modern drivetrain and much less rare on a worn or badly indexed one. A tired chain shifting under load is how bent derailleur hangers and snapped chains usually happen.

So it is mostly the first item. Not slow poison — an occasional acute risk.

You are describing the classic mistake, and it is not the oiling — it is what happens after.

The sequence that matters:

1. Wipe the chain clean first, with a rag, before any oil goes on. Back-pedal the chain through a folded cloth several times. This removes the old lubricant and the grit suspended in it.
2. Apply lubricant to the rollers, one drop per link, while turning the cranks slowly. The lubricant needs to get inside the rollers — that is the only place it does any work.
3. Wait a minute, then wipe the outside of the chain thoroughly. This is the step people skip and it is the most important one.

Any oil left on the outside of the chain does nothing except collect dust. That is your black chain: not dirt that arrived, but dirt that got glued on by surplus lubricant. A properly lubricated chain looks almost dry on the outside and is slippery only inside.

Oiling every two or three days on top of that is far more than needed and is making it worse, because each application adds more surface oil for grit to stick to.

The practical detail people forget: strip the bike overnight.

Bags, computer, lights, pump, tools — all of it comes off and comes inside anyway for weather reasons. A stripped bike is less attractive than a loaded one, and more importantly, if the worst does happen you have lost a bike rather than a bike plus everything needed to continue.

Also take a photo of each bike with the frame number visible before you leave home, and keep it on your phone. It costs a minute and it is the difference between a report the police can act on and a description of a black gravel bike.

The trick that makes it fast is to use the brake pads as the tool.

Fold a rag or a piece of kitchen paper, dampen it lightly, slide it between the pad and the rim, squeeze the lever gently and spin the wheel. The pad presses the cloth into the braking surface with even pressure all the way round, including into the grooves, and the wheel does the work.

A few rotations, turn the cloth to a clean part, repeat. Both sides at once because there are two pads. This takes under a minute per wheel and gets most of the deposit.

It also solves your solvent constraint neatly. The liquid is on the cloth rather than on the wheel, so nothing runs down into the hub or onto the tyre sidewall.

Walking up short hills on a flat-ish 7 km route is the detail that answers this: it is very likely the gearing.

Single-speed bikes are sold with one ratio, and second-hand ones often carry whatever ratio the previous owner liked. A lot of them are geared high — fine for a fit rider on flat ground who wants speed, brutal for anyone starting out or meeting a gradient. There is no way to make a too-high gear easier except with your legs.

Two things to check before you conclude anything about your fitness:

• Count the teeth on the front chainring and the rear sprocket. A ratio around 2.5 or below is friendly; well above 2.8 is a racing ratio and will hurt.
• Check the tyre pressure. This is the single most common cause of a bike feeling heavy, and it costs nothing. Underinflated tyres can easily double the effort. Pump them to the pressure printed on the sidewall and ride the same route again before changing anything else.

That second one has fixed this exact complaint for more people than anything else I know.

The rest of the list, roughly in the order it will annoy you:

• Tyres and pressure. Go wide — 40 mm or more. A wider tyre at a sensible pressure carries load with far less risk of pinch flats, and comfort matters more at your weight than at anyone else's.
• Frame size and geometry. At 200 cm you are past the top of many manufacturers' ranges. Some brands do genuinely large frames; otherwise you are looking at custom, which is less exotic than it sounds and solves both problems at once.
• Seatpost and saddle rails. Common failure point. A stout post at the right length, and steel rails rather than carbon.
• Brakes. Disc, not rim, and larger rotors. You have more energy to dissipate on every descent than the design case assumed.
• Gearing. Lower than a standard build. This is about being able to keep cadence on a hill rather than grinding, which is what protects your knees.

Steel or aluminium frame rather than carbon, and a touring or trekking bike rather than a road bike, gets you most of this by default.

On the shouting: the one thing worth keeping from that instinct is noise as a warning rather than as a comment.

A loud shout or a bell before the manoeuvre completes can genuinely stop a driver who has not seen you. That is useful. A shout afterwards is communication with somebody who is already past you and can only escalate.

So the version I have settled on is: be loud early, silent late. It uses the same reflex for something that occasionally works.

Worth noting the adjacent categories that do exist and are sometimes what people are looking for: adult tricycles, and recumbent trikes for people who cannot balance at all.

Those are not teaching tools, they are permanent solutions for riders for whom two wheels are not going to work. Different problem, and it is worth being clear which one is being solved before shopping.