Tandem Bicycle

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The view 125 KB Everyone wonders what the view from the stoker's position is. Here is a good indication. We were doing about 20 mph when Veronica took this.	full-tandem.jpg 146 KB	tandem_colors.jpg 105 KB

In June, Veronica and I rode 100.5 miles around Lake Tahoe. The organized ride is billed as "America's Most Beautiful Bike Ride". It is a spectacular ride, but we were slow. It was our first century and we were riding our old, heavy mountain bikes. Even with slick road tires, they just were not the ideal tool for the job. Prior to the ride, we figured that, if it was fun, we would get back into serious riding and get road bikes. There isn't a lot of good off-road terrain where we live now, so mountain bikes aren't ideal for us anymore.

A funny thing happened on the ride (while lots of funny things, but only one that relates to this story). We got passed, a lot. That was to be expected on our heavy bikes. The most notable bike that passed us was a tandem, towing a trailer, with a cooler on the back. We got passed by them like we were standing still, twice. We figure that we must have passed them at a rest stop. We learned that tandems are F-A-S-T. As in freight train. On the biggest downhill in the Tahoe ride, we hit 37 mph. At that speed we couldn't spin the pedals fast enough; mountain bikes have gears for climbing and power, not gears for top end speed. We later talked to a tandem team that hit 50 mph on the same hill and it was routine for them.

So, in the truck on the way home from Tahoe, we decided that a tandem might be the right thing for us. We are very similar in size and ability and we have excellent communication. We did some research and then went tandem shopping. We selected a Santana cycle.

A tandem is a long bicycle. In a single color they often look very plain. So, it is not unusual to see tandems painted 2 (or more) colors. We debated colors and went with DuPont ChromIllusion. Santana calls it ShadeShifter. The bike is all one color. Depending on how the light hits the bike, it is either metallic purple or metallic teal. Because of all of the angles in a bike design, most of the time the bike will appear to be several shade of each color. It is very cool.

So how fast is it? Sunday we took our first serious ride. About 4 minutes into the ride, we were cruising along, getting warmed up. We were pushing just a little, but not breathing that hard, going down a slight hill. I turned around to Veronica and said, "That's it; we can't go any faster." She replied, "What do you mean we can't go any faster? I can work a lot harder and we have 3 or 4 more gears above this. What's wrong?" I said, "27 in a 25. That's as fast as we go." We slacked off a little and cruised at just under 20 mph. Sadly, the ride came to a premature end with a flat tire. That is one down side to road bikes with skinny tires, they get more flats than mountain bikes.

We've found that we cruise at 18-20 mph. On a flat road with no wind, we can hit about 28 mph. Our downhill record is 40 mph (so far).