Another pre-teen/teen tandem team ride

03-06-2005, 01:21 PM

Gorgeous weather today, June-style weather, sunny, lower sixties, a day you
ride in your shorts and ss jersey. All the plum trees were in bloom.

I had two tandem teams show up -- one team had been on one of these rides in
the training series before. The other set was a family -- mom, dad and kid.
I had some concerns. Dad was riding on a single, a beat-up Schwinn that had
to be at least from the mid-80s if not earlier. Mom and kid were on a
fat-tire tandem, a brand I did not recognize. None of them had bikie gear:
no bike shorts, no gloves, flat pedals -- and the parents' helmets also
looked about 25 years old. They had never been on a club ride before.

So, I made sure they knew the distance. I made sure they knew the pace. They
said they were ready. So we took off.

As it turned out, they really couldn't maintain a 15 mph pace. They were
more like an 11 or 12 mph pace. Since the other team was much more
experienced, and knew this particular loop we were doing very well, I
figured I would pace to the slower set of riders. The other team eventually
let us know that they would ride on without us, which didn't surprise me in
the slightest, since we were so slow. They had problems with shifting the
tandem, which wasn't going into its granny gear unless it was manually
lifted into the small ring. Rose did a constant yakity-yak with me, since we
were indeed going slower. Usually we're silent in our grim determination to
keep the ~15 mph rolling. Since she wasn't gasping for breath, she was
filling my ear about life in the 6th grade.

I was also nervous because when you loop around the lake, there's really no
way to shorten the ride -- the big barrier of the lake means shortcuts are
impossible. But the slower group did complete the entire ride.

They'd like to join us again next week, but I know we'll have some faster
paced riders for sure next week, and I don't know exactly what to do. One
thought is to try to con my husband into ride leading with me -- I just
don't know if he wants the responsibility. We can split into a fast group
and a short group. Sort of silly with so few riders, but it's one way to
tackle it. The other possibility is to discourage them from riding with us.

Do you have thoughts about this?

Also, as a sort of postscript, we ran into (not literally) Dane Jackson
along the way -- met him in the bike tunnel. It's always fun to see someone
you know as you ride along. With this weather, though, *everybody* was out
there on their bikes. It was pretty amazing.

--
Warm Regards,

Claire Petersky
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