“Some people can’t tandem.
It doesn’t make them bad people, just not quite as fortunate.”Rick Jorgensen, Tango Tandems
From Scott…
Kathy has riden the last seven AIDS/Lifecycles. But for all of her training and riding and fundraising, for all of her commitment and passion for the ride and the cause it supports, she has never been able to ride every mile. I know that intimately because I’m the person on the other end of the phone when things go south for her. Mostly the reasons she has had to skip a part or even a whole day are circumstances beyond her control. Like the year she came down with bronchitis. But still, as a friend, I want to do everything I can to help her ride every single mile.
Joining the ride and being there to support Kathy is the best way I can better help her finish all those miles. In a perfect world, we would be of similar ability and I would be a more patient person. But in the real world I have a lot more years cycling long distance than she does. And when I get on a bike, I am not necessarily fast, but I do push myself hard and become very impatient with anything that hinders me. If I were to ride a single bike, I would only see Kathy at the start and finish of each ride, meaning I wouldn’t be any help at all.
But on a tandem, I can be a lot more help. A tandem allows two people of dissimilar abilities to ride together. Each person can ride as hard as they want; and each can back off as much as they need to. That goes for both of us. Either way, the two riders always stay together. Some people might finish that sense with “for better or worse.” But it’s not like that. Part of riding a tandem pulls you out of yourself, makes you think about another person because you are, as Kathy has often commented, joined at the hip. It’s a completely different cycling experience.
And that’s the deeper part of tandem riding: It facilitates communication between two people in kind of a strange, wonderful way. Successful tandeming requires communication. The better the communication, the more fun a tandem is to ride. It is this loop of pleasure and fun that hooks people.
Some things are just more fun to do with another person. Riding a bike is one of those things. Like Rick says, some people can’t tandem. It doesn’t make them bad people, just not quite as fortunate.
From Kathy …
I can’t yet address how riding AIDS/LifeCycle on a tandem will go, but I can confirm what Scott says is true. I did call him like every five minutes, for the full seven days of every AIDS/Lifecycle I’ve done… and I TOTALLY get how he woke up one morning and thought “OK, the only way to make sure this crazy chick eats and drinks and stops and starts and pedals and sleeps and gets up early enough to make it through the ride (meaning, how he would make it through the ride) is for me to plunk her on the back of a tandem and make sure I can keep track of (and comment upon) her every move.”
I get that.
What has completely surprised me is not that he’s right about just about everything (I suspected that going in), but how right he is about tandem riding in particular. It is a BLAST. It is really fun. And it’s really great to have an experienced someone to do it with.
In this blog I’ll get into the particulars of what it’s like (in that oversharing way I have), but I have to say up front that I’m getting pretty spoiled as we train up this spring. It’s more fun, it’s actually easier (but not e-bike easier because that really would be cheating), and… it’s … captivating. At least so far. Stay tuned.