1st tandem ride of the year!

Woo Hoo! We finally made it out on the tandem this year. It has bees quite a while since I have been on the bike and written about it on this blog. Wasn’t yesterday a beautiful day, nearly 70° here in Matthews. We managed to get a good start around 12:15 pm. About an hour later and 12 miles covered we were back home. It wasn’t much of a ride but there were some up and downhill stretches on the route.

We thought we saw our friend JamesD riding down Antioch Church about 12:45 as we were coming up Huntington.

Some observations. We were pretty good a launching the tandem, after four years of tandem riding you would guess this should be easy. We are the type of riders that are both unclipped at the start, so some coordination is needed. Riding along the flat sections we were also a lot smoother than I expected. One thing we both noticed was that when there was little of no effort we were pedaling squares. This did change to round as we went forward but it took a consciousness decision to make sure of it. We did manage one short downhill stretch were we exceeded the speed limit on Chestnut, just don’t tell the Stalling’s Police! We made sure to keep it out of the big ring so that we could spin the entire ride. No sense overworking knees and other joints and muscles that are not ready for the strain of big gear riding.

Of course, today is a different story. It’s raining, spring just can’t catch a break. Besides I am much sorer than I expected to be, neck and lower back seem a bit stiff this morning. Oh well, at least we are off to a good start.