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Another pre-teen/teen tandem team ride
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 Home of the meditative cyclist: http://home.earthlink.net/~cpetersky/Welcome.htm Personal page: http://www.geocities.com/cpetersky/ See the books I've set free at: http://bookcrossing.com/referral/Cpetersky |
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