Originally Posted by
Team Fab
After a serious mountain bike injury left my wife a high functioning quadriplegic we were introduced to tandems by a close friend who owned a few bikes. The first few rides were about 15 minutes long with rest breaks every five but soon we could ride 15 then 20 then 25 and so on up to a one day high of 262km ( she cried because her ass hurt soooo much and i cried because we had our life back). From a low of thinking we would never be able to ride together again to the freedom of 2 wheels. She has been rated a C3 for paracycling now but is to timid to ride in traffic on her own as she cannot brake or steer in a emergency(or let go of the brakes if she can manage to pull them).
The accident brought us closer in the last three years than many couples who have been together for a lifetime. To Quote Retro Grouch "I've heard it said and I suspect that it's true, that whichever way your relationship is headed, a tandem will get you there sooner" . For us it definitely brought us closer. I can no longer imagine not riding with my wife and we plan on traveling with our tandem(we purchased a Co-motion for that).
I could not be luckier than to have a partner in crime like her.
Our tandem created Team Fab, and we truly are a team now. We compliment each other in life and on the bike.
This is a beautiful post. Congratulations for the courage, determination and spirit to get things together like that.
We are bike-o-philes, so we'll ride almost anything if the opportunity arises. Our opportunity with tandeming started with us both trying to get our cycling back together after my home was destroyed in the 2009 Victorian bushfires, and Machka contracted deep vein thrombosis on her flight from Canada to Australia to come live me later that year.
We borrowed a tandem, put about 3000km on it with general riding and some randonnees up to 300km. It didn't seem to fit us well, but it was enough to encourage us to spend the moula on a better quality machine. So we bought a new Santana Arriva in February 2011, and haven't looked back.
We still share our riding with various singles, but we have done a lot of centuries on the Santana -- in fact, every month bar one since we acquired it, and the missed one was made up with our singles.
Communication counts on a tandem, in our experience. Communication counts in our relationship. We know, for instance, that we are low on energy when we start getting snarky with each other. Calling those bumps, rail crossings and so on is important, as are regular calls for coasting to stand and drink. Climbing is a bit of an issue, but then we have been tackling rides with lots of hills in the 6-12% range, and now have decided to probably opt for singles forreally hill y rides. Putting on a 36T cassette and a 26T ring up front has helped immensely, as has Machka's recent thread on tandem climbing.
Machka's timidity on some aspects has improved enormously, and we finished a century today without any conflict but with a lot of satisfaction.