If you need some winter bike riding stories to pass the time, you might go read some of Pamela Blalock’s stories about racing tandems uphill. They’re not full of discussion about the physics of it all, but she has great real-world stories about tandems, terrain and two very strong riders. (I vaguely recall they’ve won the Mt Washington hill climb a few times.) Most of us won’t come close to duplicating what they have done on tandems, but it’s good to get that perspective.
in this post, she mentions the idea that climbing on a tandem averages the effort of the two riders.
“Our experience is that the tandem averages out our climbing speeds. So on a pure hillclimb, our time will be about half way between the times we'd post individually. For rolling terrain, we get a great advantage from momentum and the extra power, and can at times fly along much faster than Fear Rothar would alone.”
You’ll find other comments about the topic on both her blog and the older website.
https://blayleys.blogspot.com/2012/0...m_01.html#more