my captain and i are new to riding tandems and have found that we are able to keep up with the pack on saturday group rides but the moment the road starts going up we get dropped. both my captain and i are climbers and find it frustrating that we get dropped so easily.

my theory is that we are not working well together when we climb. i think we are twisting the frame when we climb especially when standing.

what is a good climbing techniques on a tandem?

if we used rollers would that help are climbing?

thanks

chris

Hate to say it but hills are the tandems bugbear.Until the team works together, you will probably find that one of you is putting in more effort than the other. This will make that rider tire a bit sooner, so the other one then has to compensate. Don't worry though as when the team get together, you will be able to keep up with the pack. Problem is, this may a little while to achieve but do not give up yet.
Depends on the type of bike you have, but "Honking" does not get you too far on a Tandem. Effort seems to go everywhere except the rear wheel

Mind you, when you do become an accomplished team, the hills do not get any easier, they just appear to be shorter, and faster.

OK, I will bounce around a couple of ideas. I am sure some of the more seasoned captains and stokers will also chime in.

In the case of a male captain and female stoker, on single bikes, the male can out-climb the female most of the time. I will assume this is true for you two. In theory, you should be able to climb on the tandem at a pace somewhere between your pace and your captains if each of you were on single bikes.

I would offer that the bike has less to do with it than with dissimilarity in climbing styles. Do you like to sit and spin and he likes to sit and mash? Or, maybe he climbs grinding a huge gear while standing on a single?

It takes time to get in sink with each other.

I have captained with several different stokers. I would bet that if I was riding with the fittest of the stokers, we could climb with all but the fastest males, and this is on a low-end tandem. She and I liked the same cadence and were quickly in sink when standing.

So go out and ride more! Communicate! Work together!

PS…if you do get gapped on the climbs, just catch back on the flats/descents….

thanks

the bike we are riding is a custom guru, weights about 31lb

whats "honking"

mashing a huge gear I think.......

any suggestions on a good choice of race wheels. the bike has 130mm spacing. as a team we way 280lb max. we are also thinkiing using a disc wheel for tt.

For the long-winded version, you can visit this previous posting:
https://www.bikeforums.net/showpost.p...7&postcount=11

You're on the right track as it's all about teamwork.

Riding rollers may make you smoother but unless you can retain that smooth form on the climbs and agree on technique, it won't yield the desired results. Therefore, IMHO, you'd be better off practicing your climbing technique on real climbs.

You need to agree on the technique beforehand and you may need to try several different techniques to see which works best for your team (and tandem; see below). If you both favor climbing out of the saddle but one of you is a bike thrower and the other isn't, you're definitely loosing efficiency. Same thing goes for cadence; if one of you is a spinner (high cadence, a la Armstrong) and the other is a pedal masher (low cadence, a la Ulrich), then you've got another area where you're working against one another. So, my suggestion would be to find a fairly challenging climb in your local area, establish your baseline for time/speed to climb as you are today and then try tackling the hill on successive rides with a different and agreed upon technique, e.g., seated & maintaining 80 RPM, seated and maintaining 90 RPM, standing & maintaining 70 RPM with no side-to-side movement, standing & maintaining 70 RPM with moderate side-to-side movement. Just find your rhythm using one particular method and then work on optimizing it.

As for frame flex, you'll forgive me for asking, do you know how many tandems Guru has built and/or who they consulted with on their material selection & design? What type of tubing did they use, what type of frame design does it have, and how much steering trail does it have?

The 130mm rear spacing makes me suspect about overall frame stiffness and geometry as that's pretty narrow, even for a race-specific tandem. Don't get me wrong, we know a few teams who ride 135mm rear spaced tandems and I know of a few 130mm tandems, but they must be ridden "cleanly" with minimal side-to-side movement during climbs or sprints otherwise you'll tend to induce a lot of rear wheel flex. Same goes for the frame stiffness and steering. For the frame, super-light is OK so long as the right type/size tubing is used, e.g., thin-gauge, air-hardened steel, 6000 or 7000 series aluminum, Calfee's carbon bikes, or some of the Ti models with oversized or ovalized down, internal, boom & top tubes as well as some super-beefy rear stays. On the geometry, while I'm a big fan of long-steering trail on tandems, if you get it too long or throw the bike when climbing it will make the front end serpentine as you climb, which also sucks up energy. Just some things to consider as the bike's design may need to be taken into consideration as you work on your climbing techniques. You can throw a super stiff short trail tandem with normal (145mm) or wide (160mm) rear drop-outs around all you want, but a narrow wheel and long steering trail bike would climb more efficiently with zero side-to-side movement, standing or seated.


As for racing wheels, I'd check with the folks in your local area who race tandems or consider subscribing and floating a question to the folks who belong to the Atlantic Seaboard Tandem Racing Org. (ASTRO) list at Yahoo: https://sports.groups.yahoo.com/group/tandemracing/

These are the folks who can best tell you what wheels work well for which events based on lots of 1st hand experience. Frankly, I've seen just about everything you can imagine, some have faired better than others.

Try seated, high-rpm spinning, about 95 rpm or more. Work hard on pedaling with power all the way around the pedal circle, minimizing dead spots where you don't make power. For example, I always try to kick the pedal straight forward over the top.

Honking--- Getting out of the saddle and putting in a lot of pedal effort that causes the bike to go side to side. On a solo with rigid forks you will put in a lot of effort that will not make the bike go faster for long. With suspension on a solo or a tandem, the effort will be wasted as it is taken up by the up and down movement on the forks. On a rigid Tandem, it is bebatable whether the effort is worthwhile, due to Frame flex, drag on the tyres and amount of energy used.
We do get out of the saddle to get that little bit of extra pedal effort to get over a hill, but we do try to keep the Tandem in as straight a line as possible, without sideways movement. Still not convinced it works though.

My wife and I ride a tandem recreationally, and we have the same problem. Climbng is slow and tedious most of the time. Here in the Ozarks, we do a lot of climbing too. This is due partly because of the difference in height, she's barely 5-0 ( I kid her about being 4-11 7/8") and I'm 6-1. There is a considerable difference in how we deliver power to the pedals. When riding with a group, we just let them go on ahead. When it comes to downhill or level areas, they have to eat our dust!