Biking in twos
I had planned to do a lot of biking this year but I have found that I have very little reason to get on my bike for travel. I used to bike to work (which was a decent 20+ km each way) last year but I am working from home this year and do not really have the need to wander too far from my coding dungeon to ply my trade. The end result is that my bike has not been out of the barn yet this year.
On the other hand I have been riding tandems far more than I ever have. I am not counting kilometres too closely but the number is likely closing in on 400km already. Part of that is the training I was doing with a friend (he recently completed a two-day 200km tour in Toronto) and the rest is on a recumbent tandem that we bought this year.
Because I promised my youngest daughter that we would bike into school together this year, and as today is the second last (the penultimate for all you word geeks) day of the school year for my daughter, we saddled up bright and early for our ride into school. I brushed the spiders off of the recumbent tandem, adjusted the seat positions, and stuck a bottle in one of the cages (nothing like having a new batch of baby spiders on your bike to make an early-morning ride ever so less enticing–I did this before my daughter saw anything; that might have scuttled the plan before we got started). Then, a little before 8:00am we began our ride to school.
It is at this point where I should mention that we live at the bottom of a rather steep hill. If you think PEI is flat then you are right from the point of view that there are not a lot of mountains (“The highest elevation is 466 feet (142 metres) above sea level in Queens county.” from Prince Edward Island (province, Canada) — Britannica Online Encyclopedia). On the other hand, I live in Queens county and our house is approximately 3 metres above river level; I call that close enough to sea level. Also, Prince Edward Island may have more roads per square kilometre than any other province but they saved a fortune by not changing the grade of secondary roads from the natural rolling and winding paths that were their ancestors. So, this is my way of saying that the ride to school this morning was anything but flat.
I had anticipated the 14km ride to take a little under an hour. I was wrong. I had forgotten to factor in the recumbents-are-more-comfortable-but-make-hills-excruciatingly-painful-to-climb coefficient. For our ride that coefficient was approximately 1.3. My daughter rolled into school at 9:14am. I will try to have her at school on time tomorrow. It is best to end on a good note.
The next ride will be on a nice flat stretch where the recumbent tandem really does shine.
So, my legs are sore. She did her best but her nine-year-old legs were no match for my older and much greater mass. Some of the sweetest words I have ever heard were “Do you need a little burst of power now daddy?” and I heard them often enough to find them funnier each time. She would blast out twenty or thirty hard pedal strokes that would rock the bike side to side and then let out an exhausted sigh. The bike would slow a bit and then (inevitably) I would hear “I can recover quick if you need me to do it again.” It was a great ride.
I am smiling. She was smiling when she walked into school. One nice family moment and one more reminder that even a bad day on a bike is better than a good day in the office.
