The Coming Century

I did it. I signed us up for TFCE - The Flattest Century in the East. Yes, normally it's Deb who gets us into these things but it was me this time. A Century is, of course, a 100 mile bike ride and is roughly equivalent to a Marathon for runners in terms of goals and relative difficulty.

I did one once before, back in California, a little over 20 years ago...Hmm.

I had heard about this one last year and wanted to do it but they only allow a limited number of signups and I missed the cutoff. This year, I marked the signup day on my calendar and got in. I signed up both Deb and I so that we could ride the tandem but kind of neglected to tell Deb that I was going to do this. When I told her we were signed up, well, let's just say she did not jump for joy. The draw for this ride is spelled out in the name - Flat. As I think I've mentioned before, tandems don't do hills very well. Actually, they do downhills very well. It's the uphills that they struggle with. OK, it's the riders who struggle with the uphills. The bike doesn't give a crap.

Anyway, tandem riders really like flat rides so I figured this should be easy. Right?
Yeah, except that I happened to mention my plan to another guy who had ridden this ride. He said that "yeah, it's flat. But it's along the coast and it's rather windy." Great.

Whatever, we're signed up and we'll give it a try.

In order to do this, we've got to start riding - the ride is on September 13 - so I got the bike down and enlisted Kyle to help me do some clean up. We removed the chains and cleaned them and the gears and generally spruced things up a bit. I don't know if I've ever posted a picture of this bike so I found a stock photo of our bike. If you click on the picture of the bike at the top, you can get a larger picture of it. It's got fancy "aero" wheels with minimal spokes that are "just as safe as regular wheels". Notice the rear seatpost. It's got a little shock absorber for the Stoker's (the rider in back) bum. On a tandem, the Captain (the guy in front) is suspended between the wheels and gets a pretty smooth ride. The Stoker on the other hand, sits right over the rear wheel and takes the brunt of rough roads. The road shock is made worse by the fact that the Stoker can't see approaching potholes and therefore can't "brace" for the impact. The seatpost shock helps to lessen some of the punishment. You can't really see it but the brake levers on the front handlebars double as gear shifters as well. You squeeze them like normal to apply the brakes and push them side to side to shift gears. It's pretty much the coolest invention for bikes ever.

Speaking of gears, this bike has ten sprockets on the rear wheel and three on the pedal for a total of 30 gears. Some gear combinations aren't useful but it's still a huge range, and it's needed for the extremes the tandem faces - very low gears for grinding up steep hills and very high gears for bombing down the other side.

It's a really nice bike and we really enjoy it (but check back again on September 14th...).