Any tandem riders here?
 

Just picked up a used one for the wife, grandkids any anyone else with courage to sit behind me. It wasn't exactly what I wanted but it was a good deal. Now I can figure out if we can ride a tandem without breaking the bank.

What have you learned riding a tandem that you think would help us?

YouTube is your friend for the technical aspects. Patience is the secret for everything else. You won't be as fast as you're used to and climbs are murder. But with the right attitude both from the captain and the stoker it's a ton of fun.

Mrs. Grouch and I rode tandems together for over 35 years. Unfortunately, we don't have one at present.

1. The majority opinion on getting launched is for the captain to straddle the bike and hold it upright while the stoker gets on and clips in both feet.
2. Get into the habit of announcing bumps because your stoker can't see them coming.
3. As captain, my view never changed. All that I saw was a strip of road ahead. Whenever there was beautiful scenery or something else interesting to see, my stoker ALWAYS noticed it first and pointed it out for me.
4. Whichever way your relationship is headed a tandem will get you there quicker.

My spouse and I have been riding tandems since 1989. While we do it differently than most (she's 5'6" and I'm 6'2", but I ride stoker), we have picked up a few things that apply to all tandems, even those that put the bigger person in the way of the view.

First off, while you're feeling no pain in the front saddle, those bumps and potholes you're hitting are breaking the rear end of your stoker. For every millimeter your saddle bumps up, the stoker's goes up three times as much because it sits right over the rear axle. Also, the stoker doesn't see it coming. Ride accordingly.

Second of all, when you casually move the bike side to side, particularly when climbing, the poor stoker is having to hold on as though riding a bucking bronco. Take it easy up there if you want any power from the rear engine.

Related to the first two, get the widest most supple tires that will fit on your tandem. (Compass is the place to start, and probably end, your search.) There is such a tremendous difference in the ride quality, both in comfort and performance, between riding at 120 psi and rolling at 40 psi. Seriously, go wide, go supple and go with the minimum pressure that avoids pinch flats (very low if you follow the first point about missing all those road defects).

It's also not unusual for tandem riders to use a slightly lower cadence than they do on their half-bikes. Don't sweat it if you find yourself dropping your cadence into the 80's, that's normal. Perhaps related, we often are comfortable with larger jumps in gearing.

Bear in mind that with two riders on the bike at once, breaks and rest stops will come four times as frequently as they do on a half-bike. Avoid any urge to complain about yet another break or pit-stop, just plan better. Stokers often don't get up out of the saddle as often as captains, so their rear end can get a little sore as they get used to it all.

Lastly, always check your front tire for any defects or issues. A front tire failure on a tandem can be much, much worse than on a half-bike. There's just a lot more energy going into that front end (hence the reason there aren't many tandem-rated carbon forks) and the stoker always takes the brunt of any crash.

Now go have some fun.

On a related note, I'm just about to resurrect the child crank that I used for a few years on our first tandem with our son decades ago. This time that old tandem will have my grand-daughters stoking as we haul them home from school while their mother does medical school.

The stoker is never at fault.

Communicate. Many captains call out shifts. I don't, but my stoker is pretty used to my shifting habits and I aim to not do anything disruptive to our pedaling efforts. Agree that bumps should be called out. At stoplights, whoever notices yellow for the cross-street calls it out so we can be ready to go when we get the green.

There is an entire subforum right here on BF Tandem Cycling - Bike Forums Enough to keep you reading for quite awhile!

Rowan and I have a tandem and used to do quite a lot of riding with it but we live in a very hilly area now, and tandems don't work quite as well in these sorts of hills.

My wife and I ride a tandem on club rides, charity rides, touring, etc. it's a lot of fun, and we both get to the top of the hill together. About the only riding we don't do together is long randonneuring rides--my wife draws the line at 70-80 miles for a ride.

Be patient and make sure you have the same plan for the ride--if you bump the distance up without discussion or change to a hillier route it may not go over well. Just keep it fun for both of you. Trust is hard to earn but even harder to get back.

Mark W

Remember, the stoker is always right (especially when she is your wife).

My wife and I have been riding a tandem since '07. My wife does all her riding on the tandem and I ride my single only a few times a year. We ride 2,000-3,000 miles/year. My wife rode her single before we got the tandem. Her fitness increased greatly after starting stoking, I think because I can kind of take the edge off the hard efforts so she can ride both longer and harder on the tandem that she could on her single. We mostly sport ride, by ourselves and group rides, and have done some loaded touring, which we really like. We bought a used CoMotion Speedster, a 36 lb. steel bike with touring braze-ons and room for big tires and fenders. In perfect condition, it cost us about 1/2 of new.

My wife had displays for both her HR and mine. I don't see hers. She works to approximately match my HR, which is how we distribute the effort to make it fun for both of us. We love riding tandem together.

I ride stoker on our tandem. I really enjoy the fact that I can simply bury myself on the climbs, knowing that if I completely bonk out my wife can provide enough power to keep us going while I recover, albeit at a much reduced speed. I rarely go as deep into the red on my half-bike, in fact I often find myself dogging it on the approach to the last big climb of the day just so I don't burn out.

I also think there's something magical and entrancing about both riders on the tandem pounding up a hill. It's like a strenuous modern dance that no one wants to cause to end by backing off. Many times we have both been surprised to have arrived at the top of a familiar climb without really being aware of where we were or how we got there.

Key to tandem riding: Communicate!!!
The idiot (pilot) up front must tell the nice person on the back (stoker) what he is doing. She is NOT a mind reader.
SO . . . say out loud when shifting, braking, coasting, resume pedaling, standing, turns, etc..
Stoker does the turn and stopping/slowing signaling.
Been riding in tandem for over over 42 years.
Enjoy the ride TWOgether!
Rudy and Kay/zonatandem

Oh, and take her out for coffee/lunch!

To give my stokers a sense of control the drum brake lever is theirs.

Agree 100% with @zonatandem about communication.

As strong a rider as you are @jppe, slowing down some might be advisable, at least until your stokers are acclimatized. i put fatter tires on too, as the wife felt they were 'safer'.

And don't be surprised if nobody takes to it. My experience.

In my opinion it's the most fun you can have on a bicycle without jumping. Take it slow, be patient and understanding. It will be frustrating and awkward at first, you do so many things automatically that will be annoying to the other person on the bike (like stopping pedaling abruptly) that you will have to stop or learn ease into. After enough time on the tandem you will be able to read each other's minds and communicate through the pedals. You will ease up slightly and she will adjust to you slowing or coasting without a word. Don't expect it to go smoothly at first and just focus on getting smoother each ride, soon you will be faster and happier than you ever though possible.

kwog

I recently got my second tandem, a Fandango from MTBtandems near Atlanta. It allows 2.3 or wider knobby tires, and I got a second wheelset for road 40c tires. The gearing is great for hills and the bike is, overall, a huge improvement over the 30 year old Santana we had been riding. Tandem riding is, as others have said, a great experience for growing closer. Unless you're not into that, in which case you won't be together very much longer.

hmmmmm.................looks like this thread got moved from Fifty Plus to ............................Fifty Plus. :D

Some great advice here! My wife and I have a daVinci with two freewheels, so the stoker can coast when she wants to (as can the captain, I suppose). You still need to be in sync, otherwise it feels like you're fighting each other, but fortunately for me, my wife handles that really well.

The most important rule, as someone already pointed out: The stoker is never at fault :-)

My wife and I (both 66) did 68.7 miles on our tandem today. Great time. :love:

I don't think so. For decades we did most of our tandem riding ninety degrees out of phase. It felt perfectly natural, especially on flats where the power pulses are evened out. It takes a bit of patience to learn to climb out of the saddle with the pedals at 90 OOP, but it's not half-bad once you get the hang of it.

That said, when we relocated to a less flat locale, we did set our pedals to just a couple of teeth out of phase. The thinking is that if they are perfectly in phase it is too easy for the stronger rider to overwhelm the other so that each rider isn't contributing an equal amount of their capability. It actually took us a while to get used to being nearly in phase after so many years of smoother power strokes.

There's lots of correct ways to do this, no matter what the owner of Santana says.

Thanks to all for the terrific insights. Just what I was hoping for.

Other than our quick ride around the neighborhood we did our first ride yesterday. It was 21 miles and a lot of the things pointed out in this thread surfaced. I do a lot of things on the bike intuitively and I've got to be more vocal about many of those. I about wore her out with my higher cadence pedaling style so we'll work on that. We're still working on her positioning and I think with one more slight tilt of the saddle we might have that dialed in. We got better at starting and stopping over the ride. Right now starting on a hill seems pretty daunting!!!

She indicated that she really enjoyed it so we'll see. It was a mostly flat ride but we did take on one 9-10% hill and we were able to ease up it much better than I would have guessed. For this ride she was using platform pedals which was good for mounting and dismounting but not so good for pedaling. She has toe clips on her road bikes so I'll move those over to the tandem which should help us ease along even better.

She has pretty short arms and can't comfortably reach her water bottle. She's either going to use her camelback or she could put a bottle in my jersey pocket as she can easily each that. She drinks a lot more fluids than I do so keeping the fluids handy is a must!

(A year ago today I was pedaling through Yellowstone on my XC trip. What a blast!!)

:love:Good start!!!
Been pedaling out-of-phase (OOP) 90 degrees for over a quarter million miles since 1975.
Do some more rides and be sure to COMMUNICATE!
Rudy and Kay/zonatandem

I did finally find all the necessary parts and got my old tandem ship-shape for an almost-five- and almost-four-year-old. The girls came over today with their helmets not really knowing what was in store. The almost-five-year-old was initially reluctant to get on the bike. She recently took a spill on her own tiny bike and landed on her face, which was painful but didn't leave any lasting marks.

After talking about it and then sitting up on the saddle while we walked down the street to the bike path, she decide to give it a go. Soon we were doing laps around the soccer field with a detour over the river and ending each lap with a race against her uncle, who was running. That got her little sister excited to give it a go and by the end of the day I had ridden almost 20 miles with one or the other of them back there.

This week we take delivery of a Burley Piccolo trailing bike, which will turn the tandem into a triple so that both of them can ride at the same time. This is going to be fun. I hope they remember this in a few decades when I need them to push my wheelchair.

why? I've been around this forum long enough to know that you both are very experienced riders. So I don't understand your comment. When I bought our tandem in Victoria, BC a couple years back, we rode up a hill so steep, everyone thought that there was no way. and we did it pretty well with ease. My wife is not really a cyclist, and had never been on a tandem! Since then she loves the tandem......now if I could just convince her to ride across the US with me for my 60th!

When I lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada for many years my perception of what constituted a "steep hill" was very different from my current perception about steep hills. :)

We live on a 14% grade hill which is one of the flatter roads in our immediate area. And there isn't just one hill ... they're everywhere. There are routes here I have trouble doing on my single bicycle with great gearing ... never mind a tandem!! There's one 100K route I've yet to complete within the randonneuring time limit ... I think on my last attempt, I was just over, but it was an effort to do that well.

I've coined a whole new description of what "flat" is. Tasmanian Flat is a ride that amounts to a 1 or less.

I had a look at a 400K recently run in Manitoba, and IIRC it came up as a 0.1. If I hadn't spent 13 years living in Manitoba, that would be almost hard to imagine.


All that said, we could have ridden the route we rode on Saturday with a tandem ... it's one of the few flatter routes in the area (0.68). And if we didn't mind negotiating our way through a never-ending maze of road intersection barricades, we could probably take our tandem on the Cycleway. And of course, we can ride it up north where I've managed to design routes that come in at comfortable numbers like 0.6 to 0.8.

But in addition to the hills in the Hobart area, the roads aren't particularly brilliant and there's a lot of traffic ... neither of which make cycling in general very nice, and especially not on a tandem.

Yes, road for 30yrs, mtn for 17yrs.

Start with shorter rides.
Let her have input on the route.
Stop for breaks as she needs them.
Keep it fun.
The rest you will figure out.

Hope it works out for you.
Some folks love it, some not so much. Never know until you try.

Tandem allows the avid rider to share some adventures that a casual rider would normally miss out on. Plus you never have to wait for them or wonder where they are.

Good luck.