Originally Posted by
Machka
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.
In other words, if the distance is 100 km, and there is 1000 metres of climbing, that's a 1. 1000 metres of climbing/100,000 metres in distance * 100 = 1.
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.
Our lowest tandem gear is 26 front, 34 rear. For our team, that's a slightly higher gear than my 26 front, 27 rear on my single. Close enough that if I can get up it on my single, we can climb it on the tandem, just slower. In general, given unlimited gearing choices, climbing speed on a tandem should be the average of the two team members on their singles.
Our 2003 bare steel tandem weighs 36 lbs. My bare carbon single is 18.5 lbs., so a tandem can easily be lighter than two singles. A local champion team rides a 25 lb. tandem. Gearing is the key to climbing, as always. It also helps a lot if the team members learn to be comfortable with identical cadences and pedaling styles, i.e. distribution of pedal force during the pedal stroke. Ideally, one shouldn't be able to tell the difference between the feel of the pedals on the tandem and one's single.
Our ideal riding routes around here are about ".9" on your scale. They don't go higher than 1.8, and are hard to find below .5 without riding on major highways. Stoker doesn't enjoy rides over "1," but then she can't ride any of our usual routes on her single.
I feel safer on the road on our tandem, solo, than I do on my singles. It's a larger, more impressive vehicle. Cars tend to give us more room and courtesy. We run 28mm Conti 4000 IIs which measure ~32mm on our 23mm (outside) rims at 90 lbs., 281 lb. team. The tandem is more comfortable for me on poor surfaces than is my carbon single and Stoker has a Specialized carbon Cobble Goblr (CGR) seatpost.