Originally Posted by
Retro Grouch
How do you plan to carry your "stuff"?
Anything that you carry in your shorts pockets is likely to fall out. If you wear a regular bicycle jersey, you will be laying back on it. I bought an inexpensive mesh photographer's vest. It has pockets for my wallet, cell phone, car keys etc and it's all easily accessible while I'm riding.
I sometimes wear bike shorts from which I've cut the padding and sometimes I wear gym shorts. A wicking t-shirt suits me fine.
A helmet with a visor would probably be better because the angle of your head is different. One thing I think you'll like is that you are much less likely to have sweat in the eye issues.
The bike came with a seat bag that holds a fair amount of stuff, and I don't normally need access to stuff other than water bottles while I'm on the bike. As I mentioned earlier, I'm likely in the market for a larger bag. I wore a cycling jersey today, but tomorrow I'm going to try a running t-shirt, since the zipper was slightly annoying, and I don't really need the pockets. My helmet has a visor, an I almost always wear a headsweats or something similar to keep the sweat out of my eyes.
Originally Posted by
JanMM
Glad to hear that you have come around to accepting that a recumbent bike is just another type of bike - welcome to the dark side!
I wasn't looking for a recumbent. The bike found me, and I'm working on Kingston 2.0, who is more open-minded and less opinionated than earlier versions you may have encountered.
We have a pretty active local marketplace on FB that my wife watches, and she always sends me a screeshot when interesting bikes come up. She said she almost didn't send this one because she didn't think I would be interested in a recumbent, but at the price they were asking, it seemed too good for me to pass up. I figure if I don't like it, I can just put it back up on the FB marketplace for the same price and the next person can snap it up to try it out. Thankfully, my wife is very understanding of my weakness for acquiring used bikes. I bought three already this year.
So I took the new bike out for a 32 mile ride this morning, and here are a few observations: Likely no surprises for this crowd, but thought I'd share my experiences as a first-timer, and a few more questions have come up that I sprinkled throughout.
1) Recumbents use different muscles: I could spin it up to a good cruising speed, but I didn't have the legs to hold it there for very long, so my average speed was several mph lower than on my other bikes for the same route. I'll put a few hundred miles on the recumbent in the next couple of weeks and I'm sure it will get easier, but I'll be really surprised if I'm ever as fast on this bike as some of my other bikes. I realize the Strada wasn't really built for speed so it's probably not a fair comparison, but I don't see any problem with maintaining a 15mph moving average which is all you need for randonneuring anyway.
2) Looking up all the time is pretty nice: I never realized how much I'm not looking ahead on my other bikes until I experienced always looking ahead. Nice.
3) Handling is a lot different: I ride the recumbent more like a tandem than a single safety. Carry more momentum into the hills since I can't stand up and blast over the top, and much more cautious at intersections since I don't have the nimble handling or burst of acceleration that I normally do. Starting uphill is hard, so I'm going to try to avoid that as much as I can.
4) Steering and Turns: With my safeties, I don't use the handlebars to steer. I just lean the bike a little bit one way or the other and it goes where I want it to. With the recumbent I find myself steering with the handlebars and high-speed turns are surprisingly different. Not sure how to describe it exactly. With a DF I feel like I can scrub speed or accelerate through the corner if I need to so it's ok to come in a little hot or a little slow. On the recumbent, I feel like I have to pick a speed going into the corner, and I'm committed. The bike corners very well, so it's not uncomfortable, it's just a lot different than what I'm used to. I'm looking forward to getting more experience so I can push it a little harder, which seems like it will be super-fun on curvy descents.
5) Comfort seems overall about the same: Since I don't really experience any discomfort on my other bikes, there's not much room for improvement. I got a little chafing on my inner thigh where the pad is sewn into the shorts. Nothing major, but little annoyances on a 2 hour ride can turn into major discomfort on a 20 hour ride. Tomorrow I'll try some different shorts. I also got a little numbness/pain in a horizontal line across my rear at the level of my tailbone. Is this a fit issue or something that resolves itself with more time on the bike? I feel like the seat tilt & position is adjusted pretty well, but I'll experiment with some adjustments to see if something else works better.
6) Tires: I thought the 23c tires were fine. The foam on the seat provides a lot of cushion, and I haven't really bought into the whole wide-tire craze yet. I rode 25's on a 1,000k last weekend and they were totally fine except for a few short sections of gravel. I'll ride the 650c x 23 kendas until they wear out and most likely just get some 650c x 28 Paselas after that. Don't really see the need to put a set of 559's on there for an extra 2-3 mm of tire width, but it's nice to know the option is there down the road. I'm sure I could also get a different fork if I wanted to go really wide. Looks like the brakes will accommodate 26x1.75" so I could also go 1.25" in the front and 1.75" in the back. Not sure if people do that or not, but it seems like it could work.
7) Gearing: My ride today was pretty flat since I live on the North Shore of Chicago, but I would expect I would need a lot more range on a hilly ride than I would on a DF. The bike has a standard road triple (50-39-30) and a 9-speed cassette. Will a 12-36 be low enough for a hilly ride, should I be thinking about a different chainset/granny ring, or should I just leave the recumbent at home for really hilly rides?