Originally Posted by
jim_pridx
So sorry to hear that! Do you suppose that's really the end of your tandeming career?
Originally Posted by
Magnum PI
get well soon! In our younger club riding days we had a couple crashes that resulted in some broken bones. But we don’t talk about that anymore. Hope you keep on trucking.
Thank you for the kind thoughts. A few months ago I posted a writeup of our accident titled "Bad things happen" (
www.bikeforums.net/search.php?searchid=10206108). Last weekend was the 6-month anniversary of our fall. Physically Jean has fully recovered, thanks to great conditioning before the fall, long weekly hikes in the nearby hills after her surgery, and the purchase of a rowing machine - what our daughter calls a "hamster wheel". However, Jean suspects that she may no longer have the skeleton required for this wonderful activity. But then, we haven't sold our tandems yet.
As many of the responses to this thread have shown, riding tandems is a life-long adventure. I posted our combined starting age as 45 but we actually started riding together a few years earlier. During the first year of our marriage (we married in our teens) we borrowed a Huffy tandem, swapped in a rear wheel with a freewheel, and went for a weekend tour. That primitive tandem would drop the chain every few miles but we had a lot of fun and couldn't wait until we had enough money to buy a real tandem.
Except for raising our daughter, riding tandems is the best thing we have done together. We had hoped to ride well into our eighties, like some of you have; however, time will tell if that happens. Stay safe.
