# 2000 miles of tandemming



## srw (11 May 2014)

As those of you who've had nothing better to do than closely peruse signature lines will know, just over a year ago @rvw (she's Mrs W in real life) and I set ourselves a challenge - to ride at least 100 miles a month on the tandem and also complete 2000 miles in a year. The year ran from April 2013 to April 2014 (inclusive), chosen to coincide with our 20th wedding anniversary year. This was among a number of other things we set ourselves to do during the year - and one of the ones we completed. Oddly enough, it was mostly the ones which involved regular commitment where we were successful rather than the one-offs - there's a lesson in there somewhere.

We are fortunate enough to have two tandems. One is a Thorn Rohloff in British Racing Green - like most Thorn touring bikes it's extremely well-engineered, stable on its 26" wheels and weighs a ton. It's equipped with XTR mountain bike rim V-brakes and is shod in Marathon pluses. The other is a Santana titanium machine we picked up second-hand a couple of years ago. With 700c wheels and hugely wide gearing (53-40-28 x 11-34 9-speed) it's very lively, very quick and very versatile. It's also occasionally rather temperamental - the gears can be a pain to adjust, and the cable-hydraulic combi disc rear brake always feels a bit of a bodge job, although its stopping power is awesome. We ran the first part of the year in Durano pluses, but they wore out alarmingly quickly and we're now on a Marathon-Conti combination. I think we'll use Marathons for normal, but I'm toying with something faster for the London 100 sportive (probably the only sportive either of us will ever do). Both the bikes are equipped with S&S couplings, which makes transporting them in a car or a train pretty easy.

We have two local out-and-back rides which are about as flat as you can get in the Chilterns - the routes are carefully selected to hug the top of the ridge we live on. One is a 14-mile saunter to The Lee (where the Liberty family lived) and back; the other takes us somewhere over 20 miles to Cholesbury or on to Wigginton. These two routes formed the bread-and-butter of our year, and mycyclinglog records that just over half of our rides by number - adding up to somewhere in the region of a quarter of the miles - were on one or other of these routes.

The other major source of miles was our trip to Normandy on the 2013 Fridays' tour. This week of meandering around the countryside south of Cherbourg contributed about 250 miles to a June total of very nearly 500 miles. The Fridays also gave us our longest ride of 122.1 miles (London - Southwold) as well as one or two others. I particularly remember the drenching we received on our ride into London en route for Southend-on-Sea, and the black ice we found and slid on on our way to the post-Christmas Fridays' tourette. 

That was our only accident of any kind during the year (in fact it was my first for years). And we only had a handful of mechanicals - a puncture in a Marathon,a puncture in a Marathon plus (yes, they do happen - a half-inch bit of razor sharp flint) and a slipping saddle, to be cured by tightening up the adjustment bolt.

Inevitably in a year with 62 individual rides, totalling 2015 miles and taking up over a week of elapsed riding time (plus faffing time and stopping-at-lights time) a lot of the rides blur. We went through floods in Surrey and slurry in Shropshire, along footpaths and motorways in Berkshire and up and down alarmingly steep hills on the Isle of Wight and in Buckinghamshire. I only remember one hill that defeated us - the relentless monster that is Kop Hill out of Princes Risborough, on the heavy tandem after a heavy lunch. 

We finished the year with a shameless nostalgia ride. I moved to Abingdon in 1974 from the North-East; @rvw was brought up in Shropshire and came to Oxford to university, where we met. Before moving here to Buckinghamshire we lived in a series of places in Oxford and then Bicester - which was the cue for a weekend finale via Bicester to Oxford and back again via Abingdon. We visited all four of our shared homes and my childhood home, and passed within a very few minutes of all of the places we individually lived in Oxford. 

We found someone to take a photo of us outside the church where we were married (no, we didn't ride tandem away from the service - it was the number 7b bus instead).





and had a long evening at Bella Italia (previously Bella Pasta) on George Street - the sad loss of the Taj Mahal from Turl Street meant that we could only go to our second-favourite haunt. All of which partying meant that when we got back to Stoke Mandeville station and discovered an imminent train home we enjoyed the relief of having met our target and cut our journey short rather than climb the long hill up to the top.

For stats geeks (and I apologise in advance to graphical pedants for the limitations of google docs), here's a chart of the year. No, it wasn't a speedy year! About 40% of the miles were on the slower bike, and we're not exactly built for speed. It was particularly good to see that only the doldrums of February and March (almost exactly 100 miles each) sent us back below the target line after June's jump-start.


----------



## steveindenmark (13 May 2014)

Excellent-

Well done and congratulaions to you both.

I have yet to convince Jannie that riding a tandem would be good fun.

Steve


----------



## VJOCK (29 Jun 2014)

Well done on the rides and distance 
I hope to reach 1000 by end July but looking rather unlikely

Also, spotted you around the lee earlier today as you zoomed past us just before the cock and rabbit pub.
Both flat rides u mentioned in chilterns we also do with various variations . On trikes or tandem ( thorn explorer)


----------

