Well, here we are, two weeks on from being petrified and less than manly, Mikeal (Spiller of seed) and I have mastered the two wheeled, two seat bicycle.
We saddled up, and mounted the object of fear the other day. I can't say it went seamlessly, but it was a victory. We wobbled our way about for a while, then entertained the commuting traffic around Point Chev with a snake like wobble, several curses and the threat of intra-fratenal warfare. That was the low point.
A stop in a workshop later and corrected seat height and we were fearsome. From there we rode smoothly out to the Rosebank Road go-kart track and proceded to lap it around the tight track, no traffic, few distractions and no laughter from the two builders and their dog. We were a unit, at one.
On our return to town we sped along the bike path, with the eighty kilometre per hour traffic inching past us, we were a missile with two men atop. Homeward we made it all the way with no further incidents.
This weekend we will attempt a whole one hundred kilometres, although I suspect I may need to change my bare SLR saddle to something with even a modicum of padding to avoid a minor meltdown. Apart from that all will be good.
As a complete aside, I did have a wager on the Round Taupo a couple of years prior. This wager was around myself and Gordon McKendry on a tandem to beat two comparative whippets on another tandem. Thankfully Gordon was less of a man than me and chickened out. I suspect that while, our combined two hundred kilogrammes plus would have been a trifle slow up hill, based on my current tandem experiences, I would say that we would have been unable to even ride it in a straight line far enough to reach the control gates, all five hundred metres from the start. That would have been the nadir of my cycling career.
As I've told you many times now, the SLR is an ass-hatchet, much like Olympus cameras are ass-inine. Maybe you're right, thoug about the SLR. Maybe it weren't the saddle that rubbed wrong but the fact that for part of a day you say you road a man missile. Maybe you didn't lube up enough. Perhaps you need to do some relaxation exercises before mounting the missile next time.
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