Two Wheel Blogs

I should have gotten up and run my 6-miler first thing in the morning, when it was still in the low 60s. Instead, I drank coffee, read the paper, and watched TV. When I hit the trail at 11:00, temperatures had risen to the low 80s. Fortunately, there was a breeze. Without it, it would have been a much hotter run.

After lunch, I wanted to go for a ride. I don't know if the wind had picked up, but the "breeze" that cooled me during my run now felt more like "wind." I did not relish the idea of spending the afternoon either fighting or running away from a headwind. No, today was not a good day for riding stretched out over the frame. It would be better to ride low, close to the ground, to cut down the wind.

Everyone has some dark secret he or she keeps hidden away, never letting it see the light of day. It's like an ugly lamp, a present from some well-meaning relative, doomed to spend eternity in the attic or the basement, whichever has the darkest corner. My secret isn't that deep or that dark, but if you looked in my basement, you would find my road bike and my cyclcross bike (thanks again, Boz) and my hybrid and my son's mountain bike. If you looked a little farther, you would also see a recumbent cycle, a CatTrike Pocket, to be exact. How it came to be there is a long story. Suffice it to say, we bought it because my wife, Diane, is unable to ride a regular bike, the result of a knee injury cased by too much riding "back in the day."

I'd never ridden the recumbent before, not for any real distance of length of time. Rather than ride my cyclocross bike, I decided to take the 'bent for spin. I did the big loop on the Madison Country trail system, riding down the bluff to Horseshoe Lake, then coming back up through Glen Carbon to home. It was a very different perspective to ride sitting upright, legs extended in from of me, and low to the ground. If felt like the pedaling action worked a different set of different leg muscles or, possibly, the same muscles but in a different way.

I found the bike a little hard to handle. Going straight wasn't a problem -- most of the time. But it didn't take much, a little bump here or there, to change the bike's direction slightly, requiring a correction. I quickly learned to stop pedaling and coast as I approached the traffic barriers where the trail intersected with roads. Doing so allowed me to minimize interference and coast in a straight line, thereby reducing the likelihood that I might run into one of the barriers.

Other than that, I enjoyed riding the recumbent. It was fun to be down low, to see the trail and the surrounding scenery from that level. And it was fun just to cruise, just roll down the trail. It was very different from riding my road bike, but not unpleasant. I may do it again sometime.