Setting the Pace

Meep Meep!

When my wife and I first started biking together, there were no pace issues.  We were newbies and riding on fairly heavy hybrids.  We just naturally kept pace with each other.  But I threw myself into biking to help manage my diabetes.  My wife on the other hand, is hardworking and pretty busy.  Sometimes she would put in 60-70 hour weeks; it doesn't leave as much time for for biking.  So while I was putting in 4-6 days of biking per week, hers were more like 2 or 3.

Eventually you start to reach different levels of performance.  If you want to ride together, you can't do it for performance reasons; one person will either pull far ahead or not get any exercise.  So you stick to leisure.  Which is great as it gives you time to enjoy each others company.  But I can't do 3-5 leisure rides a week, I need to exercise.

The obvious solution would be a tandem bike.  Then our level of fitness wouldn't matter as much.  It's definitely a bike I want to investigate in the future.  But there's no room in the budget for a tandem bike so a cheaper solution was required.

It's tough to hang with a roadrunner on this thing!

We decided to try different bikes to see how it would go.  I took my hybrid out and she took out her road bike.  For the most part it did work well.  I did have to draft to keep up at times, and on a few occasions she did sprint away, but I held my own pretty well.  Most of all, we were able enjoy a fitness ride together.

This winter we'll both be trying out spin class.  I'm hoping it will help narrow our fitness gap and get us back on matching bikes.  In the meantime we'll make do with mismatched bikes or leisure rides.