New Toys(or Show-and-Tell)

First, for those regular readers, I've been a bit lax updating my blog in the last couple of weeks.  To make up for it, I wrote an entry yesterday talking about recent rides as well as today's entry about upgrades. That entry has more exciting less tech-y pictures than this one.

A few weeks ago, my front derailleur shifter cable broke.  I bought a set of SRAM X.4 trigger shifters to replace my current shifters.  I installed the front derailleur shifter three days after the cable broke.  I didn't get around to installing the rear derailleur shifter until two weeks ago.

The old front shifter. Note the ever-present gap between the shifter and the grip.

A couple of hours before my ride with Andrew to New York State line and back, I started work to upgrade the shifter.  I was a little concerned that I wasn't leaving myself enough time to get the new shifter installed and tuned, but I had no problems.  In addition to installing the shifters, I also installed SRAM locking grips and a second Mirrycle bar-end mirror.  The old grips would often separate from the grip shifter leaving an annoying gap; the new grips alleviate this problem completely. I very much like the mirror I already had on the left side handbars, so I bought a second for my bike (as well as one for my wife's bicycle).  Mirrors are a good idea on any bicycle, but are particularly important on recumbent bicycles since it so much harder to turn around and see what's behind you.

Particularly important on front-wheel-drive bikes, to help stabilize them when parking if you can set the front brake.  The bike brake is a very cheap way of doing just this.

A view of the finished upgrade, including a second mirror and the bike parking brake.

A close-up of the grip, the shifter, the bike brake, and the mirror.

For the rear derailleur, I very much prefer the trigger shifter to the grip shifter.  For one thing, when I would pull myself up by the handlebars, I often found that I would accidentally shift.  For another, when I'm shifting into my granny gear, I generally go from the middle chain ring on the crankset and the lowest gear on the cassette to the granny gear on the crankset and the fourth gear on the cassette.  I want this switch to be as simultaneous as possible.  Before, it was largely guess work.  Now, I just plink-PLUNKplink-plink and I'm there.  (The plink is the shifting of the rear derailleur and the PLUNK is the front).

There are two downsides to this new setup.  The first of which is that the twist front derailleur actually had more than three positions which would help avoid situations where the chain likes to rub on the front derailleur; I can't really get into the fifth gear or above on the rear derailleur when I'm in the granny gear. The second issue is knee clearance.  Having the shifter live below the handlebars reduces this clearance. This doesn't affect me because I installed an adjustable stem as well as moved my seat as far forward as possible.  I am not a big fan of twist shifters and am pleased with the upgrade to trigger shifters.

After this ride, I installed two other new toys.  First, I installed Kool-Stop dual compound mountain pads on the front brake.  I don't know if it just because because the original pads were quite worn (they had almost 1,500 miles on them when they were replaced)  or because the new pads are really just that much better (or most likely, both), but the new brake pads help me stop much more quickly.  Another worthy upgrade.

Kool-Stop front brake pads.  The two colors are two different compounds are for tuned for wet and try stopping.

I've had a couple of close calls with cars where my only recourse has been to, well, basically shout at them to get their attention.  Especially since I am often riding with my children, I've decided that I wanted a loud horn.  I've just added a Delta Cycle Airzound Horn.

Airzound horn (surrounded by lights) with bottle reservoir.

The horn is air-powered and has the ability to (somewhat) control the volume.  The reservoir is refillable with a regular air pump (up to 80 psi).  I (fortunately) haven't yet needed to use it in traffic, but I'm convinced it will get me noticed when I need it.  On trails and with pedestrians, I'll continue to use my voice as this horn is too loud for pedestrians and other cyclists.

The last two pictures are toys that I've already had and talked about.  But since I was taking pictures, so I snapped a couple of shots.  I used an Axiom seat collar with rack eyelets to attach the rear rack.  I bought 29.8mm size which wasn't quite large enough to replace the seat collar that was there.  I decided that this was a good thing and I used a piece of rubber to line the seat post and attached it.  The reason I decided this was better is that I didn't want to directly connect the the rack (which is attached to the rear triangle) to the main body of the bike (since there is a rear shock).  I really ought to bring up a metal piece from the rear triangle so that the rack isn't attached to the main body at all, but I found that how it is works well enough.

Rack attached to the seatpost. You can see the Trek trail-a-bike mount attached to the seatpost as well.

The final picture is showing how I mount my 100oz Camelbak Unbottle to the back of my seat.  I use two straps that go under the upper seat pad to hold it in place.  In my case, it sits on the braces for the rack, but I'm sure if the rack wasn't there, I would figure out something to make sure that it didn't drop too low and interfere with either the wheel or the brake.

I've never gone for a ride longer than 20 miles without this water reservoir and I recommend it highly.

Camelback Unbottle attached to the back of my seat.

Several Nice Rides

I've done a bit of both riding and upgrades since my last blog entry; I'll talk about the upgrades in another entry here. In the last two weeks, I've been on nine rides (counting commuting to and from work as a single ride) and my total on my Sofrider is now just over 1,500 miles (since the middle of February).

First, my friend Andrew and I went on a very nice 25 mile ride to just inside New York state and back.  This was Andrew's first big ride he and his wife Amy had their baby 3 months ago (and since his rear wheel was being rebuilt, he rode it on my comfort bike instead of his bicycle).  We averaged over 12 mph with 1200 feet of elevation gain.  Given that it was his first long ride since the Bloomin' Metric Century in May and it wasn't on a bike he had ever ridden before (and given that he had thought he'd want to ride "five to ten miles"), it was huge success.

I had several very nice commuting to work rides.  This ride, for example,  had a nice 9.7 mile loop in the morning with an 7.7 mile loop home with an average speed of both laps of just under 14 mph.  On another ride in to work, I saw a family of deer crossing the road.  Most of them ran off before I got out my phone, but you can almost make out of two of them.

Two of the family of deer I spotted.  The others got away before I got out my camera.

Apparently summer is coming to an end because I'm getting on the rode while the sun is still waking up.  Here is a nice shot of the sun rise over the Long Island Sound.

A nice sunrise. It isn't actually as dark as it looks; the light from the sun triggered the auto-light level in the camera.

On my ride to work this Wednesday, as I was finished climbing a small hill and about to turn onto a nice stretch of downhill, I caught a glimpse of something blue.  In my mirror, I saw a fully spandexed road bicycle rider in my mirror, complete with his Team Garmin jersey.  Since I had a slight downhill (about 1% grade), I decided to go for it and try and hold him off.  I was huffing and puffing (unfortunately, I let the Garmin batteries die so I don't know how fast I was going) and making pretty good time. But I saw him gaining in my mirror.  After about half a mile, he passed me and said: "Impressive!  Very impressive!"  to which I replied (with a big smile on my face): "I tried!"  For the next mile, he lead, but he didn't drop me.  I was within 10 meters or so until I turned off to head to work.

August was a busy month for us.  My parents came to visit us in the beginning of the month.  Kate and the monkeys went up to her parents house in Vermont.  When they got back, my sister Debbie, her husband Alex, and her two sons came to visit last week.  And during all of this, my big monkey just started kindergarten!

My bigger nephew wanted to try Julia's trail-a-bike.  He just turned four and he is just a little bit shorter than my big monkey.  So when she was at kindergarten, Alex and I went for a ride.  Alex rode Kate's bike pulling my little monkey, and I rode my Sofrider pulling my nephew (since it's harder balance with a trail-a-bike since I have experience pulling one).

Although my Alex is originally from Maine, he and my sister now live in Illinois, where it is flat.  I did try to point out that here in Connecticut we have hills ("I'm from Maine, I know hills.").  So off we went. The ride turned out to be a little tougher than either of us expected.  We did a total of 8 miles. Alex might have grown up riding in hills, but this was his first time pulling a trailer up them.  And he's grateful that he was pulling up my little monkey who is significantly lighter than his big monkey.

In my case, I've been riding pulling my big monkey on trail-a-bikes since she was three years old (first using a gator bar pulling her 12" bicycle with my folding bike and now her Trek trail-a-bike), so she understands how to balance very well.  My nephew had never ridden one before, so he wasn't nearly as experienced as how to balance.  And he's a lot heavier than his cousin.  Being on my Sofrider, my center of mass is a lot lower than it would be on my comfort bike, and so it was sometimes quite a bit of effort to keep everything balanced.

At first, he wasn't pedaling at all and even without that complication, I was spending a lot of energy making sure we were well balanced..  When he first started to pedal, I was surprised by how much effort it took on my part to keep us balanced (my arms were sore a couple days later, so it was quite a workout for me).  By the end of the ride, however, we were going up one last hill where not only did he pedal, his pedaling helped.  And most importantly, he had a blast.

Yesterday, while my big monkey was at her cello lesson, Andrew came by and he and I went out for a ride (he rode on my comfort bike, and I was riding my Sofrider pulling my little monkey in the trailer).  We rode a total of 11.5 miles, including the biggest hills up which I've ever tried to pull a trailer.  After reaching the peak of the last hill (almost 90 feet in 0.3 miles or an average grade of 6%), I was ready for a rest.

The little monkey and me taking a quick breather before continuing on our ride.  That little monkey really likes his cantaloupe. 

The ride home was quite a bit easier since we had a net drop of about 200 feet.  We averaged just over 10 mph, of which I was really quite proud considering everything.

All in all, I rode just over 125 miles and really had a blast!  As I mentioned, I've now put on just over fifteen hundred miles on this bicycle.  I'm very happy with the Sofrider and would highly recommend it to people who think they might be interested.  In a couple years (read: when I might be able to afford it), I can easily see upgrading to one of the higher end Cruzbikes like the Vendetta or Silvio.

Onward and Upward

I successfully replaced the front derailleur shifter after the cable snapped two weeks ago. I bought a set of SRAM X.4 trigger shifters but have only installed the front derailleur shifter so far.  For the front derailleur, I might actually prefer the twist shifter but on previous bicycles, I prefer the trigger shifters for the rear derailleur (which is why I bought trigger shifters), so I will change the other shifter as well..  I'll have more updates after I swap out the other shifter, hopefully soon.

I was only out of commission for a couple of days with the broken cable and still managed to get 85 miles in during the last two weeks.  Almost all of which are from commuting to and from work, although admittedly I often take routes that are very much not direct.  For example, on Friday my total distance was just under 17 miles instead of the 9 the direct route it would have been (they've been doing construction so I've been taking a slightly longer route).

One new thing I've been trying is a technique called bridging (talked about both Ak-tux in the comments of this blog post and in this 'Bent Riders Online (BROL) Forum post).  The basic idea is that I plant my shoulders into the seat, push hard on the pedals, and lift my butt out of the seat. It almost looks like I'm standing up like one would do on a regular diamond frame bike.  Well, when I say almost, I should point out that my butt barely gets out of the seat.  So, it probably doesn't really look like somebody standing, but that's how I like to imagine it.  It is worth pointing out that I've read that it is easier to bridge when the seat angle is lower (closer to horizontal).  I was not successful before I lowered my seat angle.

I can't bridge for very long as it takes core muscles that apparently I don't really have.  But when I am doing it, I find that I am able to transfer considerably more energy to the pedals.  I've been able to power up some small to smallish-medium hills using this technique and I find that I can do it much faster and therefore in a much bigger gear than when I just sit back and spin my way up.

Unlike other regular or recumbent bicycles, the pedals are directly hooked up to the steering.  One advantage of this is that when climbing hills, I can "pull myself up" by the handlebars which means that I can get my upper body involved in climbing.  I have been using this technique since the beginning.  I find that bridging helps me climb better than this technique (although I can't do either for very long).

There's another post on BROL where a rider came up with an idea of using a blood-pressure cuff as an inflatable bladder that he uses to help him bridge for long periods of time.  On this entry, I hypothesized that in order for this to work, it needs to be the case that when one is sitting on the air bladder, one is not as stable as when just sitting on the seat and this instability leads to the hips being able to move in a more unimpeded fashion.  I don't know that this theory holds any water or not.  In any case since it is not very expensive to try his technique, maybe I'll do that in the future as well.

Bad Bike-Ma?

July has been a tough month for bicycling.  First, my front wheel almost fell off. Next, I fell over (scraping up my pride and my elbow).  Last week between constraints with Kate out of town and the weather, I didn't ride in to work a single time.  And, to top it all off yesterday, the shifter cable running to my front derailleur broke while I was on a ride pulling the little monkey in the trailer. I did ride the remaining 2.5 miles home using only my granny gear up front, but in an effort to hit the lap button on my Garmin, I accidentally hit the stop button.

See if you can spot the wild turkeys?  I took the picture and it still took me a couple of minutes to find one.

Before the cable broke, it was a nice ride.  We saw a family of wild turkeys (although when I stopped to take a picture, they had pretty well hidden themselves).  This is my longest ride pulling a monkey so far (16.3 miles) and I felt pretty good at the end of it (I could have gone further if it weren't for the broken shifter cable and the monkey starting to get cranky).

In any case, I've ordered new shifters so that hopefully I'll be up and running mid-week.  And since that will be August, so maybe my bike-ma (and karma) will be on the up and up.

Trips To the State Line (Almost), The Park (Definitely), and The Dirt (Unfortunately)

There was rain this week so I only got to ride into work twice (although I did manage to stretch it out to 21 miles instead of just 13). Kate and her father are in Oregon visiting her grandmother.  Kate's mother is staying with the rest of us to watch the monkeys while Kate is gone.  Since the monkeys really like their grandmother, they are behaving better than usual (which, believe you me, is a very good thing).

My mother-in-law needed to go back up to her house yesterday, but graciously held off leaving until 8:30 a.m. so that I could go out for a quick ride.  I rode most of the way to New York state, turning around in Bethel, Connecticut.  It was almost 650 feet in altitude gain with some pretty serious hills just before I turned around.  I only averaged 12.7 mph, partly because the hills slowed me down so much climbing, but because they were in town, I couldn't safely zoom down them when I came back home. I was going to finish the ride with a pass up Flax Hill road, but I ran out of time (No, really, I ran out of time or I would have.  Stop snickering.)

A view of the rode in Bethel just after I turned around.

Today I packed both monkeys in the trailer and took them to a nearby park.  Last week I ended the ride pulling the little monkey in the trailer and I found that it wasn't much more (if any) effort than pulling the big monkey on the trail-a-bike.  But pulling them both in the trailer was actually kind of demoralizing as it was a lot harder than I remembered.  This ride only had 400 feet of elevation gain, but apparently we've been feeding them too much because I really felt it today. 


The monkeys had a good time being monkeys at the park (we even ran into other monkeys that we knew).  On the way home things were going well enough.  It was mostly uphill to the park, so it was mostly downhill on the way home.  Apparently that wasn't good enough as a mile from home, I decided to (er.. well..) hit the curb and fall over.


The trailer arm has a spring in it designed to make sure that it stays upright even if the bike falls over (I've unfortunately verified this feature works well in the past).  I fell onto the grass, but did it hard enough that I scraped up my elbow and arm somewhat.  The bike was mostly ok with the exception of breaking part of the plastic chain guard.  The crankset was half-buried in the dirt and it took me a couple minutes getting everything clean.

The broken plastic chain guard.

You hear a lot about how people in cars are a real problem for bicyclists.  I'm very pleased to report in this time I had the exact opposite experience.  I had several drivers pull over and make sure everybody was o.k.  To anybody who is ever in that situation, please do stop and ask. It's nice to know that most people out there will do the right thing when they need to. 


I picked myself off and dusted off my arm and my leg.  On the way home, the big monkey asked if I fell down just like the people on the TV (we have been watching the Tour de France).  "Yes baby girl.  Exactly like that."


The last couple weeks (with this fall and having issues with my front wheel last week) have been more exciting than I would have hoped.  Let's all be careful out there.

Lots of Commuting Rides (or, How I Almost Lost My Front Wheel)

Since getting back from our trip to Vermont, I've ridden just over a hundred miles (almost all of which to and from work).  Most of it hasn't been too exciting, but it's still a nice way to start and end a work day.  I modified my to work extra loop to add a couple of very short but quite steep hills.  The more the merrier, right?

Last Saturday I went for a ride after I put the monkeys to bed.  At about 9 miles into the ride I was going down a hill when suddenly the bike started to wobble.  I pulled it over to a stop and took a look at the bike.  Everything seemed fine. As I was already started up the next hill, I decided to walk the bike up and start riding again.  I went just over a mile and had started climbing (the dreaded) Flax Hill road when my front tire locked up.

I lifted the bike over the guard rail for the sidewalk and flipped the bike so I could take a proper look.  The front wheel had come loose and was basically jammed against the frame.  Definitely a little scary.  I have been using quick release wheels on bicycles for about 30 years off and on (probably a lot more off than on since I wasn't riding much until recently) and I've never had any such problem.  I had taken the wheels off the bike when transporting it to and from Vermont, but I had been riding the bike for a week since putting it back together.  I don't know if I really just didn't tighten it enough or if it got bumped at the bike rack at work or what.  In any case, the moral of the story is, please check your quick release levers regularly to make sure they are good and tight.

I made sure the wheel was properly attached and safely rode the rest of the way home (without climbing Flax Hill road the second time).

This weekend Kate and I went out for a ride with the kids.  We didn't leave early enough in the morning, however, and it ended up being a bit too hot (and humid), I left Kate and one monkey by the side of the road so I could go home and get the van with the other monkey and pick them up.

The scenery here in Connecticut is much nicer than what we had in Illinois, although not quite as picturesque as Vermont.  But since it's boring to read a post with no pictures, I'll leave you with a shot of the sun rising I took this morning on my way to work.

A view overlooking the Long Island Sound as the sun rises taken on Bell Island in Rowayton, CT.

Vermont, The Green Mountain State

Last week I took a vacation from work.  Kate and I packed my bike, the dog, and the kids in the car and and we went up to her parent's house in Vermont.  We had our niece and nephew stay with us the night before we left, and they and their father (Kate's brother) were also up for the first few days with us (his wife wasn't lucky enough to get vacation for the week).

Her parents live in Lunenburg, which is on the New Hampshire border an hour south of Canada.  It's a very picturesque and rural area.  There isn't too much close by, so we didn't really have any plans except for Kate helping out in their garden and me going for an occasional bicycle ride.

Until last year when we moved to Connecticut, we lived in (very flat) Illinois. Illinois is a great place to learn how to drive a stick-shift cars because you never have to worry about having to start on a hill.  It also makes riding a bike very easy.  In Connecticut, it is hard to find a place to ride where there isn't a large change in elevation.  I'm originally from Illinois and am not used to hills (either walking or biking).  I've been working hard to get used to the hills and been slowly making progress. At least I thought so, until I rode a bicycle in Vermont.  And, to be fair, I really shouldn't be surprised that Vermont isn't flat since its name literally translates from French to English as Green Mountain.

When I plan rides, I prefer to get my climbing out of the way early so I can start of working hard and have an easier time of it at the end of the ride.  Unfortunately for me, my in-laws live close to the top of a big hill.  For my first ride in Vermont, the first two miles I dropped over 480 feet in elevation and averaged just under 25 mph (with a maximum speed of 35 mph) and, boy, was it fun!  And the whole way down, I realized I'd be paying for that decent sooner or later.

The scenery of the ride and the weather were gorgeous.

A gorgeous view of the Connecticut River (which flows very close to our house in Connecticut).

The road.

After the big decent, there was a climb at the 6th mile of about 180 feet over 0.4 miles.  It is not the steepest hill I've ever climbed (average grade over 8.5%), but it was quite long (or so I thought).  I stopped about half way up the hill for a couple minutes to catch my breath and kept going.  Except for this hill, the rest of the route was quite flat.  Until the accent back up to the house, that is.

The climb back up was along the same route as the decent.  I averaged 5.8 mph for the last two miles.  I stopped once to catch my breath (this time for a few minutes).  The average grade wasn't that large (under 4%) and my new granny gear was very useful here, but the length of the climb was unlike anything I had tried before.  I made it, but it really was hard.

On Monday, I worked on fixing up my in-laws extra bike so my brother-in-law, Alek could go for a ride with me. I had my tools but not my stand, so it wasn't as easy as I would have liked, but I got the bike moving. Alek runs and plays soccer, but hasn't regularly ridden a bike in years.  There was a break in the rain, so off we went.  It turns out I didn't do as good a job tuning the gears as I would have hoped.  At the bottom of the first hill (about a half-mile down), we realized that we should tune it up more. So we turned around and went back up. This was just under 140 feet in half a mile,  This is an average grade of just over 5% and is definitely noticeable (although much less in this case where we hadn't gotten tired doing a long ride first).

When we got to the top, Alek realized that he didn't really want to do that again, so we didn't bother tuning that bike any more.  As I mentioned earlier, they live near the top of the hill.  But not at the top.  So I figured, I'd ride up to the top.  The hill right in front of their house has a 9% incline and the road was still quite wet.  I tried several times but could not get started (front wheel slipping).  I have dual-sided pedals (meaning I can clip in one one side but don't on the other), so I unclipped my left foot and tried one last time.  Unfortunately, I accidentally clipped in my right foot and since I didn't have any momentum, over I went.  The worst thing was being embarrassed that fell down.  I scraped up my left arm a bit, but not too badly.  And I scratched up the plastic on my mirror, but the rest of the bike was fine.  Clearly starting on wet steep hills is something I need practice with.

On Tuesday, I rode almost the same route I had done on Sunday, except that I did the bottom loop clockwise instead of counter-clockwise.  The weather was a lot gloomier this time, but it was dry so there were no traction problems.

The same road as above two days later.

The Connecticut River several miles closer to my in-laws house.

The road.

The advantage of doing this is that I didn't have an intermediate large climb to make (instead had a gradual climb and a quick intermediate decent where I hit 39 mph).  My overall time was a couple minutes slower over the 16.5 mile course (1 hour 19 minutes compared to 1 hour 17 minutes).  

On Thursday I rode a completely new route.  This one didn't start with just a straight drop but had a couple ups mixed in with the downs.  Again once I finished the decent, the rest of the route was really quite flat (flatter than what we have here in Connecticut).  This ride was a total of just over 26 miles.  The first 24 miles were a breeze.  The climb of the last two almost did me in.

On Friday, I did yet another completely new route, this one with proper rolling hills.  So unlike all of the other rides, this one was challenging right off of the bat.  It wasn't until 8.5 miles that I had finished the hills and ended up at the bottom altitude.

After my first ride, Kate and her mother suggested that they meet me at the "Covered Bridge" so that they could take my picture while riding the bike.  So instead of climbing back up the hill, I called up Kate just after mile 12 to have her meet me at the bridge.  And after the photo-shoot, I just packed the bike in the van and we went back to the house so I could get ready to take my father-in-law out for his birthday dinner (Happy Birthday!).  

A view of me riding just after leaving the Covered Bridge.

A close-up.

All in all, it was a great week.  Got to spend more time with my family and got a lot of riding in.  I'm still not very good at riding up hills, but since practice makes perfect, I'll keep trying.

How Low Can I Go, Part II

A couple weeks ago I wrote about putting a 22T granny gear on my bike.  It is still taking me a while to get used to it as I now have to shift both front and rear derailleurs at the same time so that I am not just spinning when I drop into the tiny gear.  I've found that because of this, I use the granny gear less, but that it really does nicely lower my range.

One problem with this gear, also because the large difference in size between the granny and middle gear (38T), is that the chain will fall off the granny gear when I'm shifting down to it.  To stop this problem I bought a (34.9mm) N-Gear Jump Stop Chain Guide.  Because of the pulley near the bottom bracket for the front derailleur, I couldn't get it quite as far down as I would have wanted, but it does seem to have stopped the problem.

Chain-stop from the front.

Chain stop from the side

When I originally put the triple crank on the bike, I found that the chain actually fell off the crankset less frequently than with the original double. With the small granny gear, the problem was worse than with the original double.

In the same vein as the last post, I moved the seat on my Sofrider as far forward as possible as well as lowered the angle of the seat. Lowering the angle means I've reduced my cross section to the wind.  Moving the seat forwards means that hopefully my center of mass is now closer to the front wheel to help with wheel slippage when climbing.

You'd think that when somebody is writing about this in a blog called The Recumbent Quant, there would be a quantitative measurement about how much forward the seat has moved, or by how much the angle has changed.  Well, don't worry.  I'm disappointed in myself too for not having these things.  My guess is that the seat angle changed from 50 degrees to about 45 degrees.  Part of me would like to be able to lower the seat even more, but given that I use it to pull a trail-a-bike, I think this is about as low as it can go.

New seat position.  It few centimeters further forward and probably about 5 degrees more horizontal.

 I've been riding this way for about a week.  I guess the biggest surprise is that there really isn't much of a difference while riding.  The handlebars are further away and feel a bit less "cramped" (although it was never really a problem before) and the viewing angle to my bike computer is a bit worse.  And I had to extend the boom so the bottom bracket/crankset moved a bit more forward. So I can tell that the seat is in a different position, but the bike basically feels the same when I'm riding it.

Another possible difference is that by tilting the seat back, I'm able to ride further without "recumbutt" (which is having your butt fall asleep (this is much better than having your "what-what" fall asleep)..  This is a problem that I used to have on longer rides.  I haven't had any symptoms yet, but I've only ridden for just over 16 miles since I made the change.  I'll probably eventually add padding to the seat bottom as well.

I do feel as if I am cruising at a little faster on flat terrain and on my maiden voyage, I hit 39 mph on a course that I've ridden on before without realizing I got anywhere near that fast.  And the next day was my fastest every time commuting to work.  All of that being said, I'm not really yet convinced how much of a difference it has made (although it's pretty clear that it hasn't gotten any worse).  Time will tell.

How Low Can I Go?

When I bought my Cruzbike Sofrider, it came with double front crank (with 48 teeth on the big cog and 34 teeth (48T/34T)) and a rear cassette that goes from 11T to 32T.  With this setup, the bike has a range of 26 to 107 gear inches.  (For those unfamiliar, "gear inch" refers to equivalent size wheel without any additional gearing.  For example, 60 gear inches is equivalent to riding a large penny-farthing bicycle with a 60" front wheel).

Almost immediately I realized I wanted more range and although it took me twoattempts, I installed a triple crankset (48T/38T/28T).  This decreased the low end of my gearing to 21.5 gear inches.  This was a big improvement and made a big difference, both when pulling a trailer on "regular" hills and when riding solo up very large hills. It was a big improvement, but it wasn't enough.

After the Bloomin' Metric Century and the problem I had on that large hill, I started thinking about what I wanted to do.  After asking on the 'Bent Riders Online forum and deciding that it was at least worth trying, I ordered a 22T cog.  This is equivalent to just below 17 gear inches (or a reduction of a third over the original crankset in terms of number of teeth or gear inches).

Today, I pulled the crankset, removed the old cog and put on the new one.

Crankset with the original 28T granny gear.

Crankset with the new 22T granny gear with the original gear to the right.  The new gear really does look a loot smaller, doesn't it.

My bike being held on the bike stand after reattaching the crank.

After taking it for a short test drive, I realized I needed to shorten the chain.  The reason is that the diameter of the 22T cog is significantly smaller than the 28T cog and that the chain was too long to be in the small front cog and the higher (meaning smaller in number of teeth and therefore also diameter) gears.

I ended up removing a couple more links than I meant to because the first time I pushed the pin out of the chain, I pushed it completely out and wasn't able to get it back in.  After reading online, I realized my mistake and made sure to leave the pin in the second time.  I had to break the chain one more time (again, I was smart and careful enough to leave the pin in) because I hadn't routed the chain correctly through the rear derailleur.

Here I'm using the chain-breaking tool.  I recommend removing the wheel before trying this.

The second time I was smart enough to leave the pin in and not push it completely out. The white bag is being held by my daughter so the camera phone would focus on the pin and not the floor.

With the new setup, I can still (barely) make it into the large cog on the crankset and the largest (lowest) cog on the rear cassette.  You're not supposed to use this gear and I tried to avoid it before, but I'll try harder now.  I can be in the granny gear on the crankset and easily make it to the 5th gear on the cassette.  I can make it into the 6th gear, but it isn't entirely happy.

Since I had installed a new granny gear, I needed hills on which to try it out. After putting the kids to bed, I took the bike out for an 11 mile ride that went up Flax Hill road (one of the worst hills around here) twice.  I averaged 14 mph, which is my fastest ride (over 10 miles) ever.  Not bad considering I did Flax Hill twice.

I like the lower granny gear, but the difference between the medium cog on the crankset (38T) and this gear (22T) is quite noticeable.  When changing from the second cog to the granny, I also need to move the rear derailleur from the 1st (biggest) gear to 4th or 5th gear if I don't want to spin out (meaning spinning but not turning the wheel because it's moving too quickly).  I had similar problems when shifting out of the granny gear and if I didn't change from a high rear gear (say, 5th) in the granny gear to a much lower rear gear for the middle cog on the crankset, I found that it was too hard to peddle.

The first time I went of Flax Hill road, I did use the smallest gear on the bike, but found that I didn't really need to (the GPS claims my speed was as low as 3.6 mph here).  The second time I went up the hill, I found the lowest gear quite comfortable although for that particular hill, I would have been quite o.k. in the next highest gear.   Here the GPS doesn't report as low a speed, it does show me averaging 4.5 MPH for most of the last part of the hill,

For now, I think I'll go up a size to the 24T ring as the granny gear on the crankset.  In the future, I'll consider replacing the middle 38T chanring with something smaller (say, a 34T).  Definitely learned a lot playing with this.  More tweaking coming soon.

Housatonic Rail-Trail

A friend of mine, Oguz, recommended the Housatonic Rail Trail (part of the Pequonnock Valley Greenway) as a nice place to take the family to ride.  So I folded up the trail-a-bike and the trailer and put them in the back of the wagon, put the bike rack and the two adult bikes on the car, and away we went.  (O.k.  It took a bit longer than I made it sound, but let's not dwell on how slowly I pack cars...)

The link above shows parking around here, so that's where we went.  When we got there, we found something like a parking lot that was full.  We found a spot and only realized later when we came back and was the only car parked where we were that we saw the sign saying we had parked in a tow away zone (our car was still there with no problems).

The area was beautiful with great tree coverage for almost the the entire ride.  The downside of great tree coverage is that it messes with the GPS ability to get a signal, so the route it traced out is somewhat deficient.  But that's a trade-off I'll gladly make.

Where we parked was basically in the middle of the trail, so we randomly decided to start by going south.  The trail is mostly paved although it's almost gravel in some places (but I had no problems with traction or pulling the big monkey on the trail-a-bike) and it was pretty much a soft decent until the end of the trail.  If we do it again, we'll give serious thoughts to driving to the end of the trail and parking on the street (I saw cars parked here).  I personally like to start at the bottom so I can end at the bottom of a big hill.

We turns around heading north, rode back to our car, got some food and kept going north.  About a mile north of our car, we saw picnic tables (and restrooms), so we stopped and had lunch.  (Or, well, we didn't really pack lunch, so we had chips and pears).  They also have parking here (more so than where we had parked), so this is another viable choice for starting the ride as well.

The view of the river from our picnic table.

Kate and the monkeys looking at (but mostly not falling into) the river.

The river and the trail on which we had ridden.\

The monkeys posing in front of the bikes.

The monkeys and me.

After lunch, we kept going north for a bit longer.   Somewhere around 6.5 total miles into the ride, we had a choice on the trail to take what I thought was a fork right or keep on the main trail left.  We stayed left, but then we soon ended up right next to an apartment complex.  I'm not sure if the path kept on going at that point or not because we turned around and went back to the car.

The trail was pretty busy today.  Lots of people walking pushing strollers and walking their dogs.  Many others out on bikes.  But there were no problems either safely passing people or safely being past by other bicyclists.  It was narrow in places and there were certain segments that I wouldn't have been as happy riding if it had been raining, but today there were no issues.

When we got to the car, the big monkey was quite tired as she really had pedaled most (or at least a lot) of the way.  The little monkey was a lot more energetic as he just sits and watches his mom pedal him up the hills.  When we were almost ready to leave, we heard that somebody on the trail was having trouble and that an ambulance was on the way.  We watched as they very slowly removed the car blocks on the path.  I certainly hope whomever was waiting for them was stable, because that was not the demonstration of speed or hurriedness that I would have hoped for in a true emergency.

It took us a little bit longer to pack the car than we would have liked, didn't quite have the right food for lunch, etc.  But none of that mattered today.  Oguz was right.  This is a lovely place to take the family for a ride and we all had a wonderful time.