On 12/21/2015 09:54 AM, Ron Mc wrote:
Kind of a cryptic question, but. Our 30 miles was from their house, neighborhood rolling hills, onto a major thoroughfare to access a paved greenway path for the bulk of the ride. The greenway is twisty and up and down bluffs following a creek (flood zone) - part of it was also along a bike expressway, exposed to a stiff south wind. Tandems are inertia machines with twice the power and half the drag for similar rolling resistance. My bike is a very good climbing machine, but keeping up with the tandem on descents required using each one of my gears to chase when they were coasting by maintaining a good spin. I did the same thing on climbs, which was also my catch-up, where he would typically make one shift to their low spin/mash gear. I made a dozen shifts for each of theirs. My shifts were rolling knuckle or pulling thumb. His shifts were at least partly spared by the fact that it's a laborious reach from the hoods to the bottom outside of the woodchipper bars.
I've never used Woodchipper handlebars, but I have used drop bars with bar end shifters for many years, including on tandems (having owned a tandem since 1975). I really don't understand "laborious reach" in this context, unless the bars really don't fit the captain and have far too much drop. If that's true, then the bar end position is basically unusable for him -- and if so, then what's the point of those bars?
Come to it, I have difficulty understanding the captain's shifting strategy based on your description. Riding tandem in rolling country I shift a lot: often all the way to top gear on the way down, then through the bottom and up the other side dropping gear after gear to keep the pedal effort the same and paying out momentum to keep the roll going. Go over the top and start down and it's upshift, upshift and upshift, building momentum. I'd coast when I had spun out my 54x12.
That's pretty much the exact opposite of what you're describing, and probably pretty close to your shifting strategy. It definitely means a lot of shifting, and it does as you say depend on quickly and effortlessly reaching the shifters. For me, with bar ends it would be dead simple, since on those downhill stretches I'd usually be on the bar ends anyway, where I could shift with the heel of my hand or with my pinkie and ring finger. But even if I'm not riding on the bar ends, on the hoods instead, it's still not much of a reach to the shifters, certainly nothing like the reach to downtube levers, and doesn't involve bending the body -- again, unless there's something really off about how the bars are sized (excessively deep drop, for example).
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