Back in May I posed a somewhat rhetorical question, “Have Life, Fate & Weather Conspired to Erode My Mojo…? As mentioned in that posting, it was something I had on my mind given how little I’d been riding as compared to a few years back even before I retired, I’d just completed my 63rd trip around the Sun and was struggling with a few things.
As I began to tap-out some recent cycling highlights — of which sadly there are very few — I found myself reflecting on our early days when we first joined the wonderful world of tandem cycling and how so much has changed, in light of having recently closed my life’s chapter on motorcycling, in much the same way that I did with sailing 30-years ago.
Change is inevitable, and I guess it’s how you deal with it that defines you. I’d like to think I’m not a quitter and, instead, give up one thing to move-on to another. Sadly, while I’ve done this most of my life — often times merely adding things instead of replacing others –– I fear I’ve reached a stage of life when that all changes and you begin to shed hobbies and interests and I’m just not ready to do that. But, I’m also not sure if building a woodshop in my garage, taking on a collector car project, or taking another stab at volunteering is my path forward.
However, through it all, I’d like to think I’ll come out the other side still enjoying cycling and, most of all, still cycling with Miss Debbie. Quite frankly, I’ll lay the blame for this moment of introspection on our friends Roger & Eve who I know remain avid tandemists and ride as often as they can and build travel plans around cycling. But, unbeknownst to them, I just happened to catch them in the act here at home in Georgia, out enjoying what appear to be a ride on the bike trails along Barrett Parkway near south Acworth, Georgia, as I was on my way to pick-up a pair of glasses at Costco. It’s not that I was looking for them, but when I had a rare tandem bicycle sighting while sitting at the intersection at Old U.S. 41 and Barrett Parkway on Thursday morning, I had to take a closer look to see if I might know who they were: sure enough, it was Roger & Eve.
A Short Trip in Mr. Peabody’s WABAC Machine
It all began for us on Saturday, 9 August 1997 when we ventured over to Jack & Susan Goertz’s Tandems Limited in Birmingham, Alabama “just to look” and take a test ride. After six hours or so — to include stepping away to have some lunch at a local sandwich shop — we loaded our new ‘Royal Plum Pearl’ 1995/1996 Santana Arriva in the back of our 1995 Toyota 4-Runner, our first of nine tandems we’ve since owned.
The following morning we headed-out from the house or our lightly-trafficked for a short ride and during the next 30-days we’d joined the Tandem Club of America, discovered the recently formed Tandem Club of Georgia (aka, P.E.A.C.H.E.S.), subscribed to Greg Shepherd’s “Tandem & Family Cycling” magazine, attended our first PEACHES ride, ridden our first Metric Century and started to become regulars at local charity rides we found now that we were also members of the Southern Bicycle League and started to receive it’s newsletters.
Our first of 82 tandem rallies was the Alabama Tandem Weekend in New Hope, Alabama in March 1998. It’s been a great ride ever-since where we’ve met more friends than I could ever begin to mention without leaving out at least half-of-them because there have been so-many: it was for many, many years our social life up and until life became a bit more complicated with friends moving-away, having families, closing their respective chapters on tandem cycling, etc.
Sadly, “Tandem & Family Cycling” — a great full-color publication that focused 100% on tandem cycling— only lasted from 1994 – 1999, at which point the income from subscriptions and ad revenue was not sufficient to keep the enterprise going and along with it went the very useful tandemmag.com website with its tandem rally calendar and links to on-line tandem cycling resources.
It’s demise prompted me to create TheTandemLink.com with a replacement for the tandem event calendar, tandem club listing, links to tandem resources, etc., as well as an outlet for my miscellaneous ramblings in my ‘Bulletin Board’ entries. I actively maintained TheTandemLink.com until around July 2009, and it was on 1 January 2010 when I created TheTandemGeeksBlog to capture my thoughts on tandem cycling and then began to expand it to other interests and hobbies. In July 2011 we acquired our first Harley Davidson motorcycle and by 5 October 2011 I realized I was cluttering-up TheTandemLink.com blog with far too much non-tandem cycling content and migrated that to a new blog, RidingTwoUp.com.
It was in January 2017 when I migrated my tandem cycling event & rally calendars to TheTandemGeeksBlog, followed shortly thereafter by my tandem club list in February 2017 and I essentially stopped actively maintaining TheTandemLink.com. It was on the 21st anniversary of TheTandemLink.com that I sunset the website on 31 December 2020. It was just far-too vast in content that was no longer current built using 1990’s vintage Adobe PageMill 2.0 software to create that was now also becoming obsolete so, on 26 January 2017 the site went dark and all the content was removed from the FatCow.com servers.
It was just over a 16-months back that I posted my last retrospective in a 30 April 2022 blog post was also struggling with how to sustain and maintain TheTandemGeeksBlog entitled, “1,040 Posts & 430,000 Views Since 1 Jan 2010; Where Do I Go From Here?” I’m still not sure I’ve found the answer to that: more in a moment.
But, regardless, it was a great ride, to be sure and as I reminisce and write, I’m reminded of how we learned about events, shared stories and formed virtual friendships with tandem enthusiasts around the country.
Lives Are Like Books: We Begin to Write New Chapters as we Close Old Ones, and Many Overlap
So, as I continue my trip down memory lane ahead of my update, I’m reminded of how much has changed since we began writing our tandem cycling story 26-years ago almost to the day. While communications technology has given us a lot, it also seems to have diminished the value it used to provide, at a much slower and more methodical pace that perhaps now seems quaint to many, perhaps even a few of my more progressive Regular Readers.
TCA DoubleTalk and Tandem@Hobbes
When I say regular readers, I’m really speaking to the tandem enthusiasts who have been riding ‘two-up’ long enough to have been members of the Tandem Club of America founded in 1976 and fondly recall receiving their “TCA DoubleTalk” newsletter. For anyone who doesn’t know about it, DoubleTalk was a bi-monthly publication that included one or two travel logs from seasoned cycling duo’s as well as the annual tandem rally calendar and entry/registration forms that we’d cut-out from the newsletter and mail-in with checks to sign-up for the events. Receiving and reading the newsletter was an on-going ritual that we so enjoyed, as it allowed us to plan our future trips, usually 9-months to a year in advance.
And, of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Wade Bloomgren’s Tandem@Hobbes listserver that was stood-up in late 1992, filling our Email inboxes with digests of the dozens of back & forth Emails that floated between tandem enthusiasts from every corner of the U.S. and quite a few from overseas. Being a closed email-list, it was actually quite intimate compared to today’s forums that exist to enable wireless engagement between thousands of ‘members’ while also generating revenue for those who ‘own’ and host the forums.
While small, intimate cells of members often times develop in the sub forums, the presence of detached forum moderators who all seem to aspire to work for Facebook or Twitter censorship teams constantly remind us that ‘off-topic’ has taken on a new dimension in our current world where any hint of someone harboring thoughts that don’t conform to those deemed ‘acceptable’ by the person or persons doing the moderation are grounds for censorship, often times without notice or explanation, not that the explanations make any sense to the average sexagenarian or even more worldly and wiser elders.
The Internet’s Profound Influence
The internet’s arrival is a double-edged sword since it ultimately took-away, or made obsolete the newsletters that came via the USPS — which became snail-mail and I’m not even sure what it’s called today –– and replaced them with Emails and .pdf newsletter attachments for a while, before organic, tandem rally websites began to ‘cut out the middleman’ before going fully digital with on-line registration and payment via cyberspace. While far-more efficient some the internet-savvy, I’m not sure it served tandem cycling well, anymore than my efforts to plug the cyber-gap that was emerging after Tandem Magazine folded and took it’s web-hosted, real-time updated resources with it.
TheTandemLink.com
I thought I was doing the tandem community a public service when I stood-up ‘TheTandemLink.com’ website which initially attempted to recreate what was lost when the ‘Tandem Magazine’ website went dormant. In talking with stalwart, legacy members and founders of the TCA, I came to realize that my “little” TheTandemLink.com” or TTL website helped to unintentionally push the snail-mail-based TCA and DoubleTalk closer to extinction, all for altruistic goals. To be clear, up and until I began to offer tandem decals for sale via TheTandemLink.com,” 100% of the annual web hosting cost was on my dime, and the decal revenue while appreciated was merely a temporary and part offset. But, as noted, I closed the chapter on TheTandemLink.com effectively in 2018 and literally on 31 December 2020, 21-years-to-the-day after I began to write that chapter.
Recently Closing Some of Our Own Chapters
And now — after rambling-on about the past — I finally get to where I was headed when I sat down to to compose my thoughts as I thought about a few chapters I’d closed.
Sailing: When I moved to Georgia after living in Southern California for 10 years in 1991, I had two major recreational interests: sailing and racing Hobie Cat catamarans and recreational and club cycling, both road and off-road. I’d been an avid motorcyclist before moving to California, but partially closed that chapter while sailing and cycling remained more-or-less passions. Motorcycling was always something I enjoyed, but not so much in freeway-filled Southern California so when I did ride it was off-road in the dirt or on the track on borrowed machines.
While I brought both my bicycles and Hobie Cat sailboat with me when I moved to Georgia, the Hobie Cat never touched water before I finally closed that chapter and sold the boat sometime around 1995, pre-journal: honestly, I can’t even recall when it was. It was a great run, but I no longer had the ocean a mere hour’s drive away, and large inland lakes within 10-miles of my home and a very active Hobie Cat Association at my disposal. Moreover, Debbie didn’t know how to swim and I’d somewhat moved-on from day-sailing to racing so that would be a bad combination: it was time.
Motorcycles: When I first moved to Georgia I could see it was a great place to ride motorcycles, with relatively low traffic away from the interstates and the mountains not too far away. And, given that I typically worked from 6:00am until 7:00pm most days, beginning and ending my day at work riding a motorcycle through the National Park was quite tempting. However, after meeting and getting married to Miss Debbie shortly after arriving here and suddenly having two teenage sons, keeping a motorcycle in the garage probably wasn’t the best idea. It wasn’t until the summer of 1999 that I finally scratched my itch –– that or succumbed to a minor mid-life crisis — and bought a nearly new Honda CBR1100XX and resumed motorcycling on a daily basis.
Rather than dragging-on for a few thousand words, I’ll cut to the chase: after riding over a collective 100,000 miles on 8 different motorcycles for 24-years I closed the chapter on motorcycling on 16 July 2023 when I sold our 2017 Harley-Davidson Road Glide. Covid more-or-less was the catalyst that closed the chapter on our annual motorcycle trip down to Key West to celebrate our anniversary every July since 2014, as well as motorcycle rallies with our last Daytona and Panama Beach Bike Weeks in 2021: riding 4-5 hours was loosing its luster now that we were in our 60’s and it seemed like there were more cars and ‘civilians’ than motorcycles and ‘bikers’ choking the roads, restaurants and bars during the motorcycle rallies.
Part of me wishes we would have done like our good friend Jeff and his wife Joyce and hooked-up with one of the local Harley Owners Groups who on a weekly or even more frequent basis head off our day trips, noting Jeff has now logged over 85,000-miles in just a few short years doing-so, with hundreds of adventures to look-back on. However, such was not the case as I prefer to ride with Miss Debbie and she just lost her interest in riding for the post-Covid reasons mentioned above and due to the risks, noting we’ve had more than our fair share of bad luck with inattentive motorists over the years and motorists are getting worse not better. At some point, you just take that as a bad omen and stop trying to one-up the God’s of opportunity and fate.
If anyone is interested in reading more about our eight different motorcycles, I captured it all in a blog entry that I wrote in 2019 and have recently updated that you can find here: Motorcycling: After 24 Years and 8 Motorcycles Since Moving to Georgia, We Hung-Up our Helmets in July 2023
Cycling: Sadly, I wish closing chapters was limited to sailing and motorcycling, but along the way even my passion for cycling has had to give way to some of the challenges life throws your way.
Off-Road Tandeming: After taking up road tandem cycling with Debbie in 1997, by January 1999 we had our first off-road tandem and would head-out on single track at least every other month, sometimes more and sometimes less often with three off-road tandem rallies and a few one-day events thrown in. However, by 2010 when we attended our last Asheville, NC, off-road event, the writing was on the wall: single track was just a bit too risky for us, given that Debbie like many women was dealing with managing the hazards associated with moderate to severe osteoporosis.
Falls were at one time, no big deal, but now in our 50’s it was becoming something that needed to be more carefully managed. However, while we effectively stopped riding our 2002 Ventana ECdM by 2013, I didn’t sell it until October 2021 after acquiring our 2018 Fandango Gravel Grinder. The latter has only been used about a dozen times, so it’s fate remains in question. Although, we do enjoy riding it at Jekyll Island so perhaps I’ll hang on to it for a few more years in the hope we get down there a couple times or Miss Debbie gives-in to one my invites to at least go and ride some of the local gravel trail routes our friends Roger & Eve introduced us to back in 2021. Sadly, after just two events our friends decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze in hosting a summer gravel grinder tandem rally in addition to the 23 annual Georgia Tandem Rallies they’ve hosted; who could blame them!
Riding Three-Up: Back in March 2012 we did our first-ever tandem rally on a triplet at Sylacauga, Alabama, with our friend Brenda — the Ragin’ Cajun — aboard her Co-Motion Periscope at a rally that her partner James was unable to attend, and we had a great time. In fact, it gave me the inspiration I needed to acquire and overhaul a Precision Triplet in April 2012 that we first used at the Georgia Tandem Rally in May 2012 with our dear friend Lisa riding tail gunner, something we’d do at least once a year at either the Georgia or Southern Tandem Rallies until 2019, when we rode both our 9th and 10th tandem rallies on the triplet with Lisa. Sadly, Covid happened and we’ve only ridden the triplet once with our friend Julie since then and have not yet heard back from Lisa who seems to have reconnected with the single-bike riding scene and is otherwise stayed busy with a new grandbaby, the bluegrass music scene in the local mountain communities, etc. So, noting our grandkids while at the right age for cycling, are far-too -busy with all their other activities, it’s fair to say we’ve closed the chapter on riding three-up and it’s probably time to sell that bike too.
Road Tandeming: I now fear road tandem riding may be reaching its twilight for us, as once again growing risks associated with sharing the roads while cycling with motorists continue to be a risky proposition. I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve ridden our Calfee from the house this year, and even rides on the nearby Silver Comet Trail have been extremely rare. Our May 2023 Georgia Tandem Rally was cut short 11-miles into our second day of riding when a large piece of heavy gauge wire was kicked-up into our tandem, tearing-away the rear derailleur. Other than two post-repair shake down rides, one from the house on 31 May and another on the Silver Comet Trail on 7 June, the Calfee has remained on the storage hooks hanging from the ceiling in the garage.
Now, to be fair, I was unable to ride from 9 June through 24 July, so that’s all on me and hopefully now that I’ve got some of my cycling fitness back and we’ve made our 8-day visit with my mother in Pennsylvania, perhaps we’ll find ourselves back on the bike.
More than you wanted to know, but perhaps we’re not alone in this phase of our life’s journey which is why I decided to share this particular update. Life is Good, make no mistake about it! Our time with family, kids, many grandkids and the like are great. Museums and botanical gardens are wonderful places to spend time. Cycling is still something I do 4-5 times a week. Travel remains a possibility, but has become a harder pill to swallow given the insane jump in costs to do so, hence another reason we’ve not returned to Key West even via a short, 2-hour flight from Atlanta.
The TandemGeek's Blog 
Mark, thanks again for everything you’ve shared with the tandeming community—I think even experienced cyclists have learned a lot from you over the years. Re some of the challenges you’ve faced re the ever growing number of drivers out on the roads and the ever more distracted motoring public…..
Living in a dense eastern city, what we’ve done is ride more with local clubs on lesser-traveled rural roads and ride more on the ever-growing number of rail trails. We recently did a 300 mile ride on the Greater Allegeny Passage (GAP) trail, which runs from western Maryland to Pittsburgh on a packed limestone closed access trail. It was a superb ride. We ride more on the trail network here in Baltimore than we do on roads. The other option: road conditions and driver behavior in Europe is way better than it is in most of the U.S. You have a coupled tandem, there are European rallies, tours, self-directed tour options galore on the Velo network.
Not sure if there are trail networks near your place, but I’ve been able to find a handful around my house, and I do much of my daily riding there—it just lowers the probabilities of accidents.
Best,
M
I’ll suggest it one more time. Pickleball.
Exercise and socializing with people of all ages.
Warning: it can be addictive.
I’m struggling to integrate all of what you’ve said since I’ve been out of touch with your multifaceted life for quite some time now. Sounds like the arc of your life has mirrored mine somewhat- many, too many interests, but somehow manageable. Less so as time and entropy exert their ineluctable influence; even so the intractable machinery of your physical self rebels at doing what you see as “giving up”. Eventually you give in to the inevitable, which isn’t so bad since it allows you to become a “human being” (for a change) rather than a “human doing”.
I say “good job” and embrace that simplicity.
Thanks Mark for all the writings over the years. When my wife and I started regularly riding the tandem in 2016, the info out there was way too thin. Your writings helped us learn a bit about rallies, tandeming in general, etc. I hope you’ll continue to ride the tandem and write.
I will say, with over 100,000 miles on the bike over the years, every so often, the motivation to ride does wane quite a bit. What got me out of the last slump in 2016 after a horrible accident in 2013 (yep, a 3 year slump,) was the tandem and cycling friends. There is nothing that matches the motivation to ride as much as riding with cycling friends. I’ll mirror the previous comment though – after my crash, the desire to ride on the road is non-existent.
Fortunately, up here in the Chicago area, we’ve got hundreds of miles of rail-trails and bike trails. Yes traffic on those trails can be heavy at times, but I’ll deal with inattentive pedestrians over cars any day of the week. MTR is coming up in a few weeks. Attendance looks to be better than the previous 3 or 4 with 250 teams registered so far. Fingers crossed it’s a sign that tandeming is on the upswing again. We’ll see.