After a 2 year hiatus from the tandem I was back in the saddle again for the Continental Tandem Tour. Basically Mike had told me that I was entered with Dean so there wasn't much discussion about me returning.
With absolutely no preparation we were going to have to wing it. Thankfully (from a competition point of view) Chris and Bob were not racing this time as Chris was sick but there was still some real competition with Tristin and Anja and Vaughn and Mitchell along with a number of other out of towners. We struck problems early on at the Prologue with 2 rims cracking even before we had started. We ended up using the rear wheel of my road bike which was not designed for tandems at all.
The prologue was 6 laps of the Trafalgar park track. We were 2nd to last to race. At the first corner I really doubted that we were going to make it around. Dean later admitted that he was struggling to keep us on the track at the corners. We got the fastest time by 10 sec and averaged 50kph.
Stage 1 was a 13km TT from the Moutere to the Riverside Cafe. We started first which was unusal for a TT and made it hard with no-one to chase. We finished 7 seconds down on Tristian and Anja but 3 seconds ahead of Vaughn and Mitchell.
Stage 2 was a 45km road race. We broke away with the our main competitors and an R&R sponsored team from Massey. In the end it came down to a 3 way sprint which we won easily.
Stage 3 was going to be the hardest for us with a climb over Neudorf and then down the valley to the Mot airport. We came unstuck on Neudorf with a combination of problems. Firstly my handle bars kept twisting around so that when we stood there was nothing that I could brace against to get the power out and secondly my road wheel on the back was showing the reason why tandem wheels are normally 36 spoke not 32 and was rubbing on the frame. T&A & V&M got a small lead on the climb and we had to stop at the top to get the seat sorted out. We chased hard out down the valley but barely saw them again in the twisty valley road. We slipped into time trial mode and just hoped that Vaughn and Mitchell would win the sprint which would still leave us in first place overall. We came across the finish line and could see the others just turning around from their sprint further down the road - so we weren't that far off. Thankfully we were still in first position overall and so had won the tour.
Riding a tandem is quite fun but is also a lot harder that I thought it was going to be.
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