When you take the leap and decide to get married, you are choosing to ride tandem through life with this one special person, through the up hills and down, through the cold, the wind and the rain, you are in it together. But for some reason, actually riding tandem together is a wholly different set of wheels, or so I initially thought.A couple of weeks back, Shaun and I found ourselves mulling over the awesomeness of a three hour Argus time. The Argus, for those of you who don’t know, is the most beautiful cycling race in the world, 110km’s of picturesque mountains and incredible ocean views, cycling along roads carved into the side of the mountain with sheer rock faces plummeting down into the Atlantic ocean.
Three hours is an incredibly good time.
For some reason, I can only assume we were drinking wine at the time, we decided we should give it a bash on a tandem. (What makes this of notable importance is that we tried this once, many years ago, we got half way around the block before I got off and stormed home)! Anyway, there was some, though limited, logic behind this new idea; tandems go faster down hill with the collective weight of two people on one bike, and they are capable of going faster on the flats (provided that the people on the bike have quads of steel and run diesel engines), but, and there is a but here, going up hill feels a bit like riding your bike in a swimming pool. The effort it takes to get yourself up a hill is hard enough without the combined problem of having someone else throw you off your groove, you have to be completely in sync, and standing together is harder than you might think, individually – it’s impossible. Of course we only found this out after procuring a tandem and entering an incredibly gruelling 109km cycling race in Knysna.
Giving ourselves a grace period of half an hour (because we’re not as fit as we should be and we’ve only climbed on the tandem together about four times), we made the ‘realistic’ goal of completing the race in three and a half hours.
Oh how ambitious we were.
Lets start by exploring the reasons why Shaun and I would make good tandem partners (on a bike, not in life. No wait, it probably applies to both):
1. We both think we are awesome.
2. We are both very competitive.
Although I’m listing this as a positive (because I needed to have more than just one), it’s not entirely a good thing. Let me explain; Shaun is so competitive he will dive into a race and give everything, and I mean everything, until he blows, until he has absolutely nothing left. I am so competitive I talk myself out of wanting to compete before I even start the race because I’m scared I might not achieve my desired time, I tell myself I don’t care and I must ‘just enjoy it’ – whatever that means. This is clearly not a good thing. Together, these are completely incompatible.
Now let’s explore the reasons Shaun and I don’t make good tandem partners:
1. Shaun is chronically on time. I am almost incapable of getting to the start of a race on time. (I’m too busy convincing myself I don’t care and I don’t want to win anyway.)
2. I am a lefty (leg), Shaun is a righty. This means nothing to you until your feet are clipped into your pedals and you unclip opposite legs when you stop the bike! (A tandem cannot lean to the left and the right at the same time.)
3. I start the bike with my pedal raised and ready to push down with brute force. Shaun starts by pushing off his standing leg, then lifting his clipped in leg, then pushing down with brute force! Not only does this spell confusion, bruised shins and bad language, but there is a large chance you will stay in one place until you can fuse your techniques.
4. I swing the handle bars from side to side when in standing position (this is not good form but I’d rather fall off the bike than admit that to him, I’m a grown up like that). Shaun has the most incredibly stationary upper body – damn him for his awesome core muscles!
5. The clincher … We both like to be in control.
With this overwhelmingly positive overview, you can see exactly why we launched into riding tandem together. Unlike in a marriage, where the idea opposites attract is a good thing, when riding a tandem, the more similar you are the easier it is. We clearly have a lot to work through, although when I say we, what I mean is I. I know I sound like a martyr here, but the guy on the back really has no control over anything. We don’t steer, or break, or change gears, we don’t choose the route or the side of the bike we unclip on. We keep the pace to the gears that are chosen for us, and are then asked with all audacity whether we are pushing! We listen, and we do as we’re told. We stand when the person in front stands, because we can’t not…But then in a rarely found moment of contemplation, something happened. I realised how similar riding together on a bike is to being married. Let me enlighten you.
1. Sometimes it’s about blind faith.
Now I’m not saying it’s a man’s position to steer a marriage, what I am saying is that you have to believe your partner is going to fulfil their roll, whatever it is, without you peering over their shoulder second-guessing them.
2. You learn it’s about communication.
Sometimes a gear is too hard for me to push, or I need to crank it up a notch because spinning can hurt a ladies undercarriage (really it’s impossible for a guy to understand this), those are the times I need to speak up. Try as woman have over many centuries, men just have not mastered mind reading. The problem with speaking up when you’re so exhausted is that sometimes it comes out as more of a yell than a speak. Your normal climate and pressure controlled voice becomes raw and direct. Which brings me to point three.
3. Understanding.
When you know where your partner is, mentally or physically, you can quite easily determine what is worth fighting about. If one of us has a particularly terse note to our voice, realising it’s because we’re in a race and beyond exhausted, will prevent a needless feud over a trivial tonal matter. Not everything is worth fighting about, understanding can carry your marriage a long way.
4. Support.
Going it alone is a heavy burden. Obviously it is impossible to actually go it alone on a tandem, but you can most certainly feel like you are. You can ride side by side yet feel depleted and abandoned. There is something incredibly uplifting in hearing your spouse acknowledge your efforts and offer words of encouragement. You don’t have to be on a bike and completely exhausted to have that kind of encouragement bring tears to your eyes. Knowing someone’s got your back and can see your efforts, does everything in helping you trudge that last mile of uphill. In short; support fosters trust, which is invaluable in assisting blind faith. It’s synergy folks.While I can calmly sit here and muse over the similarities of marriage and tandem riding, being in the race allowed for less contemplation. With Shaun’s competitive spirit we catapulted off the start line at a pace I strongly feel is reserved for cars. The lead tandems set a gruelling speed which we managed, until we hit the first big climb – that’s where the wheels began to come off, figuratively speaking of course. We realised that in our excellent attempts to service our bike the night before we had screwed up the gears enough that we couldn’t change down to allow us to climb up hill. Every change into our smaller chain ring required my unclipping my right foot and timing a perfect kick to the de-railer (whilst peddling of course) while Shaun changed the gears. It sounds easy enough, and probably is when you’re not riding up a hill that looks like you’ve reached base camp at Mount Everest. The day was freezing and the hills got progressively steeper as the race went on, this did nothing to help our inexperienced arses reach the end of the race. In fact, up one particularly steep hill I managed a whopper of a kick and succeeded in hoofing the chain right off, requiring us to stop and fix it. This too sounds easier than it was. Our poorly matched cycling technique and lack of fire-drills came into play rather heavily as it took us the better part of five minutes, lots of bad language, Shaun loosing his temper (which has only happened about twice in the eleven years we’ve been together) and a bruised undercarriage, for us to get the bike going again. As our collective profanity echoed its way down the mountain, we managed to summit Everest, whilst simultaneously stomaching the humiliation of all the riders who had passed us and seen our attempts at starting on that camber climb.
This was not the last mountain we had to climb either.
I’m pretty sure that holds true for our marriage as well. No matter how prepared you think you are, sometimes you just don’t have it. Sometimes the mountains are bigger than you expected, or your gears wont change. Sometimes the temperature (or your partner) is freezing and there is nothing you can do to warm yourself (or them) up. But persevering through our less than ideal race gave us something to laugh about afterwards, and left us with such a feeling of accomplishment about something we did together. And although in the moments of utter physical, mental and emotional depletion in the race I wondered whether I would voluntarily put myself through that again, I know I would. I also know that when it comes to our marriage, practicing the same faith, communication, understanding and support that is essential when riding tandem together, will lead us to a place of deeper respect and love at home.
