07 Riding a Tandem: Starting Up

hi there my name is Martin I’m with Chris to talk about starting on a tandem which for any new member can be the trickiest part of Tandem cycling so we’ll go through this step by step in this video so Martin and I are both on the bike and ready to go he’s got his feet up on the uh pedals and in the starting position captains you want to make sure you have enough clear path in front of you to get the bike going you’ve got your hand hands firmly on the brakes and your right foot on the ground ready once you’re ready to go askos your stoker Martin are you ready ready 3 two one and now when I hit one I’m going to start to press on the pedals Martin’s going to start to press on the pedals and only once we’re both pressing on the pedals I will release the brakes the tandem will start to move forward and I’m going to lift my right foot up off the ground and place it on to the paddle while I’m doing this Martin is my engine he’s already been on the pedals he’s getting us keeping us going while we move forward so we may actually get started a little bit too quickly we don’t want to be Switching gears until we’re both set on the bikes captains it’s perfectly okay to actually apply a bit of pressure back on the brakes to keep the speed under control sometimes you can have a wobbly start and it’s best to cancel the start when that happens so captains stop the bike stabilize it with feet on the ground and restart so you’re repeat the steps we mentioned previously so that’s the preferred way the best method for starting smoothly and quickly sometimes captains May struggle a bit stokers can also assist the captains their feet are not glued to the pedals so you can steud the bike by putting your right foot down to rescue a potential fall captains and stokers might be wobbly at first but uh with the help of the stalker you can get the team rolling and get comfortable so just remember starting can be a little bit intimidating if you’re new but by time you’ve had five or 10 starts under your belt you probably wonder why on Earth you had trouble to begin [Music] with