Georgia Trike Riders

Yesterday, July 28, 2007, will go down in cycling history as the inaugural ride of Georgia Trike Riders. There were three of us -- Trplay, hailing out of Cochran, on his Catrike 700, Marshall, out of Macon, Georgia, on his Greenspeed GT3, and me, Atlanta, on my Trice Monster. We were a sight to behold cruising along the gently rolling hills of beautiful central Georgia. I would bet that the good folks of Bleckley County have never seen anything quite like it.

Trplay and I have been planning to put together a trike riders group in Georgia ever since we did our first ride together a couple of weeks ago, a 106 miler, on the Silver Comet Trail. We envisioned a group of 6-10 trikers training together and showing our stuff doing pacelines in some of Georgia's premier cycling events. Trplay is a strong rider, an experienced randonneur, and can show the rest of us all his long distance secrets.

It was an overcast warm day that threatened, but never delivered, rain. We started out at 9 am from Cochran. Trplay mapped out a route that included one fairly steep climb, for central Georgia. Mostly we cruised along chatting at about 14-16 mph on the rolling terrain and had a great time. One of our goals was to try out a couple of "trike pelotons." On one long stretch, I don't remember the exact mileage, we did a paceline, changing pullers about every 5 minutes or so. Since the three of us were inexperienced with pacelines, we were surprised at the speeds we could maintain. Even on long gentle inclines we were easily maintaining 22-25 mph. Our estimate was that if we could keep the pacelines going for most of a full metric or full century we could pick up at least 5-6 miles per hour as compared to riding solo. Trikes have a wide low profile, which, it seemed to us, is ideal for drafting, as long as you are doing it with other trikes.

Anyone else have experience with trike pacelines?

Our ride was about 68 miles. One of the other highlights was a celebration of Marshall's first metric century. He moves down the road well on his Greenspeed and we expect he has many cycling feats awaiting in his future. Marshall, trplay and I are looking for other Georgia trike riders to join us for future training rides. We would like to have a group interested in training hard together and riding in metrics, full centuries and possibly some brevets. If interested, please contact me. If you live within commuting distance in other parts of the Southeast, it also might be possible for you to join us for rides.

Our main goal is to have lots of fun riding together.
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