First Club Ride

I took the VK2 out on our club's Wednesday night ride for the first time yesterday. I had held off on the club ride up to this point until I had put a few miles on the bike and felt a little more secure riding in close quarters. As I mentioned in my last blog, by sitting up during the climbs and putting more weight on the front wheel the low speed handling improves significantly and I can climb with very little wobble down to speeds as low as 5 kph (3 mph) on very steep grades over 13%.

Our Wednesday ride starts with 10 km of gently rolling coast road before arriving at the base of the first climb. We don't usually hammer the warm up and I was coasting at 30 km for much of this distance.

The first climb is about 2.5 km at between 6% and 8%. I dragged my butt up this grade and lost 4 minutes on the better climbers; however, I've was not cycling for 6 weeks due to my neck injury so I still have lots of work to do to get my form back. The important metric is that my speed of 8 kph was 3 kph slower than my usual speed on my road bike - so not too far off considering the lack of training.

At the top of the first climb we then descend about 1000 feet on the other side of the mountain before back tracking up the same road. The grade is now a steady 8% with no flat spots to recover. Going down the mountain I quickly pulled away from the road bikes. The prospect of falling at over 80 kph had me on the brakes most the way down which raised the other fear of over heating the front wheel and blowing the tire off.

On the ascent we have one very strong climber who can hold 18 kph on the 8% grade. Needless to say he disappeared pretty quickly but I surprised myself by holding between 10 and 11 kph for most of the ascent. I guess I was finally warmed up.

Once we got back on the gentle rolling warm up road, I easily pulled away from the group and was easily able to hold between 38 and 45 kph with the occasional descent of 60 kph.

With each ride I'm becoming more convinced that the VK2's climbing performance is very close to DF. As I regain my form over the next month and get my new recumbent legs dialed in I feel confident that I will climb extremely well on this bike.