One of the things I've been wondering about for a while is the degree of "crossover" between riding a conventional (DF) bike and a recumbent. I've done a lot of web searching and have found a few reports of people that ride both but it seems like for most people once they start riding a 'bent they don't ride a DF anymore or at least don't do it very often or for longer distances.
Since we're limited in how much crap we can transport to our winter sojourn in Texas (or at least choose to limit it) I "only" brought two bikes in addition to Marcia's recumbent: the Cruzbike and the Hampsten less the front triangle. I'd wanted to get a third bottle cage installed on the S&S coupled Hampsten for quite some time and this seemed like a good opportunity so I sent the front triangle off to the day spa just prior to leaving Wisconsin to get it done and brought the rest of the bike here.
I got the bike back last week and immediately had an issue I had to deal with. I sent it off with everything removed but the headset since I didn't think they'd need to remove the headset in order to weld in new bottle cage mounts. Turns out they did remove them (whether they needed to or not) and then sent the completed bike back without the headset.
Sigh.
This resulted in frantic calls all over San Antonio looking for a headset. It's interesting how "old tech" a threadless 1 1/8" headset is these days but by a miracle I found a Chris King at a bike shop. They didn't even know they had it, the guy was poking round under their workbench after telling me they didn't have one, opened up a big box of bottom brackets and lo and behold: a headset. It was even the right color! What are the odds? So 175 mile drive and $178 and I had a new headset.
I did two shorter (44 and 32 mile) rides on the Hampsten and was really pleased with how I felt on it. I felt as though I had good power and really hadn't lost anything by riding the Cruzbike exclusively for a month. In fact, the only difference I noticed is one you might expect: extended out of the saddle efforts (say 50+ pedal strokes) resulted in my legs feeling tired. Given you don't do that at all on a 'bent it makes sense that there'd be some loss of strength there.
So on the basis of that I decided to do a longer ride: a nice 200K route out to Harper that I've done a number of times (it's a RUSA permanent route I own). It's got just over 6K feet of climbing but the climbing is "front loaded" with the bulk of it (about 4K feet) being in the first 70 miles.
I generally felt OK during the ride, but toward the last third my left calf/achilles started to feel really tight and sore. I stopped to stretch it several times but that didn't seem to help a whole lot. After finishing the ride my legs really hurt, especially below the knee.
Overnight and next day things got considerably worse. My left calf and achilles are incredibly painful, to the point that I can't walk even with a considerable limp. I'm doing the RICE protocol and as I write this 2 days later it's somewhat better but still pretty painful.
My theory is the position ("angle of attack") relative to the cranks is different enough on the 'bent that even though I got a decent cardio workout and maintained general leg strength through riding it, it did not fully translate to riding the DF. The difference, however minor, repeated for fifty thousand pedal strokes or so was too much.
While a bit disappointing, this isn't really surprising. I was hoping that in an ideal world (or at least my ideal world) that once acclimated to riding the 'bent I could switch back and forth seamlessly between the two e.g., say I've got a 1200K in 6 weeks where I'd like to ride the 'bent. Start riding it exclusively 2-3 weeks beforehand and then go (or vice-versa with the DF). That might be possible but this experience suggests the differences are substantial enough that it also might not be.
More experience required.
