How to Cycle With a Partner

Video Transcript

KEVIN LIVINGSTON: Hi. I'm Kevin Livingston and now I'm going to talk about cycling with a partner. To get started, discuss with your riding partner what your goal of the day is, what your route is and how you plan to tackle the ride. Are you going to ride hard at portions? Are you going to ride together the whole time? This will also help alleviate maybe any danger like turning right unexpectedly. If I were on the outside and I didn't tell my partner we are turning right, that could cause a problem. So going back, one thing you could do is ride together in the pace line. Now we're riding a pace line or for drafting each other, we're going to ride about 6 inches to a foot off the back of their bike their rear wheel with our front wheel. And we're going to ride always just slightly to one side of the wheel either the left side or the right and you could even float back and forth. Just in case they were to stand up or slow unexpectedly, you wouldn't cross their wheel and cause an accident; that's very important. So moving on from drafting each other, you could take turns and ride a pace line. Maybe take 30-second to 1-minute poles or even longer poles depending how hard you're going. The faster or harder your riding the shorter your pole should be. The more moderate to easy the poles, the longer you can stay taking your turn at the front. So when the rider pulls off, he's going to pull off to the left, he might--he's going to pause pedal and he might give a gentle flick of his hand or his elbow or say "pulling off", and that will give me the signal to continue at his pace, pull through, and he'll get back on my wheel and draft me. Another thing you could do is you could ride to abreast if it's on a quiet road or a road with a bike lane or a big shoulder. And this is a great way to ride in sort of a conversational or more of a social way with a friend. And there's a lot of etiquette to riding to abreast. One of the biggest things in the pros that we notice is, is you always have to match each other's front wheel. When a rider rides about a half wheel in front of another rider and sort of is always pushing the pace never allowing them to catch up, we call this half-wheeling. And that's a no-no in our book. So remember good etiquette, both riding the same pace, no half-wheeling, and if there's traffic or any sort of danger, be sure to single-up, we call it singling up, getting single file, fall back in to your pace line or your draft. In that way, whether a car or if it was a narrow passage, you can get through safely. And those are some tips that will help you in riding with a training partner or just a partner for fun.