By Jeff Baron
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, July 7, 2006; WE48
Just how comfortable is a recumbent bicycle?
"The seat on my recumbent bike is as comfortable as the bucket seat in my car," says Greg Greer of Silver Spring. "It's like sitting in a chair, feet propped up in front. There's no strain on the back, neck, shoulders or wrists. No numb hands. No pain in the posterior."
Members of the local bucket-seat bicycle crowd -- WHIRL, Washington's Happily Independent Recumbent Lovers -- ride in comfort every Saturday morning in Rock Creek Park on a 22-mile spin along Beach Drive. The WHIRL riders welcome cyclists on all kinds of bicycles, and they happily talk recumbents.
Two recumbent designers and builders, Mark Colliton (Bacchetta Bicycles) and Bill Cook (Barcroft Cycles), are WHIRL regulars.
"The real advantage of a recumbent is comfort," Colliton says. "If your goal is to get exercise, maybe lose some weight, you're able to stay on your bike for a lot longer, comfortably. Recumbents are also more aerodynamic than conventional bikes, because they present a smaller surface area to push through the wind."
There are recumbent bicycles for every style of riding, and designs can be radically different: steering above or below the seat (either way, there's no weight on the hands or wrists); short wheel base or long; seat slightly reclined or leaned way back; pedals higher or lower than the seat.
One regular rider on the C&O Canal affectionately calls his recumbent cruiser a lounge chair with wheels. Some models are decidedly engineered for speed. With its fiberglass nose cone and aerodynamic body shell, Easy Racers Gold Rush recumbent bicycle, in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, looks a lot more like an F-15. That bike set the bicycle world speed record in 1986, when "Fast Freddy" Markham became the first cyclist to break the 65-mph mark on a flat course. (The record now stands at 81 mph -- also set on a recumbent.)
Though recumbents can be fast on flat land and downhill, they are slow uphill because you can't use your body weight to mash the pedals. With the right gear selection, though, climbing even the steepest hill isn't any harder than on a conventional bicycle -- you just exercise your patience, as well as your legs, on the way up.
Lucie Greenblum of Bethesda started riding a recumbent five years ago as an exercise of last resort. "I've always exercised, but due to foot and back pain, I couldn't run anymore, and a regular bicycle was too uncomfortable to spend much time on. So I tried out a recumbent. Getting used to the new equilibrium was surprisingly easy. I got the hang of it right in the bike store parking lot."
Greenblum does the 15-mile round trip from Bethesda to Georgetown on the Capital Crescent Trail four times a week on her recumbent, year-round. Her bike is a great conversation starter -- "Thousands of people on the path have asked me about it," she says.
And many recumbent riders see a safety advantage in their bikes. "A recumbent is much lower to the ground than a regular bike, so if you fall, you don't have far to go," Greenblum says.
WASHINGTON'S HAPPILY INDEPENDENT RECUMBENT LOVERS (WHIRL)http://www.recumbents.com/whirl. The WHIRL ride starts at 8 a.m., April through October, 9 a.m. the rest of the year, at the recreation building parking lot at Veirs Mill Local Park, 4425 Garrett Park Rd., Wheaton. Riders go for brunch after the ride.
RECUMBENT INFORMATION CENTERhttp://www.recumbents.com/home.asp.
BENTRIDER ONLINE ELECTRONIC MAGAZINEhttp://www.bentrideronline.com.
Not many bicycle stores sell recumbents, and there are only a few dozen recumbent specialty stores in the country, so finding a place to try those very different designs and configurations could mean a frustrating multi-state search. But the Washington area has two recumbent specialty shops:
MT. AIRY BICYCLES 4540 Old National Pike (Route 144), Mount Airy, Md. 301-831-5151.http://www.bike123.com.
BIKES@VIENNA 128-A Church St. NW, Vienna. 703-938-8900.http://www.bikesatvienna.com.