HLaB
Marie Attoinette Fan
I did a few centuries on my old cheap steel fixie (Viking).
were they married at the time? If not could it have been a ploy to explain their somewhat disheveled appearance on "arriving" back in Sheff?Not sure what bikes they were riding, but in the early 1930s when an auntie and uncle of mine would have been in their 20s they said the used to ride from Sheffield, where they lived............ to Scarborough .......................and back........on the same day !!!! which is about 180miles................I was very impressed by this, the story was told to me when I said i'd cycled to Scarborough myself, just getting there........... in one day from Sheffield was enough for me !!! and I was in my early 20s also................
My father and father in law were both not very active men who did very little except moan.
Good point there. When I started club riding in the sixties we would think nothing of riding part of a club run along the A127 or the A12 out of London and riding two abreast all the way. They were smooth, fast and fairly flat roads on which time trial records had been set. I wouldn't now dream of riding on either of those roads, even on a Sunday they are brimming with high speed traffic and uncomfortably dangerous. Cyclists are now pushed onto the lumpier back roads.They would have been on the A roads back then. Flatter, less junctions can make a big different to your average on a pot holed gravelly back lane.
My legs say fixed is actually better than gears over a long ride, and my watch says it's faster. My theory is that the former is due to lower weight, lower rpm and better elimination of waste products from constantly-moving legs. The latter is also due to lower weight but also because of the discipline of "keeping on top of" a fixed gear.