The 2010 Limburg 100km ride

Yesterday, for the 4th year in a row, Edje C. from the flemish recumbent forum organised a 100km recumbent ride starting and ending in Helchteren, in the provence of Limburg. This provence is the most beautiful of all for riding your bike, not only because they invented the famous fietsknooppuntennetwerk, but also because it's a beautiful part of Belgium with plenty of well constructed bicycles paths. I participated in earlier editions so I was planning to the same for this year. Only problem this year was that I had to work a night shift from Saturday on Sunday ....

But I was going anyhow, so .... I managed to get a couple of hours of sleep before my shift started on Saturday. On Sunday morning I left home early (around 6.30 a.m.) with my XP. Again, it was a last moment decision to take the XP, since the weather forecast had predicted some heavy rain with thunderstorms throughout the country. But since they were supposed to be locally, I decided to take a chance with the XP.

I had a different route this year to get to Helchteren, since Jonathan A. and Wouter D. were meeting me a little over halfway on their rowing bikes to accompany me to the starting point. Around 8.40 a.m. they joined me at the canal intersection in Kwaadmechelen. Wouter D. had a GPS device attached to his rowing bike and lead us the way to Helchteren. But only after 10 minutes of riding together, the dyneema propulsion cable of his rowing bike broke in half. We spent more than 1 hour to repair and replace his propulsion so that we could continue our way to Helchteren. Of course we were too late to start with the group, but fortunately, Wouter D. had the complete tour of the ride in his GPS so we caught up pretty soon.

This year's group was a bit bigger than last year : a total of 22 riders showed up. After stopping for lunch in the marina of Lommel, we did another drink stop in marina of Leopoldsburg and of course (and especially for me) an ice-cream stop in Koersel. After that I was back to Helchteren.

Although the skies turned dark a couple of times, only once a thunderstorm passed us closeby in the afternoon. Only a few drops of rain fell, but not enough to put on my rain jacket. It was warm and pretty humid all day, so I was glad that I took the XP instead of my velomobile.

Had a little over 220km on my bike computer when I got home, needles to say I slept like a baby last night !

Fixing the seat issue ....

Although the XP's seat is very comfortable, on longer rides I always start to touch one of the seats' back rails with my back bones. Very uncomfortable to say the least. Tightening the mesh was limited due to the construction of it, which in my case ment that when even tightened at maximum, my back still touched the rail.

On the Ransbike discussion forum I've read about the Sling Mesh Seat, which is a comparable seat but has a different mesh with long straps to tighten. It is not mentioned on the ShopRans pages (but there's a picture of it on here), but is available anyway for $400. Since I'm not sure if the seat fits my 2005 Stratus and the additional shipping costs + taxes would make it very expensive, I don't consider this to be an option.

I posted my problem on the forum and one of its members suggested to install some rubber pipe isolation on the seat rails and then put the seat mesh back on over the isolation. Sounded great, so yesterday I went to a home improvement superstore and bought a piece of plastic isolation hose. Cut it open in length, installed it on the seat rails and put the seat mesh back on. It now has more room to strengthen the straps, which should allow me to tighten the mesh some more and prevent my back bones from touching the seats' rail. Pretty easy solution, why didn't I think of it myself ?

As usual, only time will tell if my seat problem is solved or not, but I'm pretty sure that it is.

Plastic isolation hose on both seat rails does the trick ....