We're careening down a residential street in Long Beach's California Heights, stretched out like Olympic lugers, eye-level with a Labrador retriever racing alongside. Nestled in a tandem recumbent bike, Jonathan Dietch and I sail past carefully trimmed lawns and exuberantly-flowering Monet gardens, over a carpet of jacaranda petals -- a blur of purple below.
People on the street stop and stare; some holler and cheer.
"When I'm on my recumbent, people wave and say hi," yells Dietch, my driver and brakeman, over his shoulder. "Even the transients wave at me." He takes a turn, and we sail past a line of parked cars -- door handles at eye level, but he's not worried. Drivers notice this bike.
Fifty-year-old Dietch, a tax accountant with MacGyver-like tendencies, is taking me for a ride on a sweet machine, a candy-blue Greenspeed, GTT 5F recumbent, hand-built in Australia, with a custom Da Vinci drive train. This last detail is important because it gives me, sitting behind Dietch, the ability to stop pedaling while he soldiers on. Technically, it is a trike, because it has a third wheel, which boosts stability. Dietch provides the steering and braking from his position in front.
I'm along for the ride to find out if recumbents are finally positioned for the growth spurt that enthusiasts -- iconoclasts all -- have stubbornly predicted, decade after decade. A demographic shift might at last just make that happen. Turns out that riding low in a reclined position takes the pressure off aging backs, necks and wrists -- a perfect prescription for aging boomers, who are also more likely than most to have the cash to buy these bikes.
Our ride is feeling very tranquil and Norman Rockwell-ish until a trash truck comes roaring alongside, reminding us that with one ill-considered move we could be smashed like cicadas on the asphalt.
Indeed, some believe that recumbents' chief attraction -- riding low, in a reclined position -- also makes them harder to see for drivers and thus, unsafe. Recumbent enthusiasts say that, to the contrary, cars and trucks notice recumbents because of their novelty, and give them a wide berth to compensate. "Not like a road bike," Dietch says. "When I'm on a road bike, I'm invisible. It's like I don't exist."
Safety, in any case, won't be an issue for us today because we're heading for higher ground -- the main leg of the Los Angeles River bicycle path, a two-way paved bikeway that snakes 20 miles from downtown Long Beach, near Shoreline Village, north through Paramount and Bell Gardens and ends in Maywood.
