Rolling In From The Fringe -- The Recumbent Bicycle Has Benefits - And May Be Ready To Shed Its `Weird' Image

Technology. It's a bike design that's supposed to be superior to the typical bicycle. Only now, decades after it was first on the drawing boards, the recumbent bike is gaining popularity for its technological advances.

Stuart Strand rides a weird bike.

It's long and low, with an easy chair for a seat and pedals set in front of him instead of beneath him. On cold or rainy days, he covers the whole get-up with a pink synthetic "body stocking."

He has drawn a lot of attention over the past six years as he's commuted along the Burke-Gilman Bike Trail from Shoreline to the University of Washington. But he laughs off the looks - something recumbent cyclists get used to doing.

"We're above all of that," he said. "We just sort of try to go as fast as possible so we don't hear any derogatory comments."

One could call this the cost of living on the cutting edge, of being a trend-setter, of daring to break the mold of the conventional in the name of innovation.

But the basic design of Strand's bicycle is 65 years old. And while it can promise certain benefits over the conventional bicycle - big-time comfort, flashes of speed, even impotence prevention - it still draws more looks than riders.

It is an example of locked-out technology, the opposite of locked-in technology helping fuel the fire between the U.S. Justice Department and Microsoft.

Locked-in technology has the benefit of being an industry standard, like Microsoft's Windows operating system, the QWERTY keyboard or VHS videotape. It may not be better - just ask a Macintosh user, a Dvorak keyboard typist or a BetaMax fan. But by being its industry's model, locked-in technology rules the day.

"The Windows PC is the best-selling PC in the world. It isn't the best," said Bob Bryant, editor and publisher of the Renton-based Recumbent Cyclist News. "I have seven Macintoshes in my office. I wouldn't trade one of them for a PC. The best products don't always make it to the top of the heap."

Rivals go to the fringe

Rival products do often get relegated to the fringe.

In this case, the recumbent, for all its benefits, becomes the pocket protector of the cycling set. Recumbent riders, who call regular cyclists "wedgies," openly acknowledge they are thought of as geeks. In this cosmology, Stuart Strand rides a weird bike.

It didn't have to be that way.

In the early 1930s, when bicycle racing was one of the world's foremost spectator sports, a second-rate cyclist named Francois Faure rode a streamlined recumbent to victory over all of Europe's top-ranked racers. In 1933, he broke the 19-year-old record for distance traveled in one hour, riding 45.055 kilometers.

By beating bike racing's most coveted record, Faure ignited a controversy over whether he had really ridden a bike. The Union Cycliste Internationale, bike racing's rule-making body, was on the spot.

The following spring, it declared that Faure's record would stand only in a special category. Meanwhile, it ruled that recumbents were illegal. Racing bikes, it said, would have to be built to a set of dimensions that ruled out the laid-back style, perpetuating the upright form popularized by John Kemp Starley, maker of the 1896 Rover Safety Cycle.

Bicycle technology went on to a series of transformations aided by gearing, lightweight materials and a fast-changing marketplace that makes the turnover of new designs so quick that some inventors don't bother to patent their work.

In the quest for an aerodynamic advantage, designers dropped the handlebars on some bikes to where the rider seemed to have a chin on the front wheel.

But the bike rider remained upright. So while the racing world set off into the realm of aerospace alloys and Lycra, the recumbent was left largely to engineering hobbyists and a small group of inspired tinkers.

They had science on their side.

In the early '70s, California researchers studying narrow tires inadvertently discovered that wind resistance accounted for a whopping four-fifths of the resistance on a bike and rider going 20 mph. Borrowing the legs of champion cyclists, they began building and testing various aerodynamic farings and formed the International Human Powered Vehicle Association.

Breaking the 50-mph barrier

Gardner Martin, a former automobile racer and self-taught engineer with a "Ph.D. in `Popular Mechanics,' " built a recumbent on which a rider in 1979 rode head-first on his belly at 50.84 mph. It marked the first time an unaided cyclist broke the 50 mph barrier.

Another Martin creation, the Easy Racer Gold Rush, was the first human-powered vehicle to top 65 mph. It is now in the Smithsonian Institution.

Recumbents have not moved so fast in the marketplace.

Scott Martin, a feature writer for Bicycling Magazine, said the bikes clearly have certain advantages. They're fast, comfortable and great for back problems, but they also suffer from what he called "the geek factor."

"It's a hard stereotype to overcome," Martin said, "particularly now where the sport is dominated by mountain biking and its image of youth and daring and tattoos. That's even further from the recumbent world, I suppose."

"You don't see recumbents in Mountain Dew ads" is how John Bradley, a product manager for the Wisconsin-based Trek Bicycle Corporation, put it.

But the big chill on the recumbent could be thawing. Trek has several recumbents in the prototype stage and will decide in the coming weeks whether to introduce one to the market. It probably will, said Bradley.

The bike would sell for more than $1,000, but so did many of the first mountain bikes. More important, say recumbent experts, the entry of a major player like Trek, with sales of $400 million in 1996, would validate the recumbent as a bicycling option.

Recumbent producers still account for about one-tenth of 1 percent of the nation's bicycle industry, selling perhaps 15,000 of the 15 million bikes sold each year. But the bike industry overall is in the doldrums while recumbent manufacturers are seeing their production double, triple and even quadruple every year.

Body parts give out

Driving their sales, they say, are Baby Boomer cyclists with necks, wrists, backs and backsides wracked by the conventional bicycle.

"There's always a body part that gives out," said Joel Smith, a former Boeing engineer who co-founded Vision Recumbents of Seattle. "Our contention has always been that, almost without exception, something else gets sore, something else limits the length of a ride besides your leg muscles."

That's not all the conventional bike limits. Dr. Irwin Goldstein, a urologist at the Boston University Medical Center, blames the narrow bicycle seat for about 100,000 cases of impotence in this country. Goldstein says the conventional seat, a piece of equipment so tied to the horse era that it is still called a saddle, can damage key nerves and crush the arteries that supply blood to an erect penis.

Ed Pavelka, a former Bicycling Magazine editor who had a spell of bicycling-induced penile numbness, said the recumbent was a clear-cut remedy to his problem. His machine was actually slower than a conventional bike, and his muscles took weeks adjusting to the new riding style. But when it came to the recumbent's medical value, he said, "there's no refuting that."

Not that recumbent makers are about to market their product as Viagra on wheels.

"The big advantage is, I'm having a good time," said Grant Bower, a Vision Recumbents designer who has reclined through 10 200-mile Seattle-to-Portland Bicycle Classics. "I'm still enjoying the scenery. I'm enjoying myself. It's a different mindset."

Bower and Smith said that mindset is dawning on non-recumbent riders as well.

"The question that comes up is, `Where can I get one?' " said Smith, "as opposed to `What is that?' "

Maybe the day will come when these bikes won't seem so weird after all.