A Tandem Bike Brought This Father and Son Closer Together During the Pandemic
Jonathan Woo is the kind of rider who bikes 300 solo miles a week without even thinking about it. He rides through every kind of weather that rolls through the Front Range in Colorado, where he lives, and he just enjoys being in the mountains.
So when COVID-19 forced him and his family—his wife, Sarah, and their two sons, Nathan, 16, and Wesley, 18—to get creative when it came to their activity, it made sense that bikes would be involved.
Jonathan, who started riding bikes 32 years ago in college, bought a Santana tandem bike a few years ago, so that he and Sarah could ride together whenever they both had free time from managing the restaurant that they own in Loveland, Colorado. While Jonathan rode the tandem occasionally with Sarah, biking was largely a solo activity for him.
When COVID-19 closed Colorado schools last March, Jonathan suggested that his 16-year-old son, Nathan, join him for a tandem bike ride to get some exercise. Nathan initially resisted the idea; both Nathan and his older brother, Wesley, 18, have been swimming competitively since they were 3 and 5, respectively. But when the pandemic closed the pools, it was the longest either of them had gone without swimming for a very long time.
After a few days without exercise, Jonathan convinced Nathan to join him on the tandem—and it opened up a whole new world. (Wesley went out several times too, but it just wasn’t his thing.) With his son started joining him, Jonathan felt like he was seeing his usual roads for the first time all over again.
“Suddenly I’m talking to my son,” Jonathan told Bicycling. “[Before] we never talked for more than three minutes at a time, and now we’re taking three-hour rides and talking the whole time. ... We see bald eagles and bison. We count how many other cyclists we can pass. We battle the wind together.”
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Riding a tandem was a great way for Nathan to relearn how to ride, since he hadn’t ridden a bike since he was a little kid. It gave Jonathan a chance to talk to Nathan him while they were out together, and teach him things like road safety, how to lean into turns, how to shift and brake, and how to fuel for longer rides.
“On the tandem, we started out with 18 miles, then 20, then we were riding 30 miles and 40 miles most days,” Nathan said. Their longest tandem ride was 68 miles.
Nathan loved riding so much that Jonathan decided to buy gravel bikes for them in January 2021. Jonathan had been wanting to get a gravel bike himself, and he figured getting two would allow him to keep riding with Nathan while also giving Nathan some more freedom. Plus, with far less car traffic, gravel biking felt safer.
“I liked being outdoors, and I liked the exercise, but I didn’t like [being on the back] of the tandem because I had no control,” Nathan said.
“The first time out on our gravel bikes Nathan crashed three times,” Jonathan said. “I realized, he had been clipping in and out on the tandem, but I was always there holding [the bike]. So there was a learning curve, doing it on his own bike.”
Jonathan “got kind of crazy about gravel” and started planning 65 and 70-mile routes on remote gravel roads—he studied maps and looked at Strava to get ideas for rides. The pair started going on 80-mile rides each Saturday, but would get so lost that the rides turned into 90-milers at times.
“There would always be something,” Jonathan said. “Wind or something else that would delay us, and we wouldn’t get back until dark. But when you go on an adventure with someone else, only you two know what you’ve been through. We had a lot of fun.”
They even started taking road trips to other areas of Colorado to try new routes. Sarah and Wesley prefer to hike while Jonathan and Nathan explore on their gravel bikes. But at the end of the day, they all get to talk about their adventures together.
“As a family, all four of us would go down to southern Colorado for a weekend and go biking and hiking, and that was a lot of fun,” Nathan said.
If there’s a positive outcome to the pandemic changing everyone’s routine and shutting down things like swimming pools, Jonathan and Nathan certainly found it.
“We got to spend so much more time together,” Nathan said. “At the pool, my dad would just drop me off and pick me up. Now we go riding together, spend the day together, and we talk.”
Jonathan loves learning everything he can about the engineering and physics of bikes and bike riding, and Nathan loves engineering, too. Over the course of the last year, they’ve talked at length about how everything on the bike works, and what it takes to go faster. And as Nathan looks to college, he said he’s considering going into engineering. His dream project? Designing the next world tour ultra-aerodynamic bike.
The pools have now reopened and the swim teams are back in action. Nathan isn’t biking as much as he was without swimming, but he’s still getting out on the weekends, and the family still has some road trips planned to check out more gravel roads around the state. Nathan and Jonathan are both ever grateful for the time they got to spend riding bikes together during this strange and disjointed year; it’s something they both know they’ll have forever.
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