I struck out a couple of weeks ago for a 38 to 42-ish mile ride - I’ve been working on building up to longer distances. The weather was practically idyllic - partly cloudy, with a high in the lower 80’s; honestly better than a mid-August day in Illinois has any right to be. I’d worked out the route to allow for a full 42-ish miles, but to be easily cut to the shorter distance if I didn’t feel up to the full course.
All was going well until right about mile 10, at which point the rear view mirror on my Catrike Pocket snapped off of it’s post.
That’s right - just snapped off. Not so much as a "by your leave", or "toodooloo" - one second it was there, doing a stalwart job at its duty, and the next it was a decoration on the pavement behind me.
The township road crews in the area have been diligently working on culvert repair over the course of this summer. As a result the highways and byways are punctuated with 3-4’ wide removed sections that reach across the breadth of the road, filled in with gravel rather than asphalt. These occur every few miles across the region right now and, inevitably, the difference in material results in a difference in the elevation between the road and the filler. It was upon encountering one of these sections, rolling along around 15mph or so that my mirror made its escape. As best I can tell, the jarring nature of the bump into the gravel fill must have been just enough to get it to give up the ghost.
I stopped and turned around to pick up the mirror, tossed it into a saddlebag, and continued on. I was already a third of the way into my ride, more or less, so it made just as much sense (I reasoned) to go on as it would to go back.
One of the things you quickly realize, under these circumstances, is just how valuable a rear-view mirror is on a recumbent trike.
Rear view mirrors are, arguably, desirable equipment for all road riding. I certainly have one mounted to my Cannondale upright as well, and I know that I miss them when I’m riding a borrowed bike, as with our adventures with bike sharing earlier this summer, or on the rare occasion that I take out MLW’s big-box Schwinn mountain bike.
Mirrorless rear view, however, is an area where a diamond frame bike has an advantage over a recumbent trike. Turning your head to look behind you is considerably easier on a DF bike than on my trike. It’s not impossible, mind you, but the effort is considerably higher, and the view one gains for that effort is not all one might hope.
This actually resulted in my cutting the ride down to the shorter route. The longer route included a section of road that, while only a couple of miles long, rises, falls, and twists with a minimal usable shoulder for emergency runoff. It seemed better to avoid that portion without the benefit of a rearward view.
I decided, given this experience, to order and mount two rear-view mirrors on the trike instead of just replacing the one. This puts a second mirror on the right handlebar.
My repair crew helping me out
With the relatively small size of the trike, this may seem to be overkill. And from a visual field perspective, it is. Cars nowadays have mirrors mounted on both doors in addition to the central rear view mirror (though I’m old enough to remember when they came with one, standard, and getting one on the passenger side was an extra cost option. And then you had to prevail upon your passenger to adjust the mirror on that side, because there was no such thing as a power mirror... I digress - suffice it to say that I’m old enough to remember things that make me seem old...). The general width of a motor vehicle means that those three mirrors each provide a different view, with information within each that is valuable for the safe navigation of the machine. On a trike, however, the difference between the view in the two mirrors is negligible.
The similarity in view between the two, however, is more a feature than a bug. While it is overkill in terms of the visual field, what it offers is redundancy. When I first ordered the two mirrors, my thought was towards the idea of keeping the second one in the saddlebags as a backup, alongside the spare tubes and my toolkit. But while the mirror can be installed with a bike tool kit - all of the connectors have Allen heads on them - the real question that occurs is just how badly one would want to do a roadside mirror installation. Which is to say: not at all.
If I’d had the second mirror on the trike a couple of weeks ago, losing the one would have been a non-issue. Given that they provide virtually the same rear view, I could have comfortably soldiered on without alternating between wondering if anything was coming up behind me and shifting and craning uncomfortably to see whether or not that was the case.
I’ve also realized an additional advantage in rides since doing the installation. With the single mirror on the left side of the trike, I cannot see behind me when I signal a left turn - my arm is the only thing featured in the mirror at that time. It’s a small thing, for a short period of time, but now I can still get the rear view from the right-side mirror.
It’s always possible, tho, that the fates were just looking out for me that Sunday. As I mentioned, the loss of the mirror caused me to cut about five miles from the ride. It doesn’t seem like much, but my legs were pretty much spaghetti by the end of the trip even as it was, so all may have been for the best. Gotta get up to 42 miles eventually, though...