Cruzbike Recumbents

Tom Butler: 0:04

This is the Cycling Over 60 Podcast, season 2, episode 29,. Cruise Bike Recumbents. And I'm your host, tom Butler. There are about nine more days to prepare for the chilly hilly ride. It is a 33 mile ride with 2,173 feet of elevation. I feel good about how I am preparing for the ride, but it will challenge me.

Tom Butler: 0:35

On the chilly hilly there will be a couple of things that I will be experiencing for the first time on a group ride. First is that I won't have a trunk on my bike. I was used to carrying a lot of stuff with me, so I will have to leave some stuff behind. It's easier to do that now because I know more about what I don't need on a supported ride. I am buying a Rock Bros Handlebar Bag. I'm not 100% sold that. I'm going to like a handlebar bag, but I thought it was inexpensive enough to give it a try. One of my concerns is that I don't know how to take an extra upper body layer with me without the trunk. The high temperature is projected to be 48 degrees and it will probably rain all day. I am guessing that will mean around 34 degrees when we get on a ferry at 8am to go to the island where the ride takes place. I am not sure how to dress and I would prefer to have the ability to stuff an extra layer in the bike trunk. I don't think I can do that with the handlebar bag being kind of small. I will be looking next week for some options that might give me some flexibility. The other issue is that this is the first group ride where I will be experiencing a new gear ratio. In the past I could grind up hills with a 42-46 gear ratio. Now the lowest I have is a 34-34. I can definitely feel that difference on training rides. It will be interesting to see how it works out on the hills of the chilly hilly. The biggest hill on the route is 3000 feet long with a max grade of 10.2%. The average grade is 7.1%. I am sure my legs will be burning before I get to the top. The hill is 20 miles in, so that will be another factor. There are three or four smaller hills before I get there in the range of about 4% max grade. I am going to let my heart rate get up to 165 beats per minute before I step off the bike. It would be great to be able to do the whole route without stepping off.

Tom Butler: 2:32

Once I went for the first ride with Geron and McKenna on her new bike. I talked about her bike choice last week. For people new to the podcast, mckenna is my daughter and her husband, geron, has been riding with me from almost the beginning of my cycling over 60 journey. We did 30 miles with a meal stop halfway through. That was the longest she had ever been on a bike. I think she did fantastic and she said she wasn't as sore afterwards as she expected to be. The 30 mile ride we did had a decent headwind, so I am glad she got to experience what that is like. She also got to experience what it is like to ride behind someone who blocks a lot of wind. I think she is very interested in learning how to draft behind me.

Tom Butler: 3:10

After that experience she is going to do the chilly hilly, which is going to be quite a test for her, since she doesn't have a lot of time to prepare. I think she won't be faster than me on this ride, but I don't expect that it will take long before I will be working to keep up with her. It will be a different experience not being the slowest rider in the group. She had been on a search for a saddle that felt comfortable. She ended up buying a 155 millimeter specialized power comp. That is what she did the 30 miles on and she found it to be comfortable, which is saying a lot because she hadn't spent a bunch of time on a saddle before that ride.

Tom Butler: 3:44

I am really looking forward to kicking off the 2024 group rides with the chilly hilly. I am certainly expecting some great experiences this year. I have been noticing recumbents on all the group rides I have done and they are interesting to me. The brand that seems to stick out from the others is Cruise Bike, as I have mentioned, now that my daughter is riding, it leaves my wife out because she doesn't have a bike that feels comfortable to her, so we have decided to consider a recumbent for her. I was able to get Maria Parker, cruise Bike CEO, and her husband and co-founder, jim Parker, to come on the podcast. Here is our discussion. I am really honored today to have my guests with me, maria and Jim Parker, here. Thank you, guys for coming on.

Maria Parker: 4:39

Thanks so much for having us, Tom. We are honored to be on your show.

Jim Parker: 4:42

Our pleasure.

Tom Butler: 4:44

Now I am going to let your story unfold here, but I do want to say that you are with a company called Cruise Bike. I am super curious about Cruise Bike. This is as much of me just asking questions about what I am curious about as well as anything. We will start out with a question what is the memory each of you have of cycling as a kid?

Jim Parker: 5:09

So I grew up in Falls Church, virginia, sort of inside the Beltway around Washington DC, and the bicycle was just this amazing way. My friends and I could just go exploring and we would explore, just I would go for miles, probably five or 10 miles, but that could take us all the way down Route 50. Back then the Army bases weren't necessarily locked up. We could cut through Fort Myers, drop down through Arlington Cemetery and hit Memorial Bridge and be like in front of the Lincoln Memorial, which I remember. That was just an amazing bicycle ride that we did as kids, and back then parents also didn't worry about you. You just leave in the morning and you come back before dark and that was, that's all that mattered. You didn't have a phone and if you had a snack you went to your friend's house and they fed you. And, yeah, the bicycling was just pure joy and freedom as a kid.

Maria Parker: 6:11

Yeah, jim took me on that ride when we were dating. That was. It was really cool.

Maria Parker: 6:14

Yeah for me that my favorite bicycle memory and I talk about it all the time on cruise bike is turning seven. I got a new to me bicycle. I had learned to ride a bike prior to that but my dad believed in making things hard before they were easy, so it was real rickety but I knew how to ride it. But for my seventh birthday I got a newish bike. I remember it was blue, it was beautiful and it was. And I remember riding down my parents driveway and just the speed and the feeling of the wind in my face and just at that moment I felt like I remember just pedaling out of sight of the house and thinking I'm grown up now. This is freedom, this is independence. So bicycles have meant a lot to both of us, I guess.

Tom Butler: 7:04

I love that. At one point, jim, you became interested in recombinance and I'm wondering how that came about. What drew you to a recombinant bicycle? You are a physician and a cyclist and I'm wondering if that being a physician played a role, or what drew you.

Jim Parker: 7:25

I guess in a way because I got mono, focused on the bicycle and recombinant bikes in particular. So I was in my 40s and actually Maria decided that she was going to do triathlons and so she had been a runner, never really been a cyclist like a competitive cyclist, just a recreational cyclist. And she asked me. She said, jim, I'm going to start training on my road bike. And I had a road bike too, but I hadn't ridden it in years. It wasn't a super high quality one. So I went out for a ride with her and it was so uncomfortable after about five or 10 minutes on that bike that I said I'm not, I'm sorry, I just can't do this, it's just too uncomfortable, it's hurting my wrists and my neck and my shoulders and also my perineum. But mostly it was like for me it was mostly like my wrists and shoulders that were just aching after a ride there, just so much weight on them. So I thought there's got to be an alternative to this.

Jim Parker: 8:30

The year was 2005, 2004, 2005, somewhere in that range, and I started researching and getting on the forums and I spent several months just I'd come over work and I would, just I'd hit those forums and I was reading about trikes and quads and recumbent bikes and learning all the lingo the long wheelbase, the short wheelbase, underseat, steering, overseeing, you know all these different, different terms for these different kind of weird, funny bicycles but I didn't like any of them. There was something wrong with all of them in my mind. As far as from an engineering point of view, they were either too long or they had a little front wheel or just things I didn't like about them. Mostly it was the long chain. But then I saw a reference to this kit that could be built from a. You could buy a Y frame mountain bike and with this this genius guy in Australia had had invented a kit that could convert that to a front wheel drive recumbent, and I saw a picture of that and that looked really cool and I thought it was great.

Jim Parker: 9:42

So I ordered one, I built one up and I loved it. So this bike was literally was held together with hose clamps, but it was still. I loved it and I probably weighed 45 pounds, super heavy. But I could ride, for you know, hours and hours and I loved it. So Maria said you won't catch me dead on that bike. But then one day we were out for a ride and she was herding on her road bike and she said, hey, let's switch bikes for a little while. So we traded bikes. I let her ride the cruise bike and she loved it. She picked it up very quickly, just I don't know like a day or two, and she was riding and she said I love this, I want to get one.

Tom Butler: 10:24

So we ordered.

Jim Parker: 10:25

Long story short, we ordered one for her, a kit. We had that built up and we started riding together. Farther than whatever written, we were both loving it and we felt like we had discovered a secret. Like, oh my, this is just amazing and this is. We can't keep this hidden from the world. I mean, people need to know about this. But the kit was hard to. It was really.

Jim Parker: 10:49

It took a long time to get the kit built up. It's not something that most people want to do. There's a lot of mechanical things involved with it. So I contacted John Tolhurst in Perth, australia, and my idea was that we were going to build. We would build full bikes, not kits, but actually build a, the first cruise bike. I presented that idea to Mr Tolhurst and he said interesting. So we discussed it for a while. We drew up a memo of understanding. I sent him some some money for the rights and we made a partnership and went into business and cruise bike was born and we we kind of launched the company into 2005,. Beginning of 2006 at Innerbike in Las Vegas, john flew out from Australia, we started selling bikes and and we also sold the kit back then. But we also had a couple of models of of the full bike.

Maria Parker: 11:45

I don't know if you want to step in and mention other things from your group and I think also as a physician, you also know what it looks like inside the body, so I think that was part of your interest in recombinant bikes. Yeah, yeah.

Jim Parker: 12:01

So there's actually quite a body of research on the problems with road cycling. Musculoskeletal pains, aches and pains are very common on the standard road bike and there's also pressure on the saddle and the perineum, which is the kind of the soft fleshy part of your pelvis that basically sits between your right near your genitals. Male or female, there are nerves and arteries and vessels that run right under that area and everybody's different and but for some people those arteries and nerves cross these bony prominences and then when you put those sit bones on a saddle, you're going to compress those and you're going to cause ischemia or and pressure on the nerves. You can cause a neuropathy and if you, if you do it long enough, it can be irreversible. If you get any numbness, that's like your body telling you that what you're doing is really bad and you should stop it because it's going to be. It can become permanent injury.

Jim Parker: 13:02

And there's a there's a study. I'm a radiologist and I saw there was a really good study where if somebody took an MRI which can show what's happening inside your body and they created a saddle and they put somebody on a saddle in an MRI and they and they documented like the compression of the blood vessels. It's like you can just see it.

Maria Parker: 13:22

It's like Jim couldn't unsee that I mean it's it's, it's not.

Jim Parker: 13:25

Yeah, it's no question about it, it's not, it's not up to debate, it's just. That's just what happens when you sit on a saddle, and this there were studies. There's some saddles with cutouts and they they have, you know, split down the middle and the studies on those really is. They help some people and they actually make it worse for other people, because everybody's anatomy is different. So if you're anatomy, if you happen to have anatomy that perfectly coincides with that gap down the middle, it's probably going to be great for you. But they don't work for everybody and for some people the edge of that saddle is going to hit one of your your arteries or nerves and might make it worse. Yeah, that's part of the. The medical background related to why I really wanted to find a recumbent that that worked.

Maria Parker: 14:09

I would just add to that that I like athletics and I like pushing myself to the limits. I don't mind discomfort at all, in fact I I enjoy it. You know, I enjoy the challenge of pushing. But what I noticed, even in myself on a traditional bike we call them legacy bikes is that you know that so much of my psychic energy was taking taken up by managing my discomfort that was unnecessary, for instance, my hands going numb or my neck hurting or my back hurting or my pelvis hurting. So I I didn't mind the pain. But once we switched over to cruise bike, I could put that psychic energy into actually powering the pedals and really, you know, making my heart pound and making my legs burn, the kind of good, good pain you know I want to kind of hit on a mental element here, when you said kind of like you're not going to ever catch me on that kind of bike.

Tom Butler: 15:08

When you look back at that, how do you explain kind of where your mind was?

Maria Parker: 15:12

Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think a lot of people feel that way when they see us on our bikes. And I get that because I felt that way too and I've since actually studied this and I made a presentation at a design conference. We, we are used to things a certain way. We, we get used to and fashion moves more quickly, the fashion world say, but we get used to bell bottom pants, for instance, to make an example, and that that looks cool for a time and then it looks totally wrong in another time.

Maria Parker: 15:43

And bicycles, they're very simple. Or we're used to what we think of as cool, as is that beautiful arched back that you see in the, in the artistic rendering of of a peloton, you know four or five or six people. You know like half curves of their arched back. So that's what we're used to thinking of as good and socially acceptable and and beautiful. And a recumbent literally puts that on its back and it doesn't look to your mind when you first see us, like no, that's wrong, that's not cycling, that's not how cycling should look and it's really just the way our brains are wired and it's very difficult to gradually move. You can move to lower, thinner and thinner leg pants from bell bottoms, but you, you can't gradually move from a hunched over position to a laid back position. So one of our challenges in our company is is to get that image out there so that people's accepted as a viable way to move through through time and space on your, on your bicycle.

Jim Parker: 16:48

Very common experience for us is we'll be riding along the road and there'll be some kids out, maybe teenagers or preteens, and they will see us ride by and they will just go nuts. Cool bike man, I love your bike, but there's something that happens between that age, whatever age that is, 14, 15 years old, and then an adult who goes, ooh, weird, bike, is that hurt you or like you know so. So there's something that happens in the socialization process where people, their mind becomes closed and they, they develop what the, the iconic bicycle should be. And if you're not on that, there's something weird or wrong with you.

Maria Parker: 17:34

Yeah, so the cycling world has been at the same basic, the safety frame has been the same basic design for well. Over what? 100 years? Well, since 1934.

Jim Parker: 17:46

So yeah, that's. I think that's a point worth exploring a little bit. So the UCI, the Union Cycle, is International which governs cycling. Even USA cycling is a is a subsidiary of the UCI. We're used to be open to recumbents and recumbents were welcome in all of the major races, the national record attempts, the, the big tours in Europe, and cycling was actually a much, much bigger sport. That is now. It was like NASCAR and the Indie Formula One, everything rolled together. That's what cycling was back then and you know it's. The major cyclists were huge stars.

Jim Parker: 18:20

What happened was a cyclist, a French cyclist named Francis Fauer, was riding a recumbent built by another Frenchman named Charles Moschee, unfortunately for Reaccumbents. He started beating everyone and the cycling world was faced with a choice Do we let this happen or do we ban them forever? The UCI had a vote and it was actually a very close vote, there's like 52 to 53 or something. I mean very, very narrow vote, but they voted to ban them forever. So all the records were struck and that was it and it was gone. And so the UCI, when they banned them, they defined what the bicycle is. They said, okay, the handlebars will be here, the bottom rack will be here, the seat will be here, the front axle will be here, the rear axle will be here. And so that shape, that bicycle form, is that way because it was made by Fiat. It was the ruling of the UCI.

Jim Parker: 19:18

People think that the bicycle is the way it is now because that's the best shape, the safest shape, the fastest shape. None of that is true. It's not. It's probably one of the most dangerous shapes. It was an improvement in safety over the high racers with the ones with a huge wheel, but it's really still flips you on your. It leads to frontal crashes. It causes chronic injuries to the saddle. It's much slower than a welder's unrecumbent because your body is not in an aerodynamic position at all. It's not ergonomic. It's really an inferior bike in almost every possible way, the exception being mountain biking, other than that on the road, there's just no comparison. It's the recumbent design. A welder's unrecumbent is far superior to a road bike on the road.

Tom Butler: 20:08

What a monumental period in time, the shift that would have happened if that boat would have gone the other way, right, and being that close, you can imagine that there would have been so many different things that would have come out of it.

Jim Parker: 20:22

Yeah, the evolution of the bicycle, the development. Think about the car from 1934 to now, the airplane from 1934 to now, just about every other technology, the locomotives, anything. Think what a train looked like now. But the bicycle hasn't changed. The components have changed the material. They may not make the amount of carbon fiber, they make them out of carbon fiber now, but the bicycle it's been frozen in time. The form. It's not because it was superior, it just was just what they decided to do in 1934.

Maria Parker: 20:53

For racing, but then in the 60s, when people became interested in ergonomics, that's when the rebirth of recumbents started, and we like to think we're bringing it back.

Tom Butler: 21:04

There is an element when you decide to make the decision between adapting frames that were already on the market to having a frame built for exactly what you wanted to do with it, that seems like a pretty significant manufacturing design challenge to take on. How did you feel about that at the time?

Jim Parker: 21:29

The very first whole bike was called the Softrider and interestingly it was designed. It looked a whole lot like our kit bike. So the first cruise bike looked a lot like a mountain bike. We even had the bottom bracket in the same place as the bottom bracket on a mountain bike, because the manufacturer it's like that's the way we know how to make our jigs fit that bottom bracket, the BB shell. And so if you look at our first bikes, we had two BB shells, one that we actually used for the crankset and the other one that was just there because that's what the manufacturer was used to.

Jim Parker: 22:11

We plugged it with plastic and we put a little plastic cover over it. But then once we got that and we started selling those and the manufacturer realized, hey, these guys are for real and this bike climbs better than other recumbents and has advantages over the recumbents. Then we got serious and John Tolhorst worked with the manufacturers in Taiwan and we kept honing it and honing it and making it better and better. And actually John Tolhorst got a patent on an improvement over the design by Tom Trailer in Los Angeles, california. He actually got the first patent on the front wheel drive bike and then John came up with an improvement over that. So we are standing on the shoulders of some pioneers, very brilliant pioneers, who helped develop the cruise bike.

Tom Butler: 23:04

Bicycling is seen as something that, once you learn it, that knowledge stays with you. People will say things like it's like riding a bike, and I'm wondering how much of that ability transfers to a recumbent.

Jim Parker: 23:20

Yeah, I think a lot of it does. You still need balance and strength to ride a cruise bike or any recumbent bicycle. The big change is when you go to a trike. You don't really need to have balance on a trike. You got three wheels, you're very close to the ground, so you definitely need bicycling skills.

Jim Parker: 23:43

So I have taught hundreds of people how to ride a cruise bike and many people come to me and they want to know can I ride a cruise bike? And my first question is well, do you ride any bike right now? Any bicycle, two wheel bicycle of any kind? And if they do, they can ride a cruise bike. Now sometimes I'll have people say I hurt this or that and I haven't ridden any bike for five years. I'm going to worry about that person riding the cruise bike and often I'll say look, before you come, try to cruise bike, dust off your old bike, get out there and just ride it, Just practice, get, ride a few miles, get that feel back, and if they can do that then they can probably ride the cruise bike. So you need to be able to ride a bicycle to ride a cruise bike.

Maria Parker: 24:32

And I would just to add to that. I think one of the challenges for cruise bike is that our bike is a bicycle. It's got two wheels. It's a bicycle but it does have a learning curve, and young people particularly. You have no problem with it, but of course, most of the people who are interested in our bike are more mature and they do have to learn to ride it. People do, but there's definitely some new skills involved.

Tom Butler: 24:58

Maria, you're an endurance athlete and you talked about running, and then obviously there's been a transition to being a recumbent endurance athlete. I'm wondering, I think maybe you would use a cruise bike in a way that a lot of people wouldn't, who are not endurance athletes, and so I'm wondering about what influence you've had when you think about spending hours and hours and hours on a cruise bike. How was that had an influence on the design?

Maria Parker: 25:32

Well, every recumbent is more comfortable than a traditional bike. I used to think about doing an ad where you put a bicycle seat on a fence post and said would you sit on this? So every recumbent is more comfortable riding. I did race across America. I've done multiple 24 and 12 hour races and have set some records and I think what has given me the advantage is that I don't have to deal with those other pains that I talked about earlier. I'm just getting to put all my energy into moving the pedals and to breathing and allowing my strength to move the bike down the road and not having to think about how uncomfortable I am.

Maria Parker: 26:17

I think cruise bikes are very comfortable but, frankly, if you're sitting in a seat with your pedaling in front of you, tracks are very comfortable. All recumbents are much, much more comfortable than traditional bikes. So I'm not sure that we do talk a lot about comfort and design in our design meetings and because that's what we're selling, we're selling comfort. So we want to make sure that every aspect of our bike is comfortable, but it just naturally is.

Tom Butler: 26:43

I'm wondering about hand position. It seems like that there is you know kind of where your arms are, where your hands are. It seems like there would have been some discovery about what that looks like spending more time on the bike.

Jim Parker: 26:57

Absolutely yeah, specifically about Maria's endurance training. She was always influential on the design and things like the handlebars or headrests because if Maria was having a problem during the whole development of the bike, starting way back in the early 2000s late you know, 2006, 2007, 2008, we would make changes to the design to try to make her more comfortable, as she was sort of the pioneer of the long distance cycling on the cruise bike. But the hand position is one of the key things. That's what I tell people that are adjusting to the bike is spend extra time on the handlebar position and on the headrest as of the two key areas that you want to tweak and retweak and just keep tweaking until you're as comfortable as you are when you're in the easy cheer watching TV or something, watching a nice movie. You want to really get that. So everybody's ideal hand position. There's a little variation, so we have different kinds of handlebars and people can angle them. It's designed so that people can find a comfortable position for themselves.

Maria Parker: 28:07

But frankly you're not leaning on your hands. So I agree with Jim, and especially getting your head position is just like sitting in an easy chair getting your head position so that you can see the TV or whatever is important, but because you're not leaning on your arms, you're not leaning on your hands, we don't even have to wear gloves. I mean, I was always like why is everybody wearing gloves? Oh yeah, they have. They need that extra cushioning.

Jim Parker: 28:34

Well, your hand position on the cruise bike is more about power production, believe it or not.

Jim Parker: 28:40

So of course it's about steering too, but it's also about getting the maximum power.

Jim Parker: 28:48

Because, kind of the secret sauce, what sets the cruise bike recumbent bicycle apart from every other type of recumbent is that our front wheel drive design directly connects the handlebar to the drivetrain in a way very similar to a standard road bike.

Jim Parker: 29:08

But in your mind you have to realize that our system is rotated about 90 degrees.

Jim Parker: 29:13

So in other words, when you're on a road bike and you want to sprint or climb and you get out of the saddle, you use your upper body to lean the frame to the right and to the left, synchronized with the time you're doing the powerful downstroke on the pedal and by doing that properly you're actually getting more torque into the cranks and we can do the same motion, but it's more of a horizontal pull on the handlebar and it actually gets more torque in the cranks, just like a road bike. And I prove that by using a stages power meter that has an app that transmits the actual torque in the crank 16 times per second to your cell phone. You can watch the graph. But when you pull on the handlebar, you're actually increasing torque in the crank. When you're re-storking the crank, its propulsive power you get to use. That's why we're in business to let people know this bike has the advantage of a road bike and also the advantage of recumbent, and it's the only bike in the world that has both of those things.

Maria Parker: 30:19

Yeah, we always laugh because when we ride, when we first start riding recumbents with other traditional cyclists, legacy cyclists, there's a little I always sense a little bit of pity. It was like you have to be on that bike for some reason and when I just blow them away, that almost immediately translates to you're cheating, you're on a cheater bike because we're so aerodynamic that it is that from the amount of power and my friends on legacy bikes will say we like to see what power producing I'm putting 250 watts into your 120 watts it's like, yeah, aerodynamics does that. Sorry, it's like you can cheat too.

Jim Parker: 31:06

You can cheat too.

Maria Parker: 31:07

It's not cheating, though. It's a bike that's available for anyone who wants it.

Tom Butler: 31:12

I just love that picture. I don't know what that says about me, but if you're taking off and all of a sudden they're going, oh, I'm having to work to keep up with her, right? Yeah, you know, I thought I was going to be waiting for her and here I am. I have to work to keep up with her, that's awesome.

Tom Butler: 31:26

To explore this a little bit more. You're pushing against the pedal and I'm wondering do you feel that? Are you like braced? Your back is braced. Do you feel like you're pushing against being braced as you're pedaling?

Jim Parker: 31:43

The fitness of it is for on all recombinants you do have the backrest to push against. All recombinants have that advantage in that you do have the backrest, which, like if you go to the gym and you want to do a leg press, you have the. Your back is supported and we have that. But what I'm talking about. So imagine the bottom bracket. So when I pull the handlebar of a cruise bike or the handlebar of a standard bike and lean the frame, I am moving.

Jim Parker: 32:16

Let's say, just imagine in your mind I am on a road bike and I lean the top of the frame to the right while I am pushing down with my left foot. By doing that I am actually moving my left hip closer to the left side of the bottom bracket, I'm leaning the frame. That's moving, it's moving the bottom bracket down there at the bottom of the bike and that's actually shortening that distance. So if you add those vectors up, that basically is again it's more torque in the crank and so we do the same thing. So if I am pushing with my left foot, I would actually either I would pull with the left handlebar and that's going to bring the bottom bracket closer to my left hip and therefore shortening that distance more rapidly, using my upper body and core muscles to actually shorten that distance and put more torque in the crank. So it's kind of hard to describe and visualize, but once you learn the technique you'll feel it and you say oh, now I know what he's talking about.

Tom Butler: 33:17

Well, I think you're doing a great job of explaining it, so that's awesome. Are you pedaling in a circular motion? Are you clipped in?

Jim Parker: 33:26

Oh yeah, Well, you don't have to be clipped in. But we generally, I tell beginners not definitely, don't clip in until you're really comfortable on the bike. But yeah, you'll want to clip in for maximum performance.

Tom Butler: 33:39

And when you come to a stop light? This is basic questions, I know. When you come to a stop light, is it easy to put your foot down and to keep yourself up.

Jim Parker: 33:50

Yeah, I usually unclip one foot when I come to a stop.

Maria Parker: 33:54

Yeah, but I don't even anticipate stops. I just come to a stop and unclip and get my foot down, just like our foot is further from the ground. It's a good question, really, because I think people probably worry about that. Our foot's a little further from the ground because it's up in the air, but it's no problem to unclip and get your foot down. Some of the worst bicycling accidents you ever see are people unable to unclip their foot and fall over, and that happens on legacy bikes as well as any recumbent or any bike you're clipped in on.

Tom Butler: 34:25

From a design perspective, with Cruise Bike it almost seems like there's two different audiences now, because you've got people that are just experiencing a recumbent for the first time, and then you have people who have maybe been riding it for a decade or whatever, and they might be looking to tweak things that a new rider would not be thinking to tweak.

Maria Parker: 34:52

Yeah, yes, it's a great observation, and I think when we were first in business, everybody who bought our bike was already riding a recumbent, and recumbent riders are very open by their nature, obviously, and so they saw a new design. They're like I want one of those too. Maybe they had three or four other recumbents bikes and trikes at home. Now we're definitely selling bikes to people who have never ridden a recumbent or even thought about recumbents, thanks to our success and our marketing, I think. And yeah, the people, the recumbent riders, they're techy, they love trying different things, they're engineers Basically, they're all engineers and so they love Cruise Bike and they love fixing this and that. And our forum has got some really terrific people on it who've built the bike all different ways and adjusted this and adjusted that. But the bike works great out of the box for a person who's never ridden a recumbent.

Maria Parker: 35:56

We've thought long and hard about everything and it works, and it's not necessary to be an engineer to learn to love our bikes. I'm not Now I'll raise my hand. I am not an engineer. I do not. When I gave feedback it was very vague, like, oh, I want my head further forward, I can't really see. And John and Jim and our other designers that have worked with would have to translate that into something, but our bike is great for non-engineers and that's the market we're really breaking into now in a very exciting way.

Tom Butler: 36:29

I think maybe a demonstration of that is that you have a Simbi recumbent bike, if that's the right word to use, but you have a bike that's at a 50 degree angle or a 40 degree angle and it seems like maybe that's something, and I think even on the website it talks about that being a good choice as a beginner bike for experience recumbent Is that an example of kind of designing more for inexperienced people?

Jim Parker: 37:01

Yeah, I think so, the more uprights that. When I started and when Maria started, we wanted to be more upright, sit more almost straight up or just a little bit leaning back, but pretty quickly you actually get. Most people get more comfortable, more reclined Not everybody, some people like to stay in that upright position but you're definitely more aero. And when you're more reclined you'll find that your body weight is distributed over a larger surface area. So if you think about all bicycles, you have to think about OK, what surface area am I going to distribute my body weight over? So every cyclist, no matter what bike you ride, you should think about that question, because on a road bike with a saddle, about the size of my cell phone.

Maria Parker: 37:46

A slice of pizza.

Jim Parker: 37:47

A slice of pizza, that's not a lot of surface area, and then you have to. So if you don't put it on your perineum on the saddle, then you have to put it on your wrist, your hands, and that might hurt. And then you might have to put it on your feet stand up, and then that's going to hurt your feet if you stand up the whole time. And so you have to be constantly rotating that weight. On a road bike and on a recumbent, the more you're sitting upright, then again you're concentrating your weight right on your tush, whereas if it's more reclined you've got the entire surface area of your back to distribute that weight, and it just becomes more comfortable that way.

Maria Parker: 38:28

And I think, to answer your question more directly and to get back to the issue of what people are used to seeing when you're sitting up, that looks more like OK, this is like a bike Kind of At least my head is up we do tend to sell our customers. Many of them have more than one cruise bike, so they might buy the Q45, which is a 45. It's actually an adjustable seat angle, but roughly 45 degrees. And then they're like oh, this is great, but I think I want to go faster, and the easiest way to go faster is to get more aero, and so then they might buy the S40 or the V20C.

Maria Parker: 38:58

I think people are attracted to the upright position because they can understand that, ok, yeah, that's like sitting on my excise bike at the gym. Yeah, that's, you know. I understand that I can see the road. Also, we're evolved to balance in an upright position, so it is easier to learn to ride sitting more upright. When people go directly to our most laid back model, the V20C, it's going to take a lot not a lot, but it's going to be more of a challenge to learn to ride. That People do all the time, but it's definitely a little bit more challenging to learn to balance when you're laid back.

Jim Parker: 39:36

Yeah, even our most laid back bike, the V20C. It's about a 20 degree recline from the horizontal, so it's pretty laid back. But you don't have to be laid back on it, you can sit straight up on it. That's true, and I have to remind people that way about that. It's like you know you don't have to, you can sit straight up when you're learning to ride.

Maria Parker: 39:59

In fact, that's how I learned to ride it, sitting up away from the seat back.

Jim Parker: 40:02

Or if you're coming Like. So, if I'm coming up on some kind of mess on the road, a traffic circle or stoplight or intersection, I sit straight up on that bike and then I'm looking, you know, eye to eye with the other cyclists and their drivers, because I'm sitting tall, so I do. Sometimes. People need to be reminded that you don't have to be reclined, even though the backrest is reclined.

Tom Butler: 40:25

Maria, you are the cruise bike CEO and I wonder if you could comment on navigating the bicycle market landscape Seems like there was a lot of change that happened because of COVID and then a lot of change after COVID. What's that been like?

Maria Parker: 40:46

Yeah, covid was initially just terrific for the cycling market, for the, for bicycle manufacturers it was too good and then it was too bad, so we all sold out everything that we had. Then the supply chain just was completely destroyed and you couldn't get anything. And there's still a lot of interest. So fortunately we're a small company. We have really great relationships with our suppliers. We were able to actually keep stock of bikes and all throughout COVID and so the COVID bump really helped us. We sold a lot of bicycles during COVID and we continue to sell a lot of bicycles. It's been very good for us.

Maria Parker: 41:31

For the bicycling market at large, it's been really hard. I talked to our dealers who are selling mostly legacy and traditional bikes and they're just really struggling because people bought their bike during COVID and they're done. You don't need a bike, buy a bike a year. So there's a sense that the market was saturated and it's very disappointing because I think all of us bicycle manufacturers really hope that this was the beginning, especially in the US, of a real surge in cycling and that the roads would become safer and we would all be on our bikes all the time. We weren't going to go back to our cars, and that has.

Maria Parker: 42:17

I don't want to say that didn't happen, but definitely it wasn't as good as an important move as we all hoped it would be. But CruiseBikes doing well. Everything changes. The first thing was getting bikes and frames and then it was getting components. Components weren't really short supply. Now components are available so that the supply chain is sort of back intact. But the demand for traditional bicycles, I think, has been really dampened by the fact that everybody bought a bike and it's sitting there. It's disappointing to me that we don't have better infrastructure for cycling, that we're not all cycling all the time, I understand, but it was sort of the great hope.

Tom Butler: 43:06

Fortunately for me, it has been something that I did. I don't know that it was so much about COVID, but I did gain weight during COVID time and it was like, okay, I need to do something about lifestyle disease. And I got on a bike and found out that I wasn't done cycling. At that point I was 59 and it's one of those things that I would love to see that shift, because I think there's so much metabolic dysfunction that if we were on bikes every day a little bit that it would reverse.

Maria Parker: 43:39

Absolutely. People talk about the cost of health care in America and most of it is due to just these diseases of excess. If we were all riding our bikes every day, we would not be spending nearly as much on health care. Think about all the diabetes and all the heart disease that would be slowed down or reversed.

Tom Butler: 43:59

You mentioned your engineering community with the bikes. When I go to your website, it seems like your community is a big part of CruiseBike. Can you talk about the role that they play in your brand and your development?

Maria Parker: 44:13

Yeah, I'm delighted to, because we wouldn't be here without our community. People who buy and learn to love their CruiseBikes are just passionate and they have come alongside us, really as partners, to make sure our company has succeeded. They love their CruiseBikes and we have this incredibly active forum. We try to treat our customers really well. We try to provide the best customer service in the industry, but really Jim and I often say that our CruiseBike family is our family. Now it has completely changed our lives. We have dear friends that were initially just customers who have become really integral to our lives.

Jim Parker: 44:58

So, yeah, a good shout out to Larry Oslin. So he's a great friend of ours now. We met him through CruiseBike. He started out as a customer. We just visited Larry's house where he personally added on a large addition to his home. He has what? 35 CruiseBikes. He's created a CruiseBike museum in his home collecting all these historic CruiseBike models, including that very first one. I started with that kit built bike back in 2005. He tracked it down. It was in the back of somebody's shed. The kind of customers we have and friends we've made, and people like Jason Perez designed a clamp. Yeah, so there's a clamp that holds the headrest struts in the frame and it wasn't very good. It was a little small part, so we had a customer redesign it and that's now called the Perez Clamp.

Jim Parker: 45:55

And it goes on all of our bikes and we named it after him.

Maria Parker: 46:00

Customers have designed bags for us. We have a customer who gets on the forum and does these detailed builds that he documents to make it easier for others to build them. We have on the forum there are customers just waiting for a new newbie to come on and answer all our questions and help them decide which bike to buy and help them build their bike or whatever. You couldn't pay for the kind of customer loyalty we have. There's just no way that they started their own Facebook group that is thousands of people and that posts all the time. We sometimes just can't believe how fortunate we are to have and that's what makes it fun to just keep going. It's still a small business. It still takes a lot of our time and energy, but we can't walk away. This is our family, this is what we do.

Jim Parker: 46:52

And our forum, someone from Africa. He was going to build a cruise bike. He liked the cruise bike so much but he couldn't get one. We don't have any dealers and it's hard to even ship one to Africa.

Maria Parker: 47:02

And he was not rich.

Jim Parker: 47:04

And he didn't have the money. They're very expensive for a lot of people. So our people on the forum got together and they bought on a cruise bike and sent it to him.

Maria Parker: 47:14

I think he built like a wooden one and he was on the forum and he was active and they're like this guy deserves a cruise bike. So yeah, so somebody.

Jim Parker: 47:24

Yeah, we're speechless sometimes. It's amazing.

Tom Butler: 47:27

How has cruise bike impacted the broader awareness and adoption of recombent bicycles?

Jim Parker: 47:33

Well, we've become the number one recombent bicycle company in the world, and when we started out, it wasn't pretty. We were not well received by the standard by the recombent world. Believe it or not, they did not like that Me personally. I would say like you want me to tell it. We're passing all the other recombents like they're tied to a post.

Maria Parker: 48:00

Yeah, Jim was boasting about our bikes and we didn't realize that there's an unwritten rule in the recombent bicycling world that you don't diss anybody else's bikes. All bikes are equal.

Jim Parker: 48:11

It's all about a personal choice, but we, marie and I, would go on these rides that you know not races. We started out just doing like the ride across North Carolina and we noticed and we were on not racing or cruise bikes, but we noticed that we'd be riding along with these really nice recombent people. But as soon as we got to the hills they were gone behind us, they just dropped off like a rock. I started talking about them on the forums and I got a lot of hate. I mean, I got a lot of angry people on my case and I learned a lot about social media then. So I kind of backed off some of those forums.

Jim Parker: 48:45

But one of the criticisms that we got which we took to heart, was hey, that's not a race, you can't really make any judgments on your performance in those, you know, cross-state fun rides. That's actually one of the reasons we got into racing to go. So the first races we went to, we tried to find races that had a history of standard bikes and recombent bikes where there was time set on a certain course, and we targeted those to see how we would do. We did great. The very first one was set the course record up in New York.

Jim Parker: 49:21

Yeah, Jim and I think the record still stands, Jim.

Maria Parker: 49:24

Smoke was coming out of his ears. One day he was on one of the forums and he was getting a little bit of criticism for his claims about cruise bike. And he looks up and he says you're going to race that bike. Because he was working full time and he didn't have the time to train. As we alluded to earlier, the UCI, which governs bicycle races, doesn't allow recombent, so we had to go outside that to the ultra world and start racing ultra.

Jim Parker: 49:52

That's why we started racing long distance. So and people say, oh well, you know, maria is just a freak, because she's just a phenomenon on the bicycle. She'd be winning on any bicycle and I could say, well, look, you don't have to guess, we have her triathlon results on a standard bike and she, in these amateur triathlons she was coming in middle of the pack among the women on the standard bikes and then she was setting world records on the cruise bike. So it's not just a gift, she is, she's. She's really good at training, she's diligent, she's diligent and she's steady. But she's not. She doesn't have an amazing VO2 max or a super fast cycle history, really big power.

Jim Parker: 50:38

And then after I started doing it.

Maria Parker: 50:40

We had a lot of records.

Jim Parker: 50:42

All over on our website there's a list of our records and it's just amazing, it's just huge. We've got hundreds of records.

Maria Parker: 50:50

But I would say that we also. We hired a marketer who happens to be our daughter, but we took recombent bicycles, I think, to a new level with marketing. At the time we got into the business there was other recombent companies and the websites were hokey. Our website was hokey and we hired our daughter and others and we said we're just going to really raise the bar, we're going to tend like we're a regular bicycle company, we're going to take professional photos and we're going to have a website that's very professional looking. So I think we we we hope that a rising tide would raise all boats and I think there's some. There are some really great companies out there but, as happens in the recombent bicycle world, little companies because they're. They're little companies, usually run by an individual. They come up, they sell a few and then they go away. But we've been in it for the long haul and we just continue to provide customer service, to have bikes and stock, to have an excellent customer interface on our website. We just are determined to be a real bicycle company.

Tom Butler: 51:58

I think that the records. To me that's really compelling. It seems like at some point that someone got attracted to trying to do like go full out and go, you know, as fast as they can. Maybe someone who had accomplished stuff as a professional cyclist. Is there like a story there of somebody getting on it and you felt like they tested that bike to the max?

Jim Parker: 52:27

Yeah, that brings to mind Jason Perez I mentioned. He designed the Perez clamp. That's on the V 20. But Jason was a mountain bike racer. He would do uphill, mostly uphill, mountain bike racing. He was a motorcycle racer, you know, going around these corners with his you know knee dragging the ground. And he got a cruise bike and he started pushing the limits in these long 200 mile races.

Jim Parker: 52:56

In California they have the triple crown, they have these series of races that have so much climbing and we're talking about 20,000 feet of climbing in a race, the kind of the amount of climbing that if any recumbent actually ever finished the race, that would be big news. That'd be on the forum oh my God, this guy finished this race with 20,000 feet of climbing on a recumbent and you know that would be big news. But Jason won these races. He beat all of the road bikes on them and if you ask him, you know he would tell you basically, the cruise bike climb, just you put the power in. It climbs just like a road bike, but a little slower because it's heavier. So he would. He would go up the hills just a little slower because it's but it's heavier. But he would just destroy everyone on the flats and the downhills. The guy could go 70 miles an hour on the downhills.

Jim Parker: 53:52

Don't recommend that I've done a lot of videos when I, when I go over 40, I've been up to about 55 and it's it's kind of terrifying because my eyes water, I can't see, I'm like, you know, it's just, I can't believe how fast I'm going. But he's got more tolerance for that, probably from his motorcycle experience. So he, jason, really pushed the limits on that to show what someone could really do on that. And he's not a pro cyclist, he's an amateur cyclist. He was a pro motorcyclist but he was never a pro cyclist.

Tom Butler: 54:27

That is really interesting and, to me, scary. If you're highlighting to people that don't know much about cruise bike, what do you tell them Like? This is my favorite part about it. This is what's so enjoyable about it.

Maria Parker: 54:45

I always give the magic carpet speech, which is I reflect on my seventh birthday and the feeling of freedom and delight that I had on a bicycle. And when you get comfortable on a cruise bike it's exactly the same. There is no managing your wrist, neck, back or groin pain. There's no toughing it out through these biomechanical issues. You're just sitting on your magic carpet, pushing as hard as you can on those pedals and feeling your heart beating and it's just pure pleasure for me. And also the view of the road is better, different.

Maria Parker: 55:32

When I ride, even if I'm on my V20C, I'm seeing things that nobody on their legacy bike is seeing, because they're hunched over in a tuck trying to keep up with me and they're or keep up with each other and they're looking at the wheel in front of them or on the road in front of them. I'll never forget there was one day we were riding before dawn in the country with a group and I'm looking ahead and I see this owl come down and just pick off this bunny on the side of the road and I'm like I see that. I'm like I see it. And of course, nobody saw it, because they were. They were looking at the road, they were looking at the wheel in front of them. They weren't seeing things.

Maria Parker: 56:16

So one of the things in addition to racing, which we talked a lot about, is adventuring. If you like to adventure on your bicycle, this is the body position you wanna have. You don't wanna be leaning over on your handlebars, turning your head from side to side, you wanna be sitting up, you wanna be able to see the world around you, and our bikes are just great for that because they're comfortable and they carry packs and they're just great for adventuring. So they're not good for everything. As Jim said, mountain biking they're not great for that, but they're good for just anything you wanna do on a road or trail.

Jim Parker: 56:55

Yeah, can I add a couple points too? I think that was great description, marie, really good. I also think of you get on a regular bike, a standard bike, and you get in a cruise bike. It's like you kinda are tucked in so you're in it. You feel like you're integral with it, instead of being perched up on this little saddle, kind of sticking way up in the air, kind of top heavy, you're in it. It's like you're in the cockpit of a jet fighter. Yes yes, so it's-.

Maria Parker: 57:27

I used to always feel like I had a seatbelt on. It's like I had a seatbelt on.

Jim Parker: 57:31

It's a different experience and so when we wreck we don't flip over the handlebars. Generally it's very hard to make the cruise bike do a forward flip. Much easier to do that on a standard bike or legacy bike. Of course, like any body riding fast myself included I've gone around corners too fast and hits a patch of sand and slid out. Generally when you wreck a cruise bike you get skinned up, you get some scratches on your hip and your arm, but you don't break your clavicle on our bikes.

Tom Butler: 58:08

I have started doing a lot of biking and then my daughter and her husband both. Her husband first actually started joining me, and then my daughter, and so my wife is being left out and she has not found a position on a bike that is comfortable for her. How would someone like my wife Kelly get a chance to set in a bike, a cruise bike? How does that happen? How does someone find it locally?

Maria Parker: 58:41

Well, that's one of our challenges. We don't have too many dealers. We have sort of a loose system where people can find other owners and sit in one. We do have some dealers. I don't know where you're located, but there are some really wonderful dealers where you can go.

Maria Parker: 58:57

The best thing we have going right now is a trial, and we're aware that because we're a small company and because there's not that many dealers, people want to try the bike and they can't and really a dealer parking lot trial is not the best experience. You really have to have time on the bike. So with the T50, the Q45, and the S40, people can buy the bike. We ask them to keep it for 100 miles, to ride at least 100 miles on it, and if they don't like it we'll take it back and pay return shipping. So we call that our 100 mile trial and that's been a great way for a lot of people to try the bike with little risk and you do have to put the bike together and then take the bike apart.

Maria Parker: 59:42

If you return it and we do get returns we get plenty of people who say it's not for me and we're happy to take the bike back Most people if they give it a fair 100 mile trial, they're in love, they're so glad to be riding without discomfort and all the things we've just described, like anything else, that it does require some practice. You don't really want to be doing it in front of 20 people. Jim learned to ride his in our neighborhood after dark, going around the block. I learned with Jim.

Jim Parker: 1:00:11

She learned faster than I did. I took about two weeks. Come home from work, go out after dark Because I didn't want anybody to see me wobbling and I did wobble. I wobbled all over the place but then quickly, after about two weeks I felt comfortable enough to go out on the bigger roads with cars. But my neighborhood was quiet and at night especially there was nobody out there and I could just practice stupid figure eights and riding around the block.

Maria Parker: 1:00:40

Yeah, there's a lot of skills. We have a lot of videos on learning to ride a cruise bike. It's not as hard as some things, but it's definitely a skill and I think that's one of the advantages like especially for a person, an adult we don't get that many opportunities to learn new things. I just bought a one wheel Because it's been so long since I learned to ride a cruise bike that I thought you know, I want to learn something new, just to kind of get in touch with my customer's mindset. And one wheel we had bought one for our son and he was just having a bond.

Maria Parker: 1:01:10

I thought that looks really fun and it's taken me weeks. I think one wheel is much harder than a cruise bike, but I'm getting more comfortable on it. But it's not something that I want to. It's not something I'm going to learn in a day and it's not something I want to do in front of other people. I'm going to, you know, I'm going out in quiet places and I'm getting more and more comfortable on it. So it's a privilege as an adult to get to learn something new that brings you so much joy.

Tom Butler: 1:01:35

That's awesome. Now my wife is an e-bike person. Do you guys have a way of accommodating people that want pedal assist?

Jim Parker: 1:01:45

Yes, we do so. We did have a model that we actually manufactured, produced and sold called the T50E. So T50 is one of our current models, the T50E. The problem with it was it didn't really sell and we loved it and we still kept a few around which are not for sale Because we still love them. But the whole battery thing, you know, I think they're too expensive because they're so cheap. We can't make them anywhere near what they're selling for. So we can't compete with the mass manufactured e-bikes coming out of China. We just can't. We can't compete with that. But what we do have is the T50 is designed for the addition of an electric assist in that rear wheel and the place you want to do it.

Jim Parker: 1:02:38

You want to do it in the rear wheel on a cruise bike. So that's the bike, so you could take it to any decent e-bike shop and they could convert it to e-assist. And I would recommend that you have the throttle controlled rather than the pedal assist, if it's legal in your state, Because all recumbents not just the cruise bike but all recumbents they're hard to get started from a stop, all of them. Because on a legacy bike, standard bike, you get to stand up on that first stroke. You stand up on the pedal and drop your weight down on it and that gets you going from a stop. You can't do that on a recumbent. So being able to hit that throttle and get going without pedaling is just a really nice feature.

Tom Butler: 1:03:31

Nice. Maria, can you talk a bit about your interest in brain cancer research and how that intersects with what you're looking to achieve at CruiseBike? I have to say that there's a documentary out there of yourI don't know if you've done Race Across America more than once, but there is a documentary out there. I watched it and I cried. I'm not going to ruin it for people, but there is a major event that happens, that there's a question about whether or not you can continue on. I was so disappointed at that point. Can you talk a bit about that?

Maria Parker: 1:04:27

Well, thanks first for watching the film. It's called Hope and it's on 3000MilesToAcurecom, our website for brain cancer research. If anyone wants to see it, it's free to watch. It's about my 2013 Race Across America, which I did solo. We have done it since as a four-person team, which was also fun, but no movie was made.

Maria Parker: 1:04:50

That came about because my sister, who was very close to, got a glioblastoma multiforme, gbm very deadly form of brain cancer and she was young. We were best friends, we were very close. She was born just 10 months before I was. We were Irish twins. We did everything very similarly. She had five children, I had four. We just talked on the phone all the time when she was diagnosed.

Maria Parker: 1:05:16

It was an extremely frustrating and grief-stricken time for all of us. I had, at the time, been doing a little bit of ultra cycling. I had set a few records and I wanted to do something to help Jenny and to deal with my own grief and frustration. I entered Race Across America and raised some money. My goal has been to raise a million dollars for brain cancer research. I think we're there. We're almost there. We continue to do to raise money.

Maria Parker: 1:05:48

It's been 10 years since Jenny died. Our Kurzweig family has always been really supportive of that. We just keep on doing it. The Race Across America in 2013 was an incredible experience. The movie details what happened, what made it an amazing thing for both me and for people impacted by brain cancer. It's just a really good story, I think you'll find if you watch the film, and we're always just interested in supporting people who might be impacted by brain cancer, whether they're family members or people who have it themselves. We're still doing that.

Maria Parker: 1:06:26

Our major fundraiser now is going across the Grand Canyon on foot, not on bicycle. Every year, we go across the Grand Canyon in a day and we're raising a lot of money with that. I still occasionally do bicycle events where I raise money for brain cancer research. It's great. This ultra cycling, really difficult athletic challenge is always, of course, a great way to model how difficult these diseases are and how difficult the journey is.

Maria Parker: 1:06:54

Now frustrating brain cancer particularly is there's been so little movement in the research there. It's because it's relatively rare, but mostly because people who have it die. If it's a disease that people haven't lived with, like breast cancer, you know about it. Everybody you know has had it or has a mother or an or sister whatever, including me. I have a sister who had and survived breast cancer, but there's a lot of people out there who care about breast cancer, not as many of us who care about brain cancer. So we're still trying to raise money. Like I said, the cruise by community has been with me the whole time. So many customers and supporters have given over and over and over again, and I'm so grateful for that.

Tom Butler: 1:07:38

There are two special things I thought about with the documentary. One is that there is this element of really educating about the physical difficulties of going through cancer treatment. As you were going along saying, I know that my sister, she deals with physical challenges with her treatment and she doesn't feel good and she keeps going and I'm going to use that motivation to keep going. I thought that that was a great part of the story and then also that it interlaced or people telling their stories, and I just found that to be a special part of the film and very well, thank you, yeah, thank you.

Tom Butler: 1:08:20

Where do you see Cruise Bike in the next five or 10 years? What's exciting about the future?

Jim Parker: 1:08:26

We'll be having a team in the Tour de France in about five years. That's the dream. So yeah, we'd love the UCI to come to us beg forgiveness, and so you know we made a mistake in 1934, and we want you guys in the Tour de France.

Tom Butler: 1:08:48

We voted again.

Maria Parker: 1:08:50

No, we really are going to just keep on going. We've got new designs. We're always working on them. We're always trying to innovate. We've got a couple of really exciting new designs that won't come to fruition for years. So don't hold off on buying your cruise tickets. It takes five, six years to develop these things. But we care about I care very much about the health of the American populace, particularly the world, and I think cycling just is such a great antidote to so much that's wrong. Right, you know, it gets you outside, it gets light in your eyes, it gets exercise. It's a great way to be with people, it's a great way to see the world. It's just such a great thing. So we'll continue advocating for anybody to get on a bicycle and to ride, and we expect cruise bikes going to really explode into the mainstream market because people will stop being so stuck on having to look like Lance Armstrong.

Tom Butler: 1:09:53

I love it. Well, this has been such a fun conversation. I appreciate so much for taking the time to do this. I know that running a small business is not an easy thing, and so good on you for doing that, and thanks so much for taking the time to be here.

Maria Parker: 1:10:10

Well, thanks, Tom. We really are honored by being invited on your show.

Jim Parker: 1:10:14

Thank you.

Maria Parker: 1:10:15

And we appreciate what you're doing to get cyclists out there too.

Tom Butler: 1:10:20

All right, well, take care, and we'll hopefully be in communication sometime when we're trying out a cruise bike.

Maria Parker: 1:10:28

Okay, terrific, bye now, bye, Bye, bye.

Tom Butler: 1:10:40

I hope you all enjoyed that discussion as much as I did. I find Jim and Maria totally inspiring. First of all, they decide to take the risk and start a company selling a bike that isn't well embraced by cyclists and they stick with it through the inevitable ups and downs of the cycling business. You have to admire anyone who is willing to put that kind of energy into something they believe in. And then you have Maria's accomplishments. She is definitely a role model of perseverance. On top of everything, they really seem to recognize that the most important thing about their company is the community that is part of their growth and development. I love that aspect of it.

Tom Butler: 1:11:19

I was certainly intrigued by their opinion that a recumbent is just the best way to experience cycling. I really wonder what would have happened if UCI had not voted to eliminate recumbents from competitions. I went out and did some reading on what was behind the UCI decision in 1934. I think I would need to do more research before I could form an opinion on whether or not they did the right thing. I would love to hear any opinion you have about recumbent bikes. Have you ever thought about getting one? Has anyone listening, tried a recumbent and decided it wasn't for you.

Tom Butler: 1:11:50

You can find my email and the show Instagram link in the show notes. It is always a highlight of my day to hear from listeners. Also in the show notes, you can find a link to a video where Jim is explaining the aspect that he talked about in our discussion considering leverage when pedaling a cruise bike. Check it out, it's pretty interesting and there is a link to the film about Maria's race across America. I really enjoyed the film and I would encourage anybody to go and watch it. I hope you are getting the most out of your cycling these days, whether you are on a recumbent or on a quote legacy bike, and remember, age is just a gear change.