Rowbikes and Streetrowers

Mmm, not much of a blogger if it's going to be 3 weeks between entries, hey! Well I'd often wondered where one found the time to write like this. So where were we. Looking at some kind of Lands End to John O'Groats (LEJOG) challenge to start off our rowing challenge.

The obvious solution it seemed to me, was to try and find out whether or not it would be possible to row LEJOG.! I could see that plenty of other strange ways had been found to complete the journey and in any case, if you want profile these days, you really have to do something extraordinary. LEJOG itself is probably considered a mere rite of passage these days by keen cyclists, but to row the 870 miles...now that really would be something.

Actually it didn't even start as a row, but as an idea to cycle some kind of a machine that would carry two people. The idea being that we could cycle 2 hours on 2 hours off, just as you would in a 2 man trans-Atlantic row. One would cycle, the other would sleep, or eat or wave at the traffic, whatever. (As I retrace my thought processes, this still seems like and interesting idea!)

I looked at all sorts of bikes. There are some incredible designs out there. The eight freight designed by Mike Burrows, was one that I contemplated. An example of this machine sits outside Borwell Cycles in Norwich and I enquired after its availability for such a challenge. In truth it was never big enough and the brakes would not have coped with the ardour of trying to stop two 14 stone blokes down all those Cornish hills. (No shame on the bike you understand, just the physics of the thing.) I shall have to come back and edit this page because I don't have some of the others to hand. I can see the opportunity for a book on freight bikes.

Anyway, as time moved on and we discussed these plans further, we came up with the idea of trying to find a machine that could actually be rowed, and thereby mirroring our Atlantic ambitions. Here again we found a number of contenders. Take a look at http://www.rowbike.com/ for one example and http://www.streetrower.com/ for another. The latter of these we took a close interest in, meeting up with it's designer and builder Simon Tarrant.


Having secured permission to buy one of these machines through the ride to work scheme, I travelled with Paul, Tom and Jack to meet up with Simon at Dorney Lake, the 2012 Olympic site. Simon was everything that one would expect of an inventor; bright, enormously enthusiastic for both his creation and the possibilities it presented and was as a consequence keen to help us in any way that he could.


The Streetrower that we saw that day was the first completed prototype. The machine that we completed our final test drive on, was the sleek finished article that you see on his website. The design of the powertrain is extremely clever, very efficient and capable in suitably trained rowing hands, of impressive speeds. In part this was the part that scared us off though. The steering was electrical and I couldn't get my head around the possibility of a steering failure doing 30 mph on the A30!