Ninety-three million miles away from your trike on the road is a colossal burning orb of hydrogen and helium that makes your trip possible. It keeps you survivably warm regardless of the weather, and its light allows you to see where you are going in the daytime hours, as well as on the moonlit nights, where its light is cast down upon you after striking the Earth’s moon. This light takes roughly 8 minutes to travel from the explosive ball to your eyeball. Light and warmth are good things for people on overland trike treks, yet those benefits can have their downsides.
Trike pilots are usually in the sun’s light and heat all day long, everyday, for perhaps weeks. The light brings with it a form of radiation that can damage and destroy human skin, and that heat that keeps you warm can also cause extensive overheating of the body’s systems. How do you get relief from the potentially harmful aspects of our closest star? After all, shade is not an expected commodity on a recumbent tricycle.
Consider this: You must make your own shade! How is that done? Well, some folks have developed interesting canopy devices that affix to tadpole trikes, thereby providing a brief period of midday shade. It is brief because the existing solutions essentially extend only over the immediate top of the pilot, being useful only when the sun reaches its daily zenith (if you are traveling perpendicular to the sun’s path), or slightly longer if you are traveling into or away from the sun directly. The longest periods of time of sun exposure come before and after the sun reaches its daily high point, thus these canopies have limited value. Depending on their design, they can also create substantial wind drag, or act as a sail in side winds. So what options are available that are not costly, cumbersome, and limited?
Your clothing is probably the best solution for sun relief. Long pants and long sleeved shirts keep most of the body covered, but what about the face and hands? Gloves take care of the hands, but cycling helmets do virtually nothing to protect the face, even the ones with tiny visors attached, which only keep the sun out of your eyes if traveling into it. Sunglasses cover a little more of the face, but the nose, cheeks, jaw, and neck are still exposed to sunburn. A good overall head solution is a baseball styled hat (without one of those annoying buttons on top) with side panels that extend down to cover the neck and face, something along the lines of the stereotypical foreign legion hat, or what you see camel riders in the Sahara wearing everyday in the sun. You can find these hats made of lightweight material, which easily fit under a traditional cycling helmet, at outdoor recreation or backcountry supply businesses.
If you don’t mind exposing your skin everyday to the sun, then a chemical sunblock must be applied to the exposed skin on a regular basis, which will result in a deep tan by trip’s end (some studies now support a carcinogenic connection to typical chemical-based sunblocks). The paradox is this: To remain cool in the hot sun, short clothing is desired, but can lead to permanent skin damage. While to keep the skin youthful and supple, long clothing is necessary, but can lead to overheating. It all boils (bad word?) down to personal preference obviously, as does just about everything else on trike trips.
Oh, another partial solution is to grow a full beard prior to departure, which covers much of the face (that is of course, if you’re a guy).
