How did you get (back) into bike riding?

Riding
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Always leads to good conversation.

How did you get into riding as an adult? Did you stop sometime and then get back into it later, or have you been riding bikes on a regular basis pretty much your whole life, non-stop?

I grew up in a family where riding bikes was something we did for transportation and for fun. Riding to school, riding to get pizza and rent movies, riding to the park with a basketball under one arm and a cooler full of Gatorade and freezepops under the other arm, and goodness help if there were any cars coming at the intersection of 14th Street and Case Road.
We started as a Huffy/Roadmaster family, and eventually graduated to entry level Haro and Mongoose hardtails, me being too cool for gears and opting for a Hoffman BMX.
In my mid-teens, I mostly stopped riding. Got depressed, started taking medication, then weaned myself off of the medication. Went to see the family doctor to tell him what I’d done and the side effects I was experiencing. He said, ‘You know, a half hour of exercise every day will do a lot to help you feel better.’
I started doing lots of different types of exercises using playground equipment in the park and some equipment we had at home, and also riding and inline skating and running for cardio. Eventually, most of that fell away and all that remained was cycling. Bought myself a crazy expensive $1000 Specialized Sirrus Comp and started riding it 30-100 daily, commuting to work at the toy store I managed after going for a long recreational morning ride every day. Fell deeper and deeper in love with cycling. My town needed a bike shop. I opened one with my dad. That was over 15 years ago. Cycling has been the most consistent recreational passion of my life. I love riding bikes and am grateful to have grown up in a family where bike riding was always so encouraged, with a dad who always wanted to go riding with his kids. I’m grateful to that doctor, a cyclist himself and now a frequent customer at my bike shop (he buys bikes for his grandkids there every year) for telling me to get out there and get moving. I feel lucky to have discovered cycling as my recreational activity of choice (among many others, but cycling is definitely ‘my main’), as I think that riding bikes is really just about the best thing in the world.

What was your journey into cycling in your post-childhood years like?

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I’ll bite. I grew up in the bush hunting and fishing and swimming and playing hockey. Moved to the city and lost those activities, turned to cycling. Started working in a shop at 13 and used the money to fund my racing, which I was never better than mid pack at. Wanted to be a mechanic full time but was pushed into engineering by my folks. Did MTB xc and road citizen events sporadically to keep my toe in it, solidly mid pack. :joy: As I approach retirement I’ve started doing mech jobs again on word of mouth. Shops here are closing, hangover from COVID I think. Hopefully I can make some spare money to keep the kids in shoes.

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A wonderful story!

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I came from triathlon.

I’m sorry.

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As a child, I always loved riding bikes around the neighborhood. Bikes provided an enormous amount of freedom as I could cover so much ground compared to walking. As an early teen, I started riding street BMX and transitioned into mountain biking in late high school/early college.

While in college, I could go mountain biking from my front door, and I rode a great deal due to that. I was eventually bitten by the fixed gear bug (at roughly the pinnacle of that cycling subculture) and did a lot of urban commuting. A move to a suburb after college effectively killed mountain biking for me as the hurdle of having to load the bike in the car and drive to a trailhead was enough of a barrier to entry that I simply stopped doing it. I continued to commute via fixed gear for a couple years though.

Due to the time involved in cycling, I eventually started running and completely stopped cycling. I ultimately burned myself on longer distance running due to that similar time burden. Around the conclusion of running, I found rock climbing and was immediately obsessed with it. I took enormous risks climbing and eventually got seriously injured. That fall largely destroyed my left ankle (talus) and tibia; the talus had to be reconstructed, and it’s now screwed together with plates. The recovery from a serious talus injury is difficult and it ruled out climbing and any activities involving impacts.

While I was not terribly interested in returning to cycling, I bought a gravel bike as I felt that I had few other options for exercise. It only took a couple rides to fall in love with cycling again. Life has taken me through a number of sports and interests, but cycling is something special as I have spent some material portion of my life on a bike. It felt like I came home to cycling.