I got off a bike sometime in 1983 and didn't get on again until 1996. It was a 1972 Pontiac Lemans that seduced me away, then a move to a new country and an urge to explore it under my own steam that brought me back. (I was so impatient to get going that within a month of buying my hybrid I rode it from London to Fort William just so I could hike up Ben Nevis and shout Hallelujah! I'm born again! closer to the heavens. Or something like that.)
How do you explain your gap years, if you had any, and what brought you back to the fold?
Cycled pretty much all the time and everywhere as a kid/teenager, on pretty much all kinds of bikes, including my mums old Vindec shopper, various rat bikes made from frames from the dump with a pair of cow horn bars, a beauty of a Raleigh Chopper (which I still own), and two fantastic racers (at the time) a fine Peugeot (Equipe, I seem to remember) with snazzy chromed lower fork legs and lower seat stays, and a Viscount (which I absolutely bloody loved, and rode into the ground).
Upon turning sixteen in 1982, and having got myself an apprenticeship in the building trade, I went out and spent the princely sum of £351.00 on a brand spanking new 50cc Honda MB5. Apart from getting me to and from work, I was certain that this magnificent red speed machine (all the terrifying 36mph of it anyway) would have the girls queuing at my door (it didn't)! My bikes gradually got pushed further and further to the back of the garage until they (apart from the Chopper) and the Honda were all sold to pay for my first car (a 1972 Hillman Imp), a bargain at £250.00.
In all honesty, that is pretty well where my cycling days well and truly got put on the back burner, having passed my driving test in January 84, I didn't ride another bike until my brother in-law turned up at our house in 1993 on a Raleigh Amazon MTB. "What an absolute beauty" I thought. A visit to
Halfords that afternoon, and a lightening of the wallet by about £200 and I was king of the road (and the mountain) I marvelled in the fact that this awesome machine had 21....yes, 21 gears!
Probably no more than a couple of months went by before I found myself in a bike shop (probably only for something as mundane as an inner tube) when I spotted it......an end of season deal on quite the sexiest bike I had ever seen, a 1993 Kona Lava Dome. I divorced the Raleigh Amazon without a second thought. Me and the Kona (which still sits in my garage and overall is still my favourite bike) spent years together. We've ridden 1000's of miles across trails, in XC races, trailquest events etc etc.
The arrival of kids, steered my attention away from cycling again, apart from the odd jaunt with a two year old on a tag-along attached to the Kona (sacrilege), until I was bitten by the cycling bug for a third time in 2006, when the good lady treated me to a lovely Scott Reflex 20 MTB as a 40th birthday present. It has never had the kind of use (and abuse) that the Lava Dome did, but it's certainly done me proud on the trails and for ferrying me to and from my other passion, rowing.
With the kids taking up rowing too, and with the amount of kit we seem to have to take with us, the Scott was temporarily retired to the garage in favour of the Mass Transit Device (........errrrrr, a Ford Transit, in fact).
Fast forward to August 2014. We are on a family holiday in Provence and end up driving up Mont Ventoux. An almost constant line of cyclists climbing the mountain ignites something inside me, and for whatever reason I announced to the Mrs and the kids that I was going to ride the mountain before I was 50! Got home and bought myself a nice Felt F95, my first road bike in over 30 years, and although not the lightest or highest specced machine, a bike that I absolutely love riding. Fast forward again to April 28th 2015.............and I kept my word, riding to the top of Ventoux (with 13 months to spare).
Cycling has always been part of my life. Sometimes it has had to take a bit of a back seat, other times it has been right up there. Probably been responsible for some of the best times I've had and this time around it is here to stay, to the point where I am in the process of research potential cycling based business project at the moment.
Great original post, and I've really enjoyed reading some of the other takes and accounts in reply.
