In September, I traveled back to the U.K. for work. I’m fortunate my job gives me these opportunities to get home and see family and friends. I had a limited time to see people. But I wanted to spend time with Graham, my oldest friend. And he had a plan for riding retro mountain bikes.
Bikes and friendship
Graham and I formed our friendship over a love of bikes. We would ride our bikes together, to local parks and woodland. Our skills, like many kids, were developed through jumping stairs and riding through woods. We were fortunate to have some trails near us. Our love of riding grew through riding these trails.
The bike I had back then was a Trek 800. I made some upgrades and took it out onto the trails. Graham was riding his BMX initially, and then a DiamondBack Accent he bought after saving some money up. We had a lot of good times. But we got older and eventually stopped riding. I don’t remember exactly when it was, but it was around the time we started going to the pub.
Beer and cars
I started riding bikes again in my mid 20’s. I have carried on riding ever since. Graham started to focus more on modified cars. This year I decided that I had to make a change in my life. Because I had been drinking more and more, and it was time to stop. Most of the time we had been together, we had been drinking. I contacted Graham and told him I wasn’t going to be drinking while I was back. I wasn’t sure if he would be disappointed. He wasn’t.
Graham came up with an alternative way for us to spend a day together. Initially, he suggested we rent bikes and ride some of his local trails. When I contacted him a couple of days before leaving the states, he’d had an entirely new plan. Graham had bought two second-hand retro mountain bikes for us to ride.
Retro Mountain Bikes
Taking me down into his basement, Graham proudly showed off the two bikes. An Orange P7 and a Kona Cindercone. He was going to ride the P7 because it was the bigger size, and I would ride the Cindercone. We had to make sure they were mechanically sound before heading out, so we spent a few hours on the Friday night tinkering in Graham’s kitchen. I’d bought a pair of my eggbeaters with me, they’re from the early 2000s so close to the right era, and I fitted them. We adjusted saddles, checked bolts were tight and made sure the shifting was working correctly.
We also ate jaffa cakes, the best bike repair snack ever! Confident that we’d got everything ready on the bikes we set about finding Graham’s bike gear. He’d not used it in a very long time, and surprisingly we couldn’t find his helmet, so we took a short trip to Halfords to pick him up a new one. Since we didn’t have a pump or water bottles, we grabbed them too. The bike pump was long. It looked like something you would see in a period drama, attached to the vicar’s bike. It was not compact, but it was cheap. We were all ready for riding the next day, so we settled down to try and watch Burt Reynolds movies with Graham’s wife.
Queen Elizabeth II Park
We headed out to Queen Elizabeth II park mid-morning on Saturday. The weather was gorgeous. It was sunny and warm, the perfect day for two fools to take out 25-year-old bikes. When we started unloading the bikes from the car, I had a sudden rush of self-doubt, not sure if the whole episode was going to be embarrassing and possibly dangerous. I mean these bikes were old and we hadn’t given them more than a cursory look over to make sure the basics worked.
As we rode out of the car park, we saw high-end full sus bikes on bike racks. I began to worry that the trail may even be too challenging for us. Would these bikes just collapse in a heap at the first jump or rock? We opted for the blue route and started to climb away from the parking areas. My concerns faded as I remembered the stupid things we used to do on bikes just like these when we were young. We set off riding our retro mountain bikes.
Rigid forks may be pretty hard on the wrists, but ultimately probably better than an early 90s suspension fork would be now. Rim brakes allowed us to stop in the past just not as quickly as disks do now. But it wasn’t raining so it’d be alright. The tires were skinny and old but were providing grip and the chain hadn’t skipped as I put a little power down, everything would be fine.
Little and Large
I currently ride an XL bike. But I have, in the past, switched between L and XL frames. My height means that either size has relative merits. I’m long in the leg, and I have found some XLs to have an awkward feeling, but with a large, I have to have a lot of seat post. The Cindercone was a large but felt more like an 18″ than a 19″. It had a 350mm seat post. I’d stretched the ‘Max insertion’ to its limit, but the saddle was still too low for good pedaling uphill. When we reached the first hill, I grabbed the bar ends, stood up, and started climbing.
My bike felt great, and I quickly powered over roots and got halfway up. Typically, as soon as you think everything is going well, something goes wrong, and this was no exception. I started to experience a knocking feeling mid pedal stroke. I got my bike up to the top of the hill and started to inspect it. We had packed a small multi-tool to help with any small repair on the trail. Unfortunately, my non-drive side crank bolt had come loose, and we required a socket to tighten it up, not something we had on the multi-tool. I was about to admit defeat, but Graham was not. We loaded our retro mountain bikes back into the car and headed back to his house to effect a repair.