Yeah, inspired by the other thread but I thought there’s probably a few funny stories out there about people’s first time actually going mtbing. No doubt there’ll be polite discussion about what constitutes mtbing, etc but just go with the flow and say what you reckon was yours…

Mine was shortly after buying my first mtb (’92 Marin Pine Mountain, second hand)- I was 19 IIRC – as I’d been after one for ages and a couple of mates were into them.

My first ride was through Wimbledon Common (just along the gravel roads) and then into Richmond Park where my main memory is of being absolutely shocked to see my mates dropping off what looked like a vertical precipice. I think I rode it once, rigid with fear. Still, I loved the rest of it and the rest is history… (and that vertical precipice is just a small, rollable drop of about 2ft at 45 degrees…)

So, how was your first time?

I was riding a “Any Bike £69” special from a local shop as a commuter.
A housemate asked if I ever road it off-road.
A day of South Downs riding later, I had a new hobby and needed a new bike (F&R hubs, BB and headset bearings all failed!)
Thanks Al, wherever you are now.

APF

I don’t really remember it specifically because I grew up blasting through local bushland on a BMX, so I guess it’s when I first rode a 26″ mtb – borrowed from a neighbour. I remember being blown away by how easily it rolled and how fast you could go. I was probably 15, that’d make it ’91. I ended up buying that bike from him and it lasted until I bought my first proper mtb in 94 and started riding real singletrack when I went off to uni in Canberra. Feels like a bloody long time ago and a long way away….

Aged 12, on my saved-up-for green and white 15 speed Apollo Blizzard, fitted with corner frame bag and ball saving top tube pad, and donning my polystyrene-covered-with-mesh-knickers Met helmet, bombing round the local woods until the left crank fell off 🙂

Rode similar places to you OP. Including the towpath and Barnes common, etc.
Started in 1986 on a Raleigh Maverick (previously done the same on a bmx).

Might have crossed paths in the early 90’s.
I was always on a Fisher then.

About 5 years ago on a racy hardtail that was too big for me and my mate took me down Cavedale. I’d already been OTB on the grass at the top and had a serious case of disco leg the entire way down.

It was awesome

As a yoot got my dawes tracker for xmas, went out with cousin dan-bob on his new tufftrax on boxing day, rolling a drop on birkrigg hit a rock and took the rear mech off. Snapped at the knuckle, instead of just getting a new one my dad got it brazed back together and it never shifted right again.

First time as an adult, Mabie crashed off the first corner on the first boardwalk into a big heap of brambles

Next day crashed on one of the drops at dalbeattie removing pretty much all the skin from both elbows, cutting my nose and chin, scuffing my knees up and skinning the palms of hands – home time.

Guisborough forest on a fully rigid Diamond Back Apex, 1997 I think would have been the year. Back then they had a longer black route signposted and I had zero concept of any mtb riding techniques so made pretty hard work of it especially all the rooty bits.

No.. I don’t remember
I have hazy visions of school holidays spent riding out to the steep woods about 4 miles from my house, and later on days either spent up on the hill over the other side of the river, or following stream beds up to their source.. (all on tip bikes, converted racers and early Raleigh mtbs)

A decade or two later and a discussion in a pub revealed that my drinking buddy had also spent his childhood in a similar way so in an effort to cut down on boozing we bought bikes and started regular rides along the (cheeky) SW coast path..
Revisiting those coast path rambles again now, it’s pretty funny to see some of the stuff that we were intimidated by at that time 🙂

MTBing wasn’t really a thing by itself, riding offroad is just what we did as kids and over time the bikes got bigger and better but it’s still a seamless transition from riding down the park on a raleigh budgie to racing an enduro world series really badly.

My first “mountain bike ride” on my first mountain bike was down the woods with all the steps in beside my school- which is still fun today though the steps are less shonky- then down the donkey lane. Which these days is a nice smooth path but back then was just a heap of rocks and mud. And then probably quite a lot of riding round the garden doing stunts.

Started riding “off road” in ’92 but my first real ride was out of Sedbergh in August ’94 on a British Eagle Vision 18 spd. Awful bike but so happy memories on it.

Probably smashing out laps of the local park, including gnarly bombhole, on an XL Raleigh Montage.

Shit got real when we discovered Broxbourne Woods and bikes that fit us better though.

My Uncle was riding a lot up around Doncaster and the Peaks. He donated his Trek 930 to me when he bought a new KHS montana pro – must have been about 1993.

When he gave it to me he brought it down to my parents house in Devon and we went up to Exmoor near where I lived and did a loop around Withypool. Was boiling hot and I suffered all the way around, but the downhill was immense.

Got back to the car and the only drink he had was a 2litre firkin/flagon thing of Hancocks devon cider. Refreshing but a bit strong for a dehydrated 13 year old!

Don’t remember the actual first ride on my 1992 Raleigh Amazon which was my first mtb, but like Northwind I just grew up riding bikes off road, we just rode our BMXs along forest and farm tracks and in the fields when they had been harvested.

First mtb did lead to ‘proper’ mountain biking very quickly, inspired by the January 1992 edition of MBUK. Happily threw that bike down things I’d think about twice today, used to actually prefer riding in the rain as the brakes barely worked, the Cheng Shin 1.9 tyres gripped less and there were less walkers to get in the way in the local woods.

Around May 1991, on a GT Timberline, in the New Forest. We rode twentysomething miles. I was wearing jeans and it rained. My seatpost clamp (one of the old type ones with a clamp on top of a simple post) came loose about halfway so I had to variously stand up or balance on a freely tilting and rotating saddle. It finished with tea and buns, though.

Like many I was often riding off-road before I had an MTB. As a kid I had a BMX and it was my “mountain bike”, riding it wherever and whenever I could. If we’re talking proper 26″ wheels and lots of gears, that was probably around ’88/89 when it was really taking off. My folks treated me to a Spesh Hard Rock (I still have it).

The first time I actually rode a “route” on that bike was the Buxton circuit in the old Tim Banton guide. I can’t remember when it was nor much about it to be honest. I do, however, have fond memories of riding down from Edale Cross to Hayfield with my Dad when he bought a Hard Rock as well. That must have been 25 years ago.

first mtbing on an actual ‘mtb’ rather than my raleigh bomber…

id got a ridgeback 601 for christmas 1988, 15 speed with red s cantilevers and bull moose handlebars. and 1.5″ centre ridge tyres. my dad has also specced mudguards and a rack.

more that real off road stuff, my strongest memory was how really low gearing made so much difference going up steps and generally made climbing stuff much more realistic. i had no idea that almost 30 years later, id still be spending my time effectively doing the same thing…

I shared a student house with a chap who went on to be a magazine editor and bike designer. He used to have various bikes knocking about and I used to play on them.

I remember a Pace with square section tubes and a bull’s eye crank, a black Cannondale with a green lizard painted on the top tube, his pink Fat Change Yo Eddy and a Scott with a stars and stripes paint job. The Scott was the one that got me hooked.

He’s cost me a fortune over the last 27 years 😉

(yes Brant, 27 years ago!)

First time on a proper MTB was 1987 – Brother bought a Giant super Sierra off a mate and didnt really use it so I used to mess around in the local woods on it (Copley & North Dean – Halifax area).
Before that – used to use old road bikes converted into “scramblers” with wide bars and slightly knobbly tyres.

first off road ride was me n my mate stuart – he had a giant boulder alu shock and i had an edinburgh bikes contour 300 with some Duotrack forks… We were 13 IIRC so 97/98 and we rode out the cliffs from arbroath to seaton and back in – and that was our days ride.

we had no idea – no tools – no food – no tubes ETC.

good job we didnt go further.

by 99 we were both racing Downhill in local races and progressed to SCUDH races the following year.

We used to call it ‘scrambling’ as kids, riding shonky old bikes down the local sand dunes and grading each other for dramatic license when we crashed.

After buying a cheap Raleigh in 1990 to get to local Lancs quarry climbing sites along moorland tracks, I realised I was enjoying the ride more than the climb. Got on a train to Staveley in December, ‘rode’ over High Street to Pooley Bridge and never looked back.

Yep, Raleigh Max mid-late 90’s – it was black and had ‘oversized tubing’ which made it look Alu but it was actually Cromo and weighed as much as the moon, gripshift and canti-brakes with plastic levers.

Went for a tear down to the local Nature Reserve thing (Cosmeston Lakes if you’re local) in the depths of winter wearing jeans, a shirt and kickers. Thought it would be fun to ride the boardwalk around the lake, hopped (or fell) down the two steps to it, tapped the brakes to control my speed and…. SPLASH, wet wood as I now know has all the friction of Teflon coated ice. Had to ride home shivering and try to dry out my pager.

That go lasted 2 years or so, none of my mate’s rode so it was mostly ‘better than walking’.

It was another 10 years before I went ‘proper’ mountain biking – Oct 2005 – some friends and I bought bikes on ‘Ride to Work’ because we were horribly unfit, rode to the same Nature Place – a distance of all of 3 miles – it took about an hour and 4 stops to get there including walking up an ‘impossible hill’ that wouldn’t require a gear shift these days and a quick lap of the ‘sketchy trail’ which was anything but. Probably enjoyed it more than I did riding Whistler Bike Park a few years ago.

1990…was 13 at the time. weather was pretty similar to today.
our youth service has just bought a fleet of specialized rockhoppers and me and my friends were the first ones to use them. our youth worker turned up on his own bike..a kona lava dome.
we shoved them in the back of the minibus and piled in and went over towards cliviger for a ride.
none of us paid too much attention to wearing suitable clothes back in those days…my attire included a pair of jeans and doc martins!!
we did wear helmets though…many years later i became a youth worker and i found the photos that were taken on the day…they’re now in my photo album.

I’d seen these All-Terrain Bikes in some of the US BMX magazines. Couldn’t get anything like it over here so we started constructing our own out of Raleigh Bombers and touring bike frames. This included cutting out the bottom of the seat tube and welding in a new BB to raise the height, brazing on canti bosses, and beefing up the head tubes (these used to either flare or pull off of old lugged frames doing jumps and drop offs). Forks were the biggest problem, used to bend a set pretty much every ride.

After a couple of years of this, I got a first edition Raleigh Maverick in 1986 and never looked back. Raced it in the local cyclo-cross league, much to the bemusement (and consternation) of the old duffers organising it, then the early Surftracks races at Blandford.

Then my dad got a Diamond Back Apex about 1987 which I promptly purloined as it weighed half as much (alu frame), rode in the Mountain Bike Club nationals in Thetford in 88 I think.

Happy days, it was always sunny back then too 😀

Boxing Day 1986. Having looked longingly at my Ridgeback S which had been under a sheet in the garage for a month I finally got to get it muddy. Marden Woods/Stoughton Down/back of Kingley Vale… whatever you want to call it. Up the slimy chalk track then the forest track to the barrows on top, with my Dad walking behind.

Couldn’t believe how much easier it was to ride than the Bomber/Grifter etc I’d been riding until then. Went even better up hill when I realised I could let some air out of the tyres and actually get some grip on that slimy white stuff 🙂

Townsend Smokey Bear, with an ordnance survey map, back when Farmer Johns were almost the only tyre available, a few months before turning 17 and buying my first proper mtb a Kona Lava Dome.

£150 Claude Butler, 2 litre bottle with some water in in a rucksack, base ball hat, to the Peak district like a proper chav.

had such a buzz though.

1988 ,coming from trail motorbikes and thinking no one could object to me riding a push bike anywhere off road

I was lucky enough for my parents to take me riding off-road ever since I learnt to ride a bike.

But I do remember the first time I experienced the joy of riding singletrack with the intention of going as fast as possible. I remember when I was about 13 chasing my brother through some woodland singletrack and struggling to match his cornering speed. It was a very dry Autumn day and I could see his spiky 1.95 Michelin tyres throwing leaves into the air as he lent the bike over in the corners.

A mate was into them, and suggested a weekend away in Wales, we rode pretty aimlessly around Sugar Loaf. Hired a GT and helmet from Broadribs in Bicester. It was stupid hot, and I was in jeans and hiking boots. we had to bang on the door of a farm cottage to beg a refill of our water bottles. This would have been 93/94; something like that.

Hooked ever since

Not counting hooning round the local sand and gravel quarry on my mum’s sit up and beg ‘singlespeed’ in the 70s, it was 1992 on my new Pallisades Trail bought from Behind Bars in Abingdon. First major ride was trying to commute off-road from Stanford in the Vale to Abingdon. Bridleways were either impenetrable oil seed rape fields or trails next to thorn hedges where I had about 2 punctures per ride. Then graduated to the Ridgeway. Still have the scar on my knee from my first spd outing on the trail at the back of White Horse Hill.

Summer of 1987, bought a Marin Bear Valley from Shockwave in Nottingham. They were the nearest place from Barnsley where I could buy one after seeing all the adverts in a windsurfing magazine. Bought it on the Saturday and the first ride was up and over Cutgate from the Langsett side the day after. Still one of my favourite routes, was up there on Saturday

June 1991, aged 13. On a church youth group weekend camp, we hired Marin MTBs in Frosterley – rode up the valley side, along a BW and then down to the valley bottom and along the main road back to Frosterley.

That evening, a girl kicked me in the shins until I asked her cousin out. We’re still together.

1990 in Austin, Texas was working over there and a bunch of us hired some MTB’s to ride round a route in Zilker park.
Suddenly remembered what had been missing from my life… riding bikes. As soon as I was back in the UK I bought an MTB recommended by MBUK; bit of a change from dry, dusty Texas in Sept’ to the South Downs Way in Jan’.

As kids we used to ride our BMX’s over the Chase while the folks went for a walk but my first proper MTB ride was at Sherbrook valley on my 1989 Raleigh Mirage. I parked at the Mintlyn Memorial and rode to Milford and back. We had a caravan at Wentnor which gave me the chance to explore the Long Mynd and the rest of the Shropshire hills. Happy days!!

For me it as only about a year ago. 😳
My wife and kids were at our caravan during the school holidays and I was still at home during the week. I found myself with some unexpected free time in the evenings, in the summer and decided to use this time to good effect by clearing all of the junk out of one of my garages…. at which point I discovered, hidden at the back …..a bicycle.
An Apollo 3200 to be precise. Constructed from lead lined steel girders with perished tyres.
It had belonged to my late father in law who had bought it in the mid nineties on a whim, ridden it a few times and it had somehow made it’s way into my garage for storage.
So, in a fit of madness, I decided to haul it out, fix it up and have a go. Boredom and loneliness can do strange things to a fella 😯

A couple of evenings and a few trips to Decathlon later, I ventured out one balmy August night.
Hadn’t ridden a bike since I was a whippet thin 17 year old, now 42 and five stone heavier than that callow youth.
Stuck to roads and footpaths went out and cycled a loop from our house to our church at the top of the hill and back home.
Maybe 3 miles.
When I got back into the house I was blowing out of my arse and was sweating so much that I had to completely remove all my clothes and lay bollock naked on the carpet for a bout 15 minutes before I was able to stagger upstairs for a shower. My legs were like jelly for hours afterwards. I was dizzy and was convinced that I was about to have a heart attack… and a stroke… and a seizure…. All at once. 😳

Liked it so much I did it again the next day…..and the next…. and as often as time / weather allowed until Santa took pity on me and brought me a shiny red Voodoo Hoodoo.

Still at it. 😀

If riding ‘trackers’ in the 70s doesn’t count…maybe about 1988 on a Spesh Hard Rock in Thetford Forest. I was so blown away by it all, I entered the first race I could. I was an ok roadie at the time so was pretty confident but thought I’d enter the fun race then move up to sport when I’d shown them what it (and I) was all about.

When I was lapped by the leaders of the women’s race I recognised hubris for what it was. When I say lapped, what I actually mean was blown away by them on the first lap! They passed me again before my race finished!

It all started for me in 91, i bought a 2nd hand bike (a Raleigh Mustang) from a shop with the intent of using it for getting home after id walked the girlfriend home.
Started to notice mtb magazines in the shops so bought one as id no idea that riding around off road was actually a thing..
next day off i find my self heading up a hill thinking to myself that for so called mountain bikes they weren’t bloody easy at riding up hills let alone mountains.
I did have a bum bag with a tube and one of those box spanners that
probably didn’t even fit half the bolts on the bike! It nearly killed me and i can still remember meeting a few walkers who looked at me as if i was crazy..but i was definitely hooked.

Katyn Memorial. Sorry, long time ago!!

I was riding ‘proper’ enduros eg on a motorbike when I saw stuff about these new mtbs. Ideal thinks I, I had a road bike, I had an off road motorbike , this would obviously fit between the two. I went out and bought a Claud Butler , took it to the Peaks and tried to do the climbs I did on the motorbike. I returned utterly broken shoved it in a friends shed and didn’t touch it for months. Eventually I tried again and discovered my bike had been nicked from the shed! With the insurance money I bought a Tufftrax with the chain stay U brake (ask your dad) and never looked back. 27 years later I am still wasting loads of money and still look, according to my wfe, like a particularly scruffy toddler.