Following the acquisition of the road bike I always lusted over as a kid (I was a mountain biker but always thought those old school dynatech bikes were lovely), myself and a couple of club mates (who have dug out their bikes from the early 90s) have decided to instigate a retro bike ride once a month

the thing that still astounds me however is the gear ratios on those old things. Mine has a relatively generous (for the time) 39-23 lowest gear. Which by my estimation is equivalent to me using a 50-28 nowadays. I like to think I’m of a reasonable standard. Have an ftp of anywhere between 3.5-4 w/kg, yet anything above say 7% gradient I’d be in the small ring. (And I run a 32 T the back)

now I appreciate back in the older days roadies were hard as nails, and climbing involved knee ruining cadences, but how did mere mortals cope?

im thinking of some of the groups that go out with our club. It’s a great mix of folks, old timers, beginners, ladies and gents of all fitness levels. There is absolutely no way many of these folks could manage to cycle 90% of the routes they do nowadays due to fact they’d be pushing up the climbs.

Was road cycling only partaken by stick thin athletes back in the day and more social groups didn’t exist ? Or has the world got hillier?

I’ve ridden most of the top UK road climbs on a SS MTB using 32:16, you just grind it out…

NB I wouldn’t say it was really enjoyable, but I survived.

42 x 21 when I were a lad. Got the same bikes but managed to get a 39 x 26 on there now, and its just about OK. My CX bike has 34×32 so I can now take that on stupid hilly road rides.

I was in a racing club so we used to kill each other. Compact chainsets didnt exist. I was also younger and lighter.

In the old days of fixed and flip flop hubs, they used to grind up the hill, flip the wheel over – making a very marginal difference, and then spin down the other side at 150 rpm….

NB One chap I ride with still comes out on fixed all winter….

Although not that hilly round these parts…

He then endlessly complains about the pace / distance of club runs as everyone else just rides their old carbon monocoque, deep section wheeled, road bike with clip on mudguards as a winter bike.

PHOTOS! [ I loved the look of the lugs on those things ]

Depends where the original owner lived I supposed, but we swapped out for 11-28 cassettes from new all the time at the shop (and on our own bikes). There were always unused 11-21/23 going cheap for the wannabe racers. Sort of made sense… fewer cogs meant you had to go small biggest cog to keep close ratios.

EDIT: just remembered 12-28 was very much a thing for cheaper builds as well… as the chainrings were such a stupid size that living without an 11t was no hardship, and the 12t cassettes could be had at a lower price.

Yeah, I picked up a mint Carlton Pro-Am from the tip(!) a few years ago. Lovely thing, rode beautifully on gentle Cotswold lanes, and the low gear of 42/21 and the effectively ineffectual brakes weren’t really an issue.

Then I moved to the Peak District. Those gears. Those brakes. F***-quitefrankly-that. A nice gentleman took it off me in return for a generous charity donation.

I did the Etape in 2000, on my Cannondale CAAD4 R800. It finished at the top of Ventoux. The bike came as standard with a 12 -23 cassette (53/39 front). A couple of weeks before the event I managed to find a 12-27 cassette, which was as rare as a rare thing. It wasn’t enough for Ventoux.

Was road cycling only partaken by stick thin athletes back in the day and more social groups didn’t exist ?

Yes. Chunkier (road) cyclists are a recent thing. 😀

I assume that all you guys were fairly decent cyclists though. Did clubs have rides where fairly unfit, out of shape middle aged folks went bimbling out for a 40 mile coffee and cake stop back in the day?

or has this phenomenon only occurred more recently due to much more ‘novice friendly’ bikes? To clarify I think anyone getting out on their bike is ace no matter how fast they go, but I can’t see those old bikes and their gears holding much appeal to anyone but a fairly fit individual

edit..idlejon answered that in his previous post!

I’m not a super-experienced roadie, but to a certain extent, you’d change cassettes for terrain. If you knew you were doing a particularly hilly ride, you’d swap in a 11-28, if you knew it would be particularly flat, you might go for a 11-21.

Having more sprockets means that’s a bit less of a thing now, but often you’d want smaller gaps if you could – especially for group riding.

but I can’t see those old bikes and their gears holding much appeal to anyone but a fairly fit individual

Even as a reasonably fit individual, I’m done with 11-23 🙂

Did clubs have rides where fairly unfit, out of shape middle aged folks went bimbling out for a 40 mile coffee and cake stop back in the day?

That’s a recent thing, back in the day club runs were mainly die hard cyclists – see RSF, woolen jersies, track mitts and riding in sub zero temps on 17mm slick tubs at 41,000 psi. I know someone who used to fill his water bottle with vinegar as he considered drinking a sign of weakness..

There also didn’t used to be any cafes open on Sundays, that is also a recent thing.

but I can’t see those old bikes and their gears holding much appeal to anyone but a fairly fit individual

But if you’ve grown up on fixed, a few gears is a complete luxury! Riders have it too easy now.

here it is!

Looking back, it’s a wonder how anyone still rides bikes because what we had Back In The Day was *rubbish*!

My first MTB had 1″ of undamped elastomer sprung “suspension” and a low gear of 28:28. 😳
My first road bike had 16 gears, the lowest being 39:23.

And the brakes on both were shockingly bad.

now I appreciate back in the older days roadies were hard as nails, and climbing involved knee ruining cadences, but how did mere mortals cope?

Simple answer is that they didn’t – mere mortals did not ride road bikes. It was genuinely only in the last 15-20 years or so that manufacturers started to make bikes with reasonable gear ratios and the market started catering for “the less fit” with things like Sportives rather than road races. Back in about 2008 / 2009, there were half a dozen Sportives in the UK and they were almost exclusively the preserve of fit racer folks on a weekend off.

By about 2015 / 2016, there were well over 300 Sportives a year. Team Sky had formed, the Olympics, Bradley Wiggins, Tour de France etc – it really opened up the world of road biking to the non-racer.

I’ve recently been lent a 10 year old road bike – reckon it was just over 30years since I rode one and that was a youths:) Since then MTB all the way.

Went out for the first time at weekend on it – my thoughts…

Far more enjoyable than I imagined
You cover a lot of miles in na much shorter space of time
20miles felt the equivalent of a 10mile MTB ride in terms of effort
I didn’t have to clean the bike afterwards
I wasn’t covered in crap
Way less faff than the MTB

However…

Steering and braking at the same time didn’t feel natural
The bars are way too narrow
Going round corners at speed is a much wider arc than I thought – had a few oncoming car issues
Couldn’t get my hands comfy
The much reduced surface are of tyre in contact with the road was an eye-opener
leading to…
The Tiagra rim brakes were terryfying – they didn’t work until they did, then locked up – did not feel in control at all

But – going back to my fist point – really enjoyed it – just need to learn how to ride one

Rode all the Mallorca climbs on 53/39 and 12/28. Was under geared for the steeper ones and grinding up the Puig in 39×28 gets a little tiresome. But I rode them. Big Mig used to grind, I prefer to spin. That said, I ride fixed all year and currently on medium paced club rides (21 mph average) on 49×15 or 88.2″. That’s 53×16 as I tell my coasting geared club mates, and perhaps they could stick in it for the whole ride and not coast! Fixed is in fact easier than you think because there is no dead spot as the wheel’s momentum carries you over the top of the stroke. You can grunt and gurn up some decent slopes here as most are relatively short and sweet. I finished third in the club hill climb a week ago on 49×18. Why 18? it was the largest 1/8″ sprocket I had in the box 😀
Have six fixed wheel bikes. Two are folders, two are track bikes and two are road bikes.

PS The reach on that Dyna-tech is all wrong, brake levers should be near vertical for braking on the drops AND hoods, and hence you might like a shorter stem. Modern bars are more compact and have a shorter reach and smaller drop. I appreciate that changing a quill stem is a pain, but a quill adaptor and a modern stem bat combo makes an old frame feel much nicer to ride. It’s not really about the material.

Back in the day I used to tour and  ride offroad on a road bike with a bottom gear of I think 42 front 28 rear.  Never a fit racing snake .  You just grind uphill until you have to walk.  thats all we had so thats what we rode

Kids today – I dunno – all this multiple low gear nonsense has made ’em go soft.  Bring back national service thats what I say

Not everyone was on a road racing bike. Non racers used randoneur bikes with triples.

@yoshimi

yep they take a little getting use to! I remember my first road bike ride after a few years of taking up mtb again. Felt very odd! got use to it fairly quickly however. 

if you think tiaga rim brakes are bad you should have a go on my tt bike with fancy pants integrated ‘brakes’ and carbon rims. Absolutely terrifying..your’s will be like four pot down hill brakes in comparison!

My dad was an old roadie back in the day and like lots on here had a 39-23 lowest. You grind up things until you cant anymore. And after having a minor cardiac event; if you can; you get off and walk, if you can’t you hope that a club mate can get to the nearest phone box to call 999 before its all too late.

I’m pretty sure that’s how it worked.

Yep – it could get a bit tough. 42×21 was a pretty standard lowest gear and 42×23 for the jessies.

But club rides were mostly a different thing to what they seem to be today. I now see club rides going past full of 50+ year olds. Back then only the very very toughest of the tough in their 2nd half century, with decades of experience and guile could hold on – very little mercy was given. Most older, slower folk went over to audax.

Later, I remember doing my first Fred Whitton on a 53/39 with a 12-25 cassette and thinking I was getting soft. Would not even dream of it now without some sort of dinner plate out the back.

PS The reach on that Dyna-tech is all wrong, brake levers should be near vertical for braking on the drops AND hoods

Quite possibly! I’ve not yet had the chance to ride it due to a back injury so I simply set it up to mirror the position of my other bikes then hung it on the wall for the winter. With brakes set up vertically I doubt I’d even be able to ride the thing tbf, and can’t remember the last time I ever road on the drops anyway!

but i agree they aren’t in the position that they are probably meant to be!

my old road bike (11-25 rear cassette) had a front mech that I rarely used, so seized and got stuck in “top”. I discovered this at the bottom of ditchling beacon on the london to brighton one year, so ground (?) up on a 52:25 (10% average gradient, 14% in spots)

you can actually put out almost as much power at really slow cadence as you can at fast ones – sure 90rpm may be the most efficient, but you’ll still get up nearly any hill when you’ve run out of gears

42×21 was a pretty standard lowest gear and 42×23 for the jessies.

Oh yeah, if you fitted a 12-25 cassette, you’d better have been off to the Alps for some racing. The only other possibility was that you were weak and feeble. 😂

My off road riding began with a lowest gear of 42×28 but if I was riding with my friend who only had 42×24 I’d not use my lowest gear as he said I was cheating😂  30×42 now riding the same bits of the South Downs, can’t imagine how I did it though I suppose being nearly 40 years younger helped.

you can actually put out almost as much power at really slow cadence as you can at fast ones

Completely true. I paced all my climbing at 3.5 W/kilo threshold. It was harder on the legs grinding away but power is force x velocity (of the pedals) which is why your power meter will give you cadence for free as it needs both numbers for power. High force low cadence, low(er) force and high(er) cadence. I averaged a lowly 55-65 rpm on some climbs, whereas I prefer 90-100 normally. Legs hurt more, but you still go up. Fixed, no choice so you just get on with it (See above at the steepest part of the hill), and I am absolutely grinding at that point.

12-25 cassette, you’d better have been off to the Alps for some racing

To be fair, the advantage of 10-speed was that you could keep the 25T on all the time, and the advance of 11-speed was to keep the 28T as well. More gears has made cog choice no longer a consideration. We had compact chain sets too for a while, but have more or less settled on SEMI compact now with an (almost) pro 52T and a bailout inner ring. It’s a decent compromise that I like and missed in Mallorca.

What all this 39 and 42t inner ring rubbish? I started on a 144BCD campag pattern crank running 44/52 and a 13/23 5 speed freewheel… and i’m (just) the right side of 50!

Back in about 2008 / 2009, there were half a dozen Sportives in the UK and they were almost exclusively the preserve of fit racer folks on a weekend off.

Errrr, except we called them Reliabilities, and you could probably do one every saturday and sunday from NYD to probably Easter, ish. And where i was, you could ride to most of them.

I’m hoping to soon collect the first road bike I ever rode, c1983. Belonged to my mates dad, who let me borrow it, and my mate has offered me it now his dad has passed away.

I’m excited and scared at the same time.

I started club riding in the early 80s – chainsets were 52/42 and most ‘proper’ riders road a 13-straight block so 13-19 and wimps rode 13-21. Only ‘tourists’ rode 14-28, the biggest freewheel you could buy. Those that wanted slower-paced rides rode with the CTC. Tyres were super-skinny and you inflated them to the max. Clothing was pretty rubbish, so if it rained you got soaked and your wool/acrylic mix jersey with its over-stuffed pocket would stretch and get hooked on the back of your saddle. Synthetic chamois shorts didn’t exist and if you forgot to apply cream the night before, they’d be like sandpaper.

About 20 years ago, we’d have a regular mid-week ride and would meet John “Woody” Woodburn who was still going strong in his 80s and a proper old-school roadie – he’d ride all day on a single bottle of water and regaled tales of racing in the 50s and 60s. I’d also race and ride with a few ex-pros of the 60s and 70s – ‘nails’ is an understatement.

I had an old Gios bike from 1983 until fairly recently – I went over to Tuscany to ride L’Eroica a few times. The biggest difference was the woeful brakes and the agony from a pair of cleated shoes with toe clips and straps.

I’ve recently been lent a 10 year old road bike

I cracked my ~30 year old road bike out this year, it’s still awesome.

Old road bikes are a bit marmite for me. Not 100% on the aesthetic but nice all the same.

In a similar vein chapman cycles on Instagram does so beautiful work but not my style at all.
But I could watch his videos all day

https://instagram.com/chapmancycles?igshid=MXhnd3FpYXg2bjFzbg==

My road bike frame is around 60 years old.  I have owned it for 40 years.  Lovely bike to ride.

Originally 2×5 campag gears but when they got knackered I single speeded it and rode it like that for a few years.  Now I have got soft and fitted and SA 3spd hub.

Errrr, except we called them Reliabilities, and you could probably do one every saturday and sunday from NYD to probably Easter, ish. And where i was, you could ride to most of them.

Agree but they were still the preserve of the fit racer folk.
No-one else knew they existed!

The current Hell of the Ashdowns sportive is the old Catford CC Reliability Ride until they realised they could market it and charge £40 for the privilege…

We used to do that route fairly regularly – ride out from South London, 100km (except no-one would ever refer to it in km…) around the North Downs / Ashdown, ride back. Then the drag up Anerley Hill to Crystal Palace on a 39:23.

When you’re young and fit you can do anything. Me and a group of friends rode up Hardknott by accident when we were in our twenties on crappy old ‘racer’ bikes. Rucksacks, poorly lubricated chains, unpumped tyres, no preparation and no idea. 

We all made it to the top, grumbling and swearing. None of us could walk much the next day, but we were ok the day after. 

Nowadays I doubt I could  manage it on my best bike with a week to prepare and a support vehicle carrying my gear.  

I bitterly regretted selling what was my first really nice road bike of the mid 1980’s so when one came up on eBay, I snapped it up. That was 3 years, ago and I still haven’t ridden it. Old bikes are well, just old. New road bikes are ace.

This is mine:

I did hardknott a few years back using a 36/30 gearing. I was on the easiest gear from about 20 yards in and it’s the only time on a road bike I’ve ever thought ‘I’m not going to make this without pushing!’

what I also distinctly remember is looking down at my garmin at one particularly steep point, seeing I was putting out over 5w/kg, and thinking to myself if I was going any slower I’d literally be stationary 

I made it up in one piece, just, but respect to anyone that could do that climb on an old school bike, because I certainly couldn’t. 

not even close..

My understanding is that there was a era of mass cycling participation. There were clubs that were social and people did long well paced rides. There would be a road captain who judged the pace. They would make the call for everyone to walk on hills over a certain gradient. I remember my wife telling me in the 90s that a school cleaner told me that the club she’d ridden with in her youth would ride from what is now Milton Keynes to the south coast and back in a day. This all ended with mass car ownership

Much like @dovebiker I was club riding/racing in the early 80’s actually started in 1979

52/42 with a 13-19 was standard though as a junior you were limited to a 72″ top gear IIRC?

I shudder to think of many of the 100 mile ride we would do in slushy conditions with fingerless mitts and shite clothes.

I don’t remember any cafe pootles as it was on the rivet every ride. The only slightly more social paced stuff I did was Audax but then the distances were much longer.

Lord knows why I stuck at it as cross country, my other sport seemed much easier!

Then I moved to the Peak District. Those gears. Those brakes. F***-quitefrankly-that.

Yup!

Just ditched my rim brakes and 36/28 and couldn’t be happier riding Peak, Dales and Lakes!

Increased my discs to 160 from 140 and put a 34 tooth cassette on my 12 speed.  I certainly don’t find worse brakes and harder hills more fun!

My understanding is that there was a era of mass cycling participation. There were clubs that were social and people did long well paced rides. There would be a road captain who judged the pace. They would make the call for everyone to walk on hills over a certain gradient

Before my time!

However, some clubs still have road captains who get upset if anyone rides more than 0.0001 mph above or below designated pace 😉

would ride from what is now Milton Keynes to the south coast and back in a day.

232 miles round trip, say at modern Audax pace of 25 km/h that’s 373 / 25 = 15 hours without any stops of punctures, so probably nearer 20 hours all in given they’ll have had punctures, gone slower and stopped multiple times.

I suspect they might have done it once near mid summers day, set off before dawn and just made it back after dusk…

I’ve never been a roadie but back in the day I got hold of touring bike gears and put them on my brothers old racer with cowhorn handlebars to make a frankenbike we called a tracker which got me around the trails of Teesside before proper mountain bikes came along. 5 speed screw on freewheel was a Shimano 14-32 and the usual derailleurs we had were plastic bodied Simplex or Huret, but the fancy bike shop managed to come up with a Suntour GT at great expense for paper round money. I suppose I should clean it up a bit.

42/52 and a 13-18 6 speed block. 130 miles in the Peak District? Winnats Pass etc? Just got on with it, being young, thin and fittish.

Winter was a 42/18 fixed, cider in the bottle stopped it freezing.

Thank God bikes are better, and my pride is non existent (compact chainset, 11-25 cassette, flipped and very slightly shorter stem) to compensate for age, asthma, bulk and a lack of saddle time.