2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

It turns out that Orwell was far too optimistic.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Not really worthy after looking at the other photos.

Walking near the tracks in Redding, California and the signal for the train started clanging. I had a few seconds to fish out my point and shoot and click it once as the train roared by at 100 kph. Couldn’t have done any better with it on a tripod.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

As an American I feel as though I’m playing dee-fense here. Not your damned defence. Defence is what keeps de cattle in de corral.

What’s with using the letter “y” when “i” is indicated?

Why do they call whatever it is that you speak “English?” We speak it in a way that anyone can understand it.

All righty then, good to go.

BTW, “heads up” is a baseball term dating back a century or more. Means look up, a baseball is coming down somewhere very soon, i.e. be alert. “Step up to the plate,” obviously a baseball term, is a euphemism for accepting a challenge that has consequences for others.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Charlie, is that you at 6m10s with the coffee?

Orange jacket is me.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

I move pianos for a living. Wish I could help you, but I’m stuck here in California.

Here we are moving a 7 foot Steinway in about seven minutes. Uprights move quicker. Sorry about making it look so easy.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

If God forgives Phelps, I don’t have much to worry about.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

If he’s not busy shifting pianos.

Spent the day doing just that. The odd thing is, the fun part of the job is moving pianos. The part I hate is answering the phone, doing the paperwork and dealing with the bills, i.e. everything else. My crew and I are very good at what we do. I don’t know how many people my age get to hear anyone tell them, “You’re amazing.” I hear it several times a week.

Everyone tells us how easy we make it look, grand piano, flight of stairs. Standard response is that it’s our first day, but we watched it on YouTube.

Wait. We ARE on YouTube.

.

Seven foot Steinway, seven minutes to leave with it.

Piano moving pays pretty well, especially since I rarely work eight hours in a day.

But.

When the book comes out, I am doing something else. Anybody can move pianos. I want to sign books and travel and give speeches and get taken on cool rides on everyone else’s trails while I can still ride a bike. Which is pretty much the life my old mate Gery Fisher has.

I think the story is worthy of a film similar to Lords of Dogtown, with one major difference, none of the mountain bikers is serving a life sentence. A lot more people ride mountain bikes than skate vertical.

My friends and I had one of the greatest bike adventures in the history of bike adventures, although I will concede to Thomas Stevens, who made the first globe circling bike ride, and did it on a penny-farthing, before roads were invented.

I’m the only one who wrote down what we did while we were doing it, and finally it turned out to be a good idea.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

“Dibs” is universal. It was in place when I was a schoolchild in California, and I am now 68 years young.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

I wrote the first set of rules for mountain biking in 1983. I had recently attended the national cyclocross championships, where some guys just showed up with a bike, while the reigning champion showed up with a half dozen bikes and a crew to match. He used different bikes for different conditions on the course, with his crew shuttling bikes back to the pickup points. The unsupported riders didn’t have a chance against this degree of organization. It was more a demonstration than a competition.

I wanted to level the field for mountain bikers, so an amateur rider had the same chance as he factory rider once the race was on.

So… No support on the course. If your bike breaks, repair it yourself or walk. That’s what REAL mountain biking is like.

Road racing has all kinds of rules restricting what the bike can be, but I wanted to encourage innovation, so my “equipment rule” was that a bike in a MTB race must have a working brake. Otherwise, if it rolls, you can race it.

Those were the two rules for riders: no mechanical support, and your bike must have a brake. All the other rules in the initial package had to do with the promoter’s responsibility to the riders, e.g. course marking, settlement of disputes, etc.

The rules were simple enough that someone had to mess with them

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

I’ve been wearing the same size Levis 501 button fly for about 45 years. The quality has gone down in that time, but I know my size and they fit the way that may no longer be stylish, but is at least familiar.

Kids these days wear jeans with the crotch so low you can’t ride a bike in them. That would be a problem for me.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

In 1987 I attended the first attempt at a mountain bike race on the Iditarod trail.

It didn’t go smoothly.

I couple of years after I wrote this piece, I camped in the Iditarod dog team camp with the teams. Coldest night outside EVERRRRR.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Wasn’t there a two wheel drive bike a few years ago – think maybe just the front wheel was shaft driven with the back a normal chain, but not sure.

Scroll to the bottom.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Does this open on Marin County for everybody, or does it already know where I live? Eerie.

They used a pretty long article by me. I shouldn’t really have to buy it.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

repack rider – just out of interest what role did Marin bikes play in he early mtb scene? Were they linked to the Marin klunker scene?

None, really. Founder Bob Buckley lived a couple of miles from the mountain bike epicenter and was himself an avid cyclist, but his business as I understand it, was importing jewelry made in Asia. By the mid-eighties it was already clear where the US market was headed, and every bike company had an off-road model or twenty.

Using his manufacturing contacts in Taiwan, Buckley had bikes made that were, like every other mountain bike of the era, a knock off of the Ritchey MountainBike. He struck gold by associating the name of his company with the Mecca of the sport, and his staff are themselves local Marin riders all grown up now after thirty years in the business.

In the end, they made some nice bikes, and there is nothing wrong with that.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

I hope you bought him a copy then!

Not sold on this side. I only saw a copy because a UK rider sent one to my friend.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

I see I made the cover, but my mate more deserving of the honor, Joe Breeze, did not.

Odd.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

I see a lot of the regular touristy diversions listed above. It’s hard to get bad Mexican food in California. Haggis is harder to find.

The bikes for hire in SF that you can ride across the bridge for the ferry ride back, are as ordinary as bikes can get. The maps are also terrible. Still, it’s hugely popular, and a drive across the GG Bridge on a sunny weekend will see several dozen inept riders on the bridge at any given time.

If you get a chance, Fairfax is 20 miles north of the bridge. It’s Ground Zero for mountain biking, the site of the first races that started the sport, a town monument to mountain biking, a bicycle museum, two mountain biker pubs, and private singletrack, with a DH pump track at the Tamarancho Boy Scout camp. If your timing is right, you might hit on the weekend when one of the bike demo trailers arrives. Otherwise, hire a bike at one of several local shops.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

I have known John literally since he first broke into mountain biking. I saw him a few days ago at the US bicycle trade show, Interbike, and I got him to sign the photo of him in his first MTB race, which ran in a 1986 copy of my magazine, the Fat Tire Flyer.

The bike in the photo is a Mongoose 24″ BMX bike converted to a mountain bike by wedging 26″ wheels into it and adding caliper brakes. John’s inscription reads, “Charlie, this is my first Mt. Bike!”

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2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Here are a couple of images of the building that will house the HoF.

Crested Butte is a wonderful mountain bike town, but it is isolated and inaccessible to most of the country. Deep snow cancels cycling for a third of the year. The HoF was housed in an embarrassingly small facility and the town didn’t seem to care that it was there.

Thousands of bicyclists visit Fairfax every week, both road and off-road, and millions of people live within fifty km. A town of 7500 souls, Fairfax sports two mountain bike pubs, two huge bike shops and a little one, and a public monument to mountain biking. Private singletrack is close to town. The Golden Gate Bridge is 25 km away; you can ride a bike from San Francisco to Fairfax in a little over an hour, and plenty of people do.

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2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Of course I have a couple. Sold all but one of my half-dozen or so early Ritcheys. I have my custom built 1983 Ritchey Annapurna, just about the nicest MTB you could buy that year. My 1994 P-21 is now my town bike, with 1.5″ slicks. My 1978 Breezer is in a museum.

The bikes I actually ride off road are modern FS 29ers.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Let me know when you’re coming. Yesterday a friend and I guided an English rider from London around a few local trails. Met him on another UK site.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Dropping in late here, but…

Length of the marriage is in inverse ratio to the expense. We got married 27 years ago at the courthouse for the filing fee. Took about fifteen minutes. We swore to a bureaucrat that we would be trustworthy, loyal, faithful, etc. Essentially the Boy Scout pledge.

Then we spent a bunch of money on a party.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

The one I’m in, of course.

”Klunkerz”

Hi Bill.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

I see the Boulder already got on this list. Here are some more shots of that bike, as well as the 1985 “Descender” suspension system by Brian Skinner.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

rode over golden gate bridge and despite intending to go straight back and around the park and streets I just headed off into the distance of Marin County,

I can tell from your photos that you rode across the Marin Headlands to Muir Beach. I applaud your ambition, a real ride on a bogus bike.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Apps read about the Ritchey mountain bike in the February 1980 BMX Plus and contacted with Gary Fisher and Charlie Kelly at the MountainBike Company in Fairfax, California. Apps told them about the off-road bicycles he had built and of large diameter 650Bx54 and 700Cx47 Nokia Hakkapeliitta snow tires that were made in Finland. In December 2006, Fisher said: “We got some tires from Geoff Apps really early on and we said ‘Holy Toledo!’” But poor supply meant the fledgling MTB industry stuck with the smaller wheels

.

Gary and I were selling everything we could put together that looked like a bicycle. We were dependent on other manufacturers to supply wheels and tyres, and we worked with what we had, which was 26″. The bike industry now has thousands of experimenters and a wild variety of products, but in 1982 all anyone wanted to do was copy the Ritchey/MountainBikes design.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Here’s a picture of a road that used to be part of my local loop.

Don’t tell me it aint nice…don’t tell me you don’t fancy a blast along it…

Panoramic Highway on top of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. Used for car commercial shoots all the time. Great road, stiff climb to get to it.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Been there, done that. Now I ride a FS 29er.

Sometimes people ask me whether I kept any of my original klunkers. Nope. Broke them all and never looked back.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Lived here for 66 years.

I’m thinking about staying.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

This one’s not on me. Thank the Lord.

I move pianos. A few years ago I got a call to come out to a house and move one. As I drove up the address I had been given, I realized that it was about the fanciest residence I had ever seen.

Went inside to move the piano, and there were the residents, Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf! Andre was wearing a warmup suit with the logo “New York Tennis Club.” That was a big surprise, but I maintained my professional demeanor. In my business I meet rock stars all the time.

As Andre walked with us around the grounds to show us where to put the piano, my employee said to him, “Did anyone ever tell you that you look just like Andre Agassi?

After finding out that he was in fact Andre, my employee said something only slightly less dumb. “Did you ever play Pete Sampras?”

Answer, “Sure. We played (XX) times. He never beat me on clay and I never beat him on grass. Would you like to know the score of every match?”

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

I published the first mountain bike magazine. I wrote most of it also.

I took a creative writing course decades ago. The instructor favoured me because I actually had been published, and because most of the others didn’t have a prayer of ever being published.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

And keep 30 minutes free at SFO, as there is an excellent mountain biking exhibition between check-in and Passport Control.

Here’s a link to the San Francisco Airport Museum page about the exhibit.

You’ve got to go and do Repack hill. Just because…

It’s essentially just over the other side of the bridge from San Fran. I was lucky enough to ride down it with Repackrider. Top guy.

I had some health issues that kept me off the bike for the last two months. Back on this week, but SLOOOOW. I didn’t spend much time on bike sites when I couldn’t think about riding.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Saw this cyclist the other day in Eugene, Oregon while I attended a graduation. How often do you see a rider without a helmet any more?

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Should have let me know you were here. I know all the trails.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

McM,

Will you be stopping by before you get on the train?

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Can’t get to Mendo without getting pretty close to where I am. Will you be stopping by?