Mybike-stephpeters

How I Came To Enjoy Cycling
I got my first bike as a 20th birthday present. Boyfriend (now husband) bought it for my birthday/Christmas present, to cycle 5 miles each way to university. It's a Raleigh, single chain ring, downtube gears, with a cross bar and drops. I don't think he realised I'd only ever ridden my sister's shopper bike twice. I worked out how to mount a bike with a cross bar, got going OK, went to the end of the road, discovered I didn't know how to stop so fell off. Learning to ride it wasn't really helped by the frame being too large - I was then only 4' 11.5" with short legs. (I've grown a whole inch since then.) When I stand straddling the cross bar, I can only put both feet flat on the floor when it has a puncture - air in the tyres means one foot with heel off the floor. There was a really fun week early on in its career, when I'd got the hang of going up through the gears but couldn't change down, so DH had to ride it round the block every night to change gear for me. It did good service for 2 years of daily commuting and the odd weekend ride, but when I left university it got put away, and then given to a friend's teenage daughter. In the early 90's DH was working in Munich a lot, but never had time to see any of Germany, so we decided to have a holiday in Bavaria and the most interesting offer was a softies bike tour. The Raleigh was retrieved from the daughter, who was now a 20 something with a car, given a new chain and I got back on it. Oh the agony, after half a mile down the railway track and back my bum hurt like hell. But the holiday was booked, so I kept at it and got sort of a little bit fit for the first time in more than 10 years. The holiday was good fun, and not too strenuous even though some of it was in the Alps. So for Christmas/birthday that year I got a Specialised Rockhopper MTB. This was a revelation - a bike that fitted (or so I thought). I started going to the gym to get stronger to ride more and got fitter and thinner. I joined the local CTC group and got hooked on road riding, so the knobblies were permanently ditched for slicks. And I started hankering after a road bike. Tried a few smallest frame sizes in shops, but a traditional diamond frame on 700C tyres is just too tall for me to straddle the cross bar, and I didn't want a mixte frame. So, for Christmas/birthday, I was permitted to order a frame from Malc Cowle, which is a slightly skewed diamond to lower the top bar. This was built up by the bike shop with my choice of bits, and oh the joy of a frame that *really* fits. The best bit is not having to reach too far forward for the handlebars. As I'm crap at hills but hate walking up them it has ridiculously low gears; I went up Alderley Edge in bottom gear riding at 3.5 mph last Sunday. Did 3 CTC centuries on this in 1994. In 95 for a 6 month tour in New Zealand/Thailand/Malaysia/Indonesia/Ireland I decided to treat myself to a Kona Lava Dome, retrofitted with some lower tech choices so that I could fix it myself if things went wrong when I was in places hundreds of miles from the nearest bike shop. Ironically the this is the only bike that I ever bought for myself and is the only one that ever got stolen, after I got back. The Rockhopper had been sold to the friend whose daughter had the Raleigh for a bit, but she didn't use it so I bought it back again. I more or less gave up cycling apart from the 0.7 mile commute to work, resulting in getting very unfit and putting on all the weight I'd lost when I took up cycling. But this year we're going cycling in Germany again, so we're out every weekend again and daily mileage is steadily increasing. 6 weeks ago a Sunday afternoon ride of 8 miles exhausted me; today I nipped out to a shop in my lunch hour thinking of 8 miles as going for a little spin. I'm not back to doing centuries again, and may never be, but I'm improving and it's fun. So the current stable is Raleigh with 2 flat tyres in cellar, Rockhopper with slicks used for daily commute, and the Malc Cowle comes out at weekends. Steph Peters