HAMMER MAN

i have been riding a road bike since 1976. I started riding to recover from injuries when i served in the USMC during Vietnam....I have been riding ever since..Wow a long time and still enjoy ever ride

wrr1020

1 to 2 year vote for me. Started riding April 2010, i've always loved bikes and wanted a road bike for awhile so i went ahead and finally bought one. Thousands of miles later its one of the best decisions i've ever made, as far as exercising goes.

Machka 

Before you know it, you've been cycling for years!


In two years, I will have cycled regularly for as long as I just cycled occasionally or not at all ... cycling half my life!!

jdom

This is year 11,I started in the spring of 2001 just before I found out I got type 1 diabetes.Been doing it since just to prove the doctor wrong when he said I can't do long rides anymore.Back then a long ride was 40-50 miles.Now I'm thinking about Brevets,but unfortunately this has been a bad year.Been working all summer.

efrobert

Id say about 5 years. I've been riding forever. I used to commute to work on my Bridgstone MTB bike back in the mid 90's. I did a couple of sprint triathlons in the 90's also, but it wasn't until I decided to move to Colorado that I became a serious cyclist, I was more of a recreational rider before that.

Cyclogenesis

Seriously Since 2007, I moved to Melbourne, Australia to start a job which required a physical.. Blood pressure was 150/110... Got told: get into shape or die. Tried diet alone, the kgs came off but BP stayed high... started commuting and then Mountain Biking (a few races and involved in a regular dirt crit series)... Now contemplating my first century ride... How serious am I? Well I dont race at the moment but I get very antsy if I am off my bike for to long... A day is not right if it is not started by putting some km into the legs...

DEK

Don't know that I can put a specific number of years on this. I've been riding "seriously" off-and-on (probably more off) my whole life. I tend to go thru periods where I will ride for a few years solid then, for whatever reason, stop riding for extended periods. I started riding again this year after not having ridden for over 4 years. I also bought a new Felt Z85 this year after having ridden my early '70s Motobecane Grand Record for most of my life.

I do love riding and now that I live in Florida, I can ride year round. But moving to FL has also caused my biggest issue - I don't have a riding partner anymore as my best friend is back in Chicago. He and I would ride 3-4 times a week together. As of now, I haven't found anyone that I can coordinate schedules with in my area. So, for now, I'm a lone rider.

patentcad

You're all friggin newbies to your Uncle Pcad. When I started riding every day clipless pedals were the absolute cutting edge. Then STI comes alone c. 1991 or so. Of course by 1992 I had it on my bike.

I'm an Early Adopter.

patentcad

Fixed for Bike Industry Accuracy.

Machka 

Actually yes ... it was asked back in 2005, probably around the time you joined BF.

But in 6 years, it appears we've got at least 60 new cyclists.

big chainring 

40 years. First ten speed when I was 13yrs old. Started racing at 15. Riding ever since. My bikes havent changed much either. Still like riding French bikes from the 70's.

SoonerBent

About 41 years. In 70 or so it started to be that if you found me you also found my bike. In 72 a couple of teachers that raced got me and a couple of my buddies to start racing. Got tired of racing and started doing t-shirt rides instead. All over OK, TX, AR, MO, CO, KS, NM. I've worn out or given away more ride t-shirts than I could count and I still have a closet full. Over the years I have taken a couple of year long breaks but I'll never stop being a cyclist.

MrTuner1970

Have been road riding since the fall of 2007. Started riding my entry-level mountain bike on our gravel roads in spring 2007. Liked it so much that I thought I'd enjoy road riding. Got a good used bike, and was immediately hooked. I was so dumb then that I was riding in regular shorts wearing briefs. And didn't know how to stand to climb. Still had a blast. Have since learned the benefit of good shorts, and have greatly upped the annual miles. Now I love hills!

Cycling is definitely my drug of choice!

z90

Seriously? I'm not sure I've ever taken anything seriously!
But...
As a commuter, at least 27 years.
As a "roadie" participating in group rides, about 3 years.

z90

Also did some mountain biking way back when, old school, no suspension fork.

Kimmo 

Built my first wheelset in 1985, IIRC... I'm 36.

I remember being about 5 or 6 and being just absolutely fascinated by some 70s ten-speed in a holiday house... I didn't learn to ride till I was 8, and anyway, it was miles too big for me, but I felt irresistibly drawn to this machine all the same. I wanted to ride it bad. I could see how it worked; what to many adults is somehow mysterious was crystal clear to me as a kid just by looking - its function is laid bare by its form. I mean, how can you not know how a bike works? It's so beautifully elegant and simple. The road bike kinda seems like a sort of animal to me, that's evolved via engineering progress rather than DNA and natural selection... I guess because it's part of a super-animal.

All machines are like extensions of ourselves, but rarely is a machine such a definite part, and so transforms the abilities, of one's body. There's powered transport, but the extra complexity has downsides that detract from the deal. It's such a pure thing. I'm absolutely positive alien equivalents have, do, and will exist elsewhere in the Universe. It seems to me that making road bikes is one of the best uses we can put engineering to. The task of building a quality road bike should be a thing of joy for any man, and I'm so very glad that during my lifetime, the engineering of road bikes is approaching exquisite perfection.

But my first bike was a BMX, and the next one too, which I stayed on till it was pinched when I was 17. Bought a cheap MTB, and wondered why I'd stuck with a little BMX so long, but I got sick of the unwieldy heft pretty quick and bought a $50 ten-speed with the turkey wings and stem shifters.
...Hello, speed. Within a couple of weeks I trashed the bike... having gotten such a taste for speed, I'd quickly noticed the narrow bars allowed me to hang onto trucks... yeah, a bit on the dangerous side.

Anyway, my bike enthusiasm had gotten a real second wind now that I'd finally seen the light and realised the road bike is the general-purpose design, and all others are specialisations. I went and coughed up $120 for a better 27" machine with indexed DT shifters and toeclips, and that was it. Very soon I was buying bike mags, and a year or two later I'd built up my barely-decent beater into a carbon beast with Ergo... it still had the crappy Sakae crank arms I started with when it too was pinched a few years later. Got another carbon weapon happening a few years ago, but that got pinched within a year. I don't like bike thieves...

Currently rocking what would've been a fairly sweet ride 20 years ago; radiused ally wearing a 600 STI group, but at 9.5kg it's old hat. A close friend just died, which was obviously a major bummer, but the silver lining is he put me in his will... gee, he was a top bloke. So anyway, now I get to look forward to living my fantasy of building up an extra sweet whip from the latest and greatest kit... I'm creaming my pants for some of that monocoque, BB30, threadless, hiddenset, 31.8, maybe Ui2, action.

I swear, I could hang such a bike on the wall, and get just as much pleasure from staring at it as riding it. Such ****ing sweet machinery as can be had these days...

*spoot*

bobbycorno

I'm one of those who never stopped riding - when I was 8 (49 years ago now), some of the neighborhood kids decided it was time for Scotty to learn how to ride. So they put me on a bike and gave me a push, and I'm still going. I got "serious" about it in college (1973, IIRC), buying my first "good" bike - a Jeunet 630 with full 531 db tubing, TA cranks, Simplex (plastic) derailleurs, MAFAC brakes, and SEWUP TIRES!! for the princely sum of $250. Raced USCF cat 4, 3 and Masters (both road and track) for 15 years and finally got that out of my system. I've mountain biked (since before there were mountain bikes), rando'ed, done multi-day tours and still commute regularly (which I've done pretty much constantly since the 70's). Currently I've got a mountain bike (Trek Fuel 90), a road bike (Gunnar Roadie), a rando/commuter ('84 Trek 610, tho' nobody'd recognize it), a recumbent (Performer Agenda semi-low), and a couple of projects, including my last race bike: an Eisentraut Rainbow that got creamed 10 years ago by a pickup truck making an "improper right turn" and I AM going to get it fixed one of these days. I ride 'em all except the project bikes. I guess you could say I was born to ride a bike, and I intend to keep on as long as I'm able. Which should be a few more decades.

SP
Bend, OR

bobbycorno

Pssshhht. Poser!
Clipless hadn't even been IMAGINED when I started back in the early 70's. And I was the first one in Corvallis to have a 13t high cog on my race bike. And yeah, intervals consisted of fleeing the local sabertooths...

SP
BEnd, OR

Reynolds 

I commuted almost daily for about 30 years, but started to take cycling seriously and train in '96, at 45 yrs old. From 2003, when I started recording, I've done more than 120,000 kms. Ironically, when I was young hated sports.

surgeonstone

I have been seriously in love with cycling since 1971. I can not imagine life without it, it sustains me.

abikemechanic

started in the spring by commuting to work for the summer because I couldn't afford gas and that was all it took to get me seriously riding. It also helped that I was working in a bike shop. I recently picked up my first road bike, a madone 4.5.

Juan Foote

Hard to say. As an adult, I have ridden seriously quite a few different stages of my life, but commonly with breaks that I didn't even look at a bike. My childhood riding drifted into "serious recreational" riding well into my 20's. For several years later a bicycle was my only transportation. I didn't ride for the next 10 years or so more than a very light neighborhood spin, or doing wheelies up and down the street on my old fixed frame MTB. I started riding seriously again a bit over a year ago as a type of physical and mental therapy for myself. I took some time off to heal from some fit issues and am just now getting started again. I could say all of my life of 40 years, with some extended breaks inbetween.

fishymamba

Since last September. I am only 15 so I think I am gonna stick with this for a while. Cycling is the only sport that I have ever enjoyed. Soccer was OK, Tennis was absolute crap, but cycling is just really enjoyable for me.

AlexZ

Ha! You're just a loud aging kid! Try 60 years! Well, really seriously....maybe 55 years.
Early adopter he sais! Ha! I remember nailing my clips onto what looked like hard ballerina shoes! Clipless weren't even a vague idea yet!

LAriverRat

Seriously? 1963, got a speeding ticket on my red 10 speed going 35 mph(paced by the squad car). I was 18. 46 year break.

2009 surgery to rebuild my rear end. Before surgery drug out my daughters mountain bike and started riding to lose weight, lower BP. Started to like it. After surgery(OUCH!), but still unable to sit very well, bought a road bike(Free Spirit, did not know any better). On the way home picked up a 89 Bianchi super sport in my size for $25.00 at a yard sale. Started to ride further and further and still liked it. Rode the bike more than i drove my car in 2010. Still get excited about riding.
Getting better and faster.