Shit fixie skidders say...

I'm sure I'm late to the party with this film...but it brought back so many great memories for me.
There are both upsides and downsides to anything 'new' suddenly blowing up into something mainstream. Having been a 'mountain biker' since pretty much day one in the UK I have seen it go from something only a few people knew about, to pretty much the biggest cycling 'market' in the world. In many ways it's a good thing, because the bikes are infinitely 'better' than they were back then...but as someone who has gone through practically every new invention to ever appear in the off road world, I realised a long time ago that the more 'comfortable' and the 'easier' the technology made it to ride off road, the less I started to enjoy myself. I think I reached a place where that original feeling of struggling over and through terrain, and being bounced around all over the place was what I was missing from the early days. It began to lose its 'innocence' for me...which is probably why I haven't used suspension in over 20 years for anything except a few years of pure downhill, and have ridden fully rigid and single-speed off road for pretty much the whole of the last 2 decades.
Whatever type of 'mountain bike' you ride these days, hopefully this film will bring back some great memories for you too...and if you're not an old fucker like me, maybe it will show you where it all started. Enjoy! 😍

lolz

I am ancient, unfit and 9kg over my racing weight and can still puke my way up the 25% climb a mile away on 39×25. On the basis that he is certainly younger than me and is riding a much lighter bike, what the fuck is his problem? About 10 years ago I rode the Croix de Fer, Telegraphe and Galibier in a day on 39x25, sure, it hurt.

source pls

https://www.lfgss.com/comments/15222774/

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It's a fair cop guvnor! In mitigation, it was a 1 am drunken rant.

It was a good rant though.

That thread could be a goldmine!

As a keen 13/14 year old, all we had was 42/52 chainrings and 13 to 21 blocks on our summer bikes which even at the light end of the scale were about 12kg. I was riding all over the west country on those gears and rarely if ever had to walk a hill....

Should've known that the maximum gear allowed to juniors was about 50x15 when God and I were both boys.

Don't understand why people with a Gangsta try and make it not a Gangsta.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scILa5iPBcg

Like singlespeeders, fixers hanker after lost simplicity. But, while singlespeeders generally look back no further than the beginnings of mountainbiking, fixers claim descent from a slew of older groups, some of them half-forgotten: scorchers, cyclocrossers, pass stormers...

Wound Up forks withstand fatigue heroically

You were definitely one with the bike with that!

Oh, weird not having Di2 and hydraulic discs. Having to manually trim your front derailleur is weird.

So I managed to pick myself up a 2017 Fuji Track from Ebay. Arriving Monday and am fizzing ... It looks like the attached photo. I want to change the handlebars to some risers and I also prefer the more vintage looking stems, attached another photo with what I mean. Are these known as quill stems?

@BareNecessities @ColinTheBald

Yay! I made in here :-)
The max gear limit was only applicable for a road race. All us young 'uns had to go through bike inspection where they'd roll your bike between two lines and wind your rear mech in so you couldn't get the bigger gears. I'm sure it was all done to save our knees!
Private riding or time trials you were allowed to ride whatever you wanted.

Hah. This is also Golf club material

They [different versions of the same Al bike] all feel stiff but the 12 really felt like it transferred that stiffness into forward motion rather than vertical into the saddle

I guess I was ahead of the curve again, having not used anything with a freewheel since 2018

10/10

Haha

Going to miss overtaking the carbon bike boy in Richmond park on my commuter to work with my basket on the front 🤣

The speeds are typically lower and I find it much easier to slow down off road as skid stopping digs in more combined with naturally slowing down more quickly due to increase rolling resistance.