When did you start cycling? (Page 2)

My only fear when I got my first road bike (3 years ago) was those skinny tires! I always road BMX as a kid and a little MTB as an adult and they have fat tires.

While I'm not a good swimmer I have never feared open water like so many do. When I was a kid I used to jump off cliffs at the quarry near my house (filled with water) and swim to the only exit out. Maybe I was just too dumb to be afraid

It's so interesting to me to see how our experiences througout our lives shape our futures.

I got my 1st road bike after 25 years of Mtn Bike, and totally understand the anxiety thing.  higher speeds, acute responsiveness, traffic, road hazards, road hazards at high speed, etc...

Grew up in the 60s and 70s touring the neighborhood by bike, going to the library and downtown, un-supervised.

Went to a college with a huge bike network, and community too.

And I've wrecked off an Mtn Bike more times than I care to recall, and I remember all the big ones vividly.  Always got right back on...

Before there was the bike, there was the trike.

I think I was 3 when I was riding the trike. When I was 4, we moved to a house that was at the top of a dead-end street up a hill. The hill was, I kid you not, about a 40^o incline. As the movers were still unpacking our belongings, my sister thought it would be fun to ride down this hill, she on our oldest sister's 10speed and me on the trike. This street went straight down about 140 meters and at the bottom it turned to the right 90 degrees.

The 10speed's brakes had not been hooked up yet, but my sister knew nothing of brake setup. She jumped on the bike, I jumped on the trike. About 10 seconds into this ride downhill, I lost control of the pedals, they were turning so fast. I had to put my feet out to the side and just hold on for dear life. Seriously. My sister shot way ahead of me, having no brakes to slow her descent down the hill. She just accelerated straight down the street. By the time I got to the bottom of the street, she was lying in the grass and unconscious. She had ridden straight into the curb and flew over the handlebars when the tire hit the curb. I thought she was dead because she wasn't responding to me yelling at her. I ran to the nearest house shouting "My sister is dead! My sister is dead!"  The lady who lived in the house at the bottom of this street drove my mother and sister to the hospital. Turns out, she was not dead but she did break her collar bone.

I graduated to my very own fixie when I was around 6, rode that to the pool all the time (1.4 miles away and included a  climb of 69 ft over a .44 mile distance).

When I was 13, I was riding my dad's Schwinn. It was a bit big, obviously, and I really had to reach forward to reach the brakes.

When I was 15, I got my own 10 speed which I rode everywhere, including on a busy main street (actually, a 4 lane highway that has since been converted to 6lanes) in Tampa which led me to my best friend's house 3 miles away.

When I got married, my (then) husband bought me a Fuji cross-towner for a wedding present and we would go on leisurely rides together, over to Bayshore and back. A few years later he convinced me to buy a mountain bike and we started riding the Florida trails together. I didn't return to a road bike until I got into triathlons 4 years ago.

I love bikes. Someday, I will own a beautiful Litespeed roadie.

(Coolest of all - BT's routing feature which allowed me to look at the AFB in Panama where I grew up, and measure these distances.)