You Know Your Old When..

I was talkng to Lauren "The Lick" Lichtenaeur on Wednesday night, and realized something very painful. I am no longer what anyone would mistake for young. Old people don't even call me "young man" anymore...and why? Because I am NOT. So as Lauren and I were joking around, I made an A-Team reference. You know, something like "I ain't gettin' on no plane, Hannibal!" Falling on 21 year old ears, the joke began to flop wildly on the floor as I realized she had no damn idea what the hell my crusty ass was talking about. "You see, B.A. was afraid of flying, but because many of the episods involved just that, that's what he said right before they drugged him and threw him on a plane!" It's not funny if you have to explain it, and even equally as NOT funny when it wasn't funny to begin with. The trifecta comes when it comes from me....the old unfunny guy who explains the jokes.
I bought my first mountain bike in 1986, and it was a sweet Mongoose polished chromo job that had GIANT moto-style mountain brake levers. These things were so large, they appeared to have been taken off of a 70's dirt bike. The stem was a quill type with a GIGANTIC v-brace thing that had about 42 lbs of aluminum in it. No suspension, a first generation tire that was just way too hard to describe with any clarity, and drilled out wheels to "save weight." The canti brakes were crazy-bad, and had foam grips and friction shifters. Most guys I meet don't even know what that is or was. I explain it as a more dependable version of a SRAM twist shifter without the indexing...and faster. The bike was sweet, and actually still in working order in my mom's garage back home. No linear-pull anything, no disc brakes, no sticky-rubber, just a few gears and no helmet. HEY, it was 1986, and I was freshman. Freshman didn't wear helmets then. We wore big hair, because that's what the guys from Whitesnake and Firehouse wore.

My first real dirt ride was on San Juan Trail in the Ortega Mountains. I went with some friends and an original member of the RADS. He rode in cut-of khakis and flip flops on the sweetest old Fat Chance I had ever seen. It too had no suspension or decent brakes, but he rocked that bike. From that day on I was hooked. Flash ahead to the current trends, and a 3" travel full suspension bike isn't even used for XC anymore, and my old CONEJO AP/5 had 4.5" in 1995, and that was HUGE DH TRAVEL. It's no wonder that guys like Bert and Jim Roff are such great technical riders, they both had to ride that crap before 10" of travel and 8" hydraulic discs! So, seeing the current crop of riders come up, it's amazing to watch how quickly they go from novice to plain bad-ass. Back in the the Pre-Cambrian period, we broke a lot of crap and lugged some heavy ass equipment through those mountains, but it IS nice when my old ass plows through a rock garden on my TOMAC hardtail, while a guy on a new full suspension carbon 25lb trailbike has to walk it.


I just hope I don't fall. Broken hips are hard to recover from, and if I lose my false teeth in the woods, I'm screwed....