I Invented Mountain Biking

OK, so many people believe that mountain biking began when those dudes in California, like Joe Breeze and co., started putting fat tires on their regular bikes in the early 70's and taking to the mountain trails. But often when I pick up a new bike magazine, there's some article about how some person is the 'real' father of mountain biking, cuz they were riding dirt trails on their bikes way before that. But if you think about it, the first bicycle ever made (in the 1800's?) was a mountain bike, since dirt roads and trails were all they had then.

In any case, the term 'mountain bike' is somewhat of a misnomer anyways, since you don't need a mountain to ride trails.

But in the early 70's I too was a pioneer of 'mountain biking'. It was around that time when myself and my childhood friend Andreas, dumped our choppered out Stingrays (which were getting too small anyways), and moved up to full frame 26" CCM bikes. We both bought the same bike at the local bike shop, Castonguay's (I wonder if that's still around). They were bright red, had a 3-speed shifter, and pretty fat tires too. We found these bikes could handle all kinds of terrain - pavement, dirt, neighbour's lawn, etc., and at a pretty good speed too.

Around that time they had started work on adding another 9 holes to the golf course in our neighbourhood (destroying the Bush we had spent many years foraging in), and the area behind our houses became a massive bulldozed dirt playground, with a mixture of old trails, mountains of dirt, streambeds, downed trees, and half-finished golf holes. We started ripping around there on our bikes, flying off jumps, riding obstacles and descending dirt chutes. We were mountain biking, man ! And we even had a cool name for it - "Rough Riding" - better than "mountain biking" I think :)

Yeah, so next time you go Rough Riding you can tell your biking buddies where the name came from !