You can read about my early years of cycling here. I had a hiatus from cycling of about 20 years when I’d gotten into cars and so my Marin mountain bike languished in a bike locker (and then an attic) for much of that time.
Myself and my partner then moved from Crowthorne to a residential suburb of Oxford. We managed to find a property with a garage so keeping the Marin wasn’t an issue and it had enough room on the drive for both our cars so there was no real dilemma about using the garage for storage. I actually didn’t have any particular plan to start cycling again following the move. But trying cycling again made sense after a few months of exploring the immediate area on foot both for food shopping and wildlife photography plus finding the bus route into the city centre being less than ideal (not to mention there being a reasonable amount of cycling infrastructure around as a lot of people using bicycles for transport in Oxford).
Marin Bobcat Trail
It had been maybe 10 years since the Marin had last seen any use and about 15 year since I’d last ridden it. I pumped up the tyres, checked the brakes worked, greased the chain and gave it a tentative short ride through a quiet housing estate just to see how wobbly I was. I was clearly not very cycling-fit at all (although I had been doing short runs daily so I wasn’t unfit) and my balance was out of practice so I was not comfortable riding one handed for signalling, but the ride was ok and so I started doing regular short rides and starting to build them up (often to the local supermarkets with a backpack).
I noticed the brakes sounded very rough, but it’s a rim brake bicycle and the brake blocks were original so of course the rubber compound had gone very hard in the near 30 years since I bought the bike – swapping those was the first job as they were basically removing rim material! It was also on the original nobbly tyres, but I would mainly be doing road cycling so I got some more road-oriented tyres. As it happens those road-oriented tyres made the bike feel way more stable – I’m not sure if it was the age of the original tyres or their tread design but cycling one handed was much easier with the new tyres.
Further tweaks/additions then happened: mudguards, pannier rack, road-oriented saddle. I also got a second set of wheels as the hubs on the originals became noisy (unsurprising as they had never been serviced) and I didn’t want to risk trying to service them myself without having another set of wheels on hand in case I screwed up. With some icy conditions during the first winter and memories from my paper-round days of how dicey it is cycling in icy conditions I also picked up some new-old-stock studded winter tyres (very noisy on the road, but give confidence that I won’t risk fracturing my wrists if the temperatures drop below zero).