I hope this ends up on the QA FB site, if not I'll make an adjustment somewhere. As I implied in my bio, my background in cycling is pretty long. I first got into road racing thanks to mountain biking. John Tomac, Ned Overend, Tinker Juarez were the big mountain bikers when I got started in the early 1990s. Somewhere I read that they all also rode on the road for training. That was because mountain biking, especially then was rather hard on your body. So to build up endurance and refine some skills you rode a road bike. Tomac, iirc, came into mountain biking from a road racing background. So anyway, I got a road bike in 1992 or 1993. I found that I enjoyed it quite a bit. It really helped that I lived in Salt Lake City at the time, and road riding was great there. Great shoulders so you weren't in traffic much, so much varied terrain, not to mention the super cycling community. Somewhere in this, I heard about some local races, gave them a try, and did poorly. I did very poorly. I had zero clue how to ride in a group, let alone how to race safely around others. My idea of training was ride hard, for as long as I could. Let's just say I had much to learn. I did learn, improved, but I was never great, but I had a blast. In there I learned how to work on my bikes. First basic stuff, how to clean, and do on the fly repairs, and related. l learned over time how to build up a bike. Bikes were a little easier to work on then, nobody had internal cable or hose routing. Disc brakes weren't a thing yet on bikes. Heck, even suspension didn't make a big arrival until the mid 1990s. Along the way I raced less and less. Life and work got in the way of training. I became an official (Commissaire now) to stay involved. We moved across the country to Eastern North Carolina. I officiated more, mostly because my finding a "real" job turned out to be rather difficult here. I started up Quattro Assi, named after Bill Lewis' Quattro Assi Bikes. I now work on bikes, cook as a hobby vs a profession, and travel the SE as an official.