Woman Goes 184 MPH on a Bicycle!

This week, a 45-year old woman pedaled a bike at 183.9 miles per hour!  That got us talking about our first bikes.

Denise Mueller-Korenek broke the speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats.  She was riding behind a specially-constructed dragster that provided a draft and used a bike with a unique drive-train that moved the bike forward 128 feet with one revolution of the pedals.  The end result:  she pedaled three miles at just under 184 miles an hour!  I said she probably could have hit 190 miles an hour if they had taken the baseball cards out of the spokes!
Well, that got us talking about our very first bikes.  Heather McGregor remembered hers.  “It was lime green with a banana seat and mustache handlebars, you know the big ones that swooped down. It had a basket with daisies on it and an orange flag on the back.”

I had a bright red stingray, with a banana seat and stingray handlebars.  We bought it in 1966 from the O’Byrne brothers, owners of the legendary Kalamazoo Cycle and Electric Supply Co. on Harrison Street.

It looked just like this one, posted on E-Bay by pas100straight.

Nico Berrios remembers getting a BMX style bike on Christmas morning when he was 4 years old. He said “When you live in Florida, you can give bikes as a Christmas present.”

We talked about standing up on the banana seat, or riding on the front handle bars.  The dumbest thing I did was this game where we would see who could ride the furthest into the Kalamazoo river and still ride back out.   Or we would set a ramp and see who could ride the furthest up the side of the barn.

What about you?  What do you remember about your first bike?  What dumb stuff did you do on a bike?