I’m Rob, a 30-something mountain biker from Bracknell, currently living in the Herts/Essex borders. I started mountain biking as a teenager in the early 00s, when freeride reigned supreme and me and my friends would watch burned DVDs of Kranked and New World Disorder films at each other’s houses to get hyped before a ride. When I asked my parents for a proper mountain bike, they responded that I already had a mountain bike – a low-end Raleigh Max from Halfords that I rode to school – and that was that. I saved up and bought a size medium Kona Scab hardtail frame for £100 from eBay. It came with a rigid fork and I built it up with parts scavenged from my dad’s even more basic – but, crucially, barely used – Raleigh. I gradually upgraded it over the next couple of years, but it remained a scruffy mongrel of second-hand and budget components.

For most of its life, the Scab ran a 150mm Marzocchi Drop Off dual crown fork from a Kona Stinky, but I went as extreme as 170mm with a borrowed Marzocchi Junior T, which I promptly blew up on a large drop to flat (freeride!). In its final form, it had a very nice Marzocchi Z150 single crown that leaked oil, and a 38/17 single speed tensioned via cable tie. I rode that bike everywhere: from pavement to singletrack, unsanctioned local trails to the elaborate woodwork of Esher Shore (RIP), sketchy natural drops to town centre stair sets. It was my primary means of transport, friendship and fun.

This was before dropper posts, so we’d use quick-release seat clamps to get the saddle out of the way before dropping in to a descent or jump line. The Kona’s post was a little loose though, so I carried a hammer to do the QR up tight enough. The frame had a neat pair of dents in the top tube from the fork bumpers, and picked up a matching pair in the down tube when I drove into a height-restricted car park with it on the roof. Otherwise, it held up well to the abuse dished out by a lanky teenager with an aversion to maintenance. I sold the bike on to a friend, and it got stolen when he took it to university.

I kept riding infrequently into my late teens and in the holidays between university terms. A friend of mine was giving up the sport and I bought his Balfa Minuteman to keep it in the family, as it were. (Sadly, I didn’t manage to nab his BB7.) The Minuteman came in Regular and Long and this was the Regular, maintaining the theme of comically small bikes, even for the time (small is chuckable innit). Fancier frame, similarly unsexy build. It has since been reunited with its original owner.

When I got my first proper job post-university in 2012, I bought a new NS Soda full suspension frame with a bunch of swanky colour-matched parts. It was the bike of my dreams, and I proceeded to mostly ignore it. I’d started road riding in my final year of uni, and when I moved away from home I stuck with that and barely touched a mountain bike for the rest of the decade. Dark times.

In 2017, I caught wind of the revolution in mountain bike geometry and bought the first mountain bike that actually fit me: an XL Genesis Tarn with a 490mm reach, one of the longest on the market at the time. Like the NS though, it got little use. I didn’t get back into riding properly until my partner, Gen, decided she wanted to give it a try. We started riding regularly in 2021, and while I obviously had a head start it became apparent that I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I set about relearning how to ride from scratch. That year, I bought my first modern full suspension bike, a Transition Sentinel.

Gen and I live in a stubbornly flat and agricultural part of the UK. We’re lucky to have a choice of jump-filled bike parks nearby, but little in the way of natural or technical riding, or descents longer than 30 seconds. I have bought, sold, and fiddled with a number of bikes in the past few years and have learned a lot about how geometry, parts and setup affect the ride. I have yet to learn to stop spending so much money.

Why Treebeard MTB? Treebeard is a character from Lord of the Rings, and an old nickname: I’m tall and have had a beard, if we can call it that, for my entire adult life. I started this blog to share my musings with fellow bike nerds, but mostly just for fun.