By Lars Hundley
This month marks 25 years of Road Bike Rider. Ed Pavelka and Fred Matheny sent the first newsletter in July 2001, following their earlier work at Bicycling Magazine, and it has gone out just about every single week since. Over 1,200 issues! John Marsh published it for the better part of a decade after Ed and Fred moved on, and I took the handoff from him in early 2018, with issue No. 798.
I’ll tell you one thing that hasn’t changed in all that time. Jim Langley showed up in issue No. 9, back in September 2001, and he’s still answering your tech questions in this one. His weekly Tech Talk column has run without a break since 2003. Nobody in cycling media has a streak like that, which is fitting for a guy who once rode 10,269 days in a row. That’s over 28 years without missing a single daily ride. (And you’ve probably noticed that most weeks his column shows up as the most popular article from the week before!)
Long before any of this, I was just another weekly reader. I dug through my old emails recently and found RBR newsletters going back to at least 2013, and I’m pretty sure I was reading for years before that. I was the kind of fan who read every issue the morning it landed. If you had told me back then that I’d end up the publisher someday, I never would have believed it.
So I’d love to know: how long have you been reading? Leave a comment and tell us the year you subscribed and something RBR changed about your riding or taught you. I’m especially curious whether anyone has been reading since issue No. 1?
Twenty-five years down, and I’ll see you next week!
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