Going fast down a hill on a bike seems to be a common theme.
My experience with this was when I was about 15. A friend of mine and I went to a park about five to ten miles from my house, and went on our ten speeds. As this was the 70s, said ten speed was a steel framed piece of crap with laughable brakes at best.

While in said park we smoked a fair bit of weed, and he had brought along a water bottle filled with potent tequila sunrise. Well blitzed, we went our separate ways home.

Only thing is, I have a lousy sense of direction and got lost.

I pumped that heavy steel bike up a hill for what seemed like an hour, then had to give up and walk it the rest of the way. It was a very long, slow incline, and as I was both drunk and stoned, walking seemed the best option.

I finally crested the hill and found myself looking down the better part of a mile of straight road, with a rather steeper pitch than the chunk I had just climbed. So I did what any idiot would do- hopped on my bike, got to high gear and pumped, then hunched down and held on.

By now some warning bells were starting to go off in my intoxicated brain, but I was committed- had I used the brakes they would have basically been melted, as they were the crappy little rubber pads on calipers that squeezed on the rims. I shot down the hill on a bike that was now as stiffly upright due to gyroscopic force as a concrete wall. In retrospect, I would guess that I topped out at better than 50 mph, but at the time the world looked like a tunnel-shaped blur with a ribbon of asphalt in it.

And said ribbon had a nice patch of gravel on it from someone's poorly maintained driveway.

I tried not to scream as my wheels, already being pushed to their limits, tore through the gravel. I heard a swift crunch, the bike juddered under me, but somehow I stayed on it with the wind screaming a dirge in my ears. By now I was envisioning a car coming out of a driveway, a dog with a habit of chasing cars, a fallen branch... any number of things would have turned me into a bloody smear at that point. Remember, this was the 70s, and I had no helmet and was wearing jeans and a tee shirt as I went at expressway speeds on a lousy quality bike whose wheels had developed a definite shimmy in them by this point.

And yet somehow my momentum was sufficient to carry me up the other side of the next hill and onto flat ground again, and I was back down to 20 mph or so, feeling infinitely more sober as I got my bearings and rode home.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 5 Apr 2012, 21:52, 1 reply)

40mph on my racing bike is scary enough
I wouldn't like to try going faster on something as dodgy as you make your sound...
( MatJ LOOK, Mon 9 Apr 2012, 11:28, closed)