Most of us who were actively riding back then weren’t racing. In 1986, I built my first wheel: a tubular rim laced to a Sturmey-Archer 3-speed hub, which I used to commute to my job at the bike shop, as well as to leave at the Menlo Park, CA, Caltrain station for my commute to San Jose, where I went to grad school. I had various cheap bikes stashed at that train station, and learned that bike thieves will steal something cheap if you use a cheap lock. I don’t remember the frame I mounted that wheel to, but I did have a Trek 412, which I purchased new from Palo Alto Bicycles in Dec 1982 to use for road riding. I don’t recall changing any of the stock components on that bike; they all worked well enough for my purposes, and by 1984 I wasn’t riding it much as I had had a head-on collision with another cyclist on Stanford’s campus which bent the top and downtube. It didn’t handle very well after that (and was eventually stolen at the MP Caltrain station).
