8. May 1999. Tomi Engel

Riding my MTB on the 25 km trip to university was never much fun and the pain in my bottom, back and neck made me stay at home whenever possible. Wearing padded shorts did not cure the disease and it made me feel like being some kind of racing nerd. Besides that the shorts have never been really comfortable either.

I knew about recumbents for a long time before I actually realized what the whole thing is about.

It was Oliver Zechlin, showing me his new recumbent made by Challenge and poisoning me with his HPV CDROM picture collection, who gave me the final kick back in 1996 to get hooked on HPVs.

Over the following years I have started to build my own customized recumbent bike, which was derived from - at least in my opinion - one of the coolest recumbent designs up to now: The Greenmachine.