How it all started...
In the late '80's the first mountainbikes started to show up in Windhoek. These were not the techo whiz bikes of today. These were 7 speed rigid bikes (no suspension) with cantilever brakes and thumbshifters on top of the handlebars. But they gave us the ability to start exploring the many trails and hills in and around the city - something we struggled to do on our Achilles backpedal bikes. As the popularity of these bikes grew, more people joined the rides and we started thinking "Hey, let's organise a race". To keep things organised we decided to create a club for mountain bikers and so the Rock and Rut Mountain bike club was started. Details about the exact date have faded but it was around March of 1993 when Patrick de Goede, Deon Schlechter, JC Faul, Freddy van Zyl and Douglas Thompson held the first meeting. The meeting took place in Velowerkstatt's showroom (it was THE bikeshop at that time) with the committee members of the newly formed club, sitting on wooden crates. Since these 5 were the only ones at the meeting they all were unceremoniously elected to form the committee.
Now we had a club, a name and a constitution and were ready to organise our first race. Those days social media was thought of as the local newspaper. This was way before Facebook and Twitter. This was even before 'The Internet' was know in Namibia. Hell we did not even had email or mobile phones yet. But somehow we managed to get the word out about the club and events. We spent nights before an event to make colourful hand drawn A3 size posters which we posted all over town at shopping centers. Not at Maerua Mall though - it was just an idea then. We approached various companies for sponsorships and one of our 1st sponsors was Mr. Morar from Chelsea Fashions.
By now rapid advances in communication technology saw email and cellphone communication taking off. We saw this as a great opportunity to get the club online and on the 16th of July 2002 we registered the rockandrut.org domain with the aim of establishing a website for the club. The 1st version of the website was online a few months later.
Early version of the website
