An example of why off-road excursions are worth while.

I always strongly consider observations from anyone willing to wave a 44 Magnum in people’s faces.  As such, I’ve always appreciated Dirty Harry‘s recommendation that a man know his limitations.  For example, I can appreciate that I am not an elegant creature and it is best if I avoid sports involving hand-eye coordination. I’ve also noted that things go more smoothly when I keep my feet affixed to the ground, to say nothing of keeping my wheels or skis out of the air. I’m also not great with imaginary numbers, like eleventeen or thirtytwelve.

I am, however, pretty good at riding bikes.  That said,  I am prone to overconfidence when it comes to cornering. My father, a devoted BMW motorcycle loyalist, bought a mid-Eighties BMW R100 RS to give to me for my 16th birthday. In the meantime, however, I picked up bike racing.  He sold the R100 before I got a chance to ride it, citing my proclivity to overshoot turns on bicycles and observing that I didn’t also need a motor helping me crash at higher speeds and with greater consequence.

A self-professed Roadie, I do wander off-road occasionally, and generally do so aboard my beloved MB-Zip. I went for a ride on Saturday with some friends who were riding bikes built in this century, and was struck by the advances in technology involved. While my bike utilizes flexy stems and elastomers, they were aboard 29ers (which is Mountain Bike speak for “bike built on 700c wheels”) with full-suspension.

I could easily match the climbing portion of the ride, but as soon as we pointed downhill, I was left in their dust, to borrow their vernacular.  Obviously, it wasn’t my descending skills – it had to be the gear.  I promptly rented a top-end 29er full suspention rig and agreed to join my mates for a longer ride out east of the Cascades on Sunday.

I’ll let you in on a secret: the advances in Mountain Biking since 1992 have not been made in the name of climbing. That’s not to say the 29er didn’t feel great on all the other terrain, but climbing felt more akin to sitting on a balance ball than riding a bike.  Descending, on the other hand, I felt like a different rider.  I was rippin’ gnar with my bra’s (that’s Mountain Bike speak “descending quite well and managing to keep up with my friends”) and at a certain point made the observation that perhaps I was over-confident, given my unfamiliarity with the bike in particular and with the notion of riding a full suspension bike in general.

About halfway along the descent, I started noticing a peculiarity in the bike’s handling: while cornering, the front wheel was tending to wash out. All the washouts were controllable, and I continued on my way.  A few turns from the bottom of the descent, however, I failed in righting a washout in a particularly nasty corner and found myself in a tangle on the ground, bike bopping me in the face, and scattering a variety of equipment in a blast-pattern around the ground-zero of my crash.  The bike literally creaked with pain as it lay in the dust.

I was mostly unhurt, but I did taco the front wheel.  Limitation noted: don’t attempt to keep up with more experienced riders on a highly technical descent aboard a bike you are not familiar with.

Phase I of Project Zero is complete.  Stock, the Zip wasn’t a bike that i was going to be able to ride.  First of all, I’m too tall for the 270mm Ritchey seatpost, and the stem was too short.  Also, while I love the approach Bridgestone took to designing their bikes, I have to say that suspension of some kind is appreciated by my joints if not my mind.  Also, this bike is hitting my Nostalgia Button, and for that, I have to take it back to the way we were riding bikes in 1991.

My family had more bikes than sense, and we ran the gamut on technologies available at the time.  We had a full-suspension Cannondale “Boinger” – equipped with the short-lived Campy Euclid group – my Schwinn loaded up with Rock Shox, various Cannondales, and a couple Bridgestones.  We rode the Bridgestones stock for a while until we got turned onto the Softride suspension stem.  We loved the clever design; the stem doesn’t change the geometry of the bike the way suspension forks did (before they were part of the design like they are now), were very light, didn’t suffer from sticktion, and were self-damping.  Similarly, we loved the design of the Thudbuster seatpost; they worked great – as long as you didn’t mind using rear suspension that effected the height of your saddle.

The great benefit of both the the Softride stem and the Thudbuster seatpost is that neither changes the geometry of the bike.  When climbing out of the saddle, the Thudbuster doesn’t effect the bike at all – it’s still a hardtail.  But, when seated, it’s three inches of travel noticeably softens bumps.  The stem has a slight bouncy feeling when climbing out of the saddle like any other front suspension mechanism without a modern lockout, but with some careful adjustment of the stem’s spring tension, you can find a good balance between suspension when you want it, and lack of bounciness when you’re climbing.

Once I got the Zip, I went about collecting the parts I needed to get back to my mountain biking comfort zone.  To my surprise, the Thudbuster is still in production and several improvements have been made to the design.  It seems lighter than the old model, and the motion of the parallelogram seems to eliminate any noticeable change in saddle height.  Most importantly, they provide different elastomers (remember elastomers?) that let you tailor the stiffness of the suspension.  Since all I want is to take the edge off the worst of the bumps, I installed the stiffest ones.  The seatpost is also surprisingly light; the Thudbuster/Arione combo is lighter than the stock Ritchey/Turbo setup.

Softride is no longer in the bike parts building business, but I snapped up a NOS stem on eBay for next to nothing and installed it.  It’s amazing how light the system is; including the Profile quill adapter, the Softride setup weighs about the same as the original steel stem.

With that, the Zip appeared ready to embark on it’s maiden voyage.  Prepping for the ride, however, we discovered the tires were hopelessly old and cracked, so I picked up some new ones.  To my surprise, when taking the old tires off the rim, I realized they had steel beads (were the Specialized Crossmax stock?); the new ones are way lighter and a bit wider than the old ones.  Finally, the maiden voyage proved too rough for the original headset, so it was replaced with a Chris King and the old brake pads were replaced with some fresh ones.

All said, the bike weighs about the same as it originally did.  But don’t worry, all the stock parts are safely stowed in a box.

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Middle Fork Taneum River

Last weekend, Michelle and I drove out over the Cascades and into the arid region on the other side of the pass.  It’s amazing the way the mountains hold the moisture on the Pacific side of the range; driving up through the rain forest to crest into the East Cascades is an amazing experience.  As a kid, I used to come out to the Yakima Valley and I remember the first time we popped over the pass to come to Seattle: the transition from the stark, dry land of Central Washington to the lushness of the Pacific Northwest rain forests is as sharp as a knife’s blade.  The reverse – the one Michelle and I took from Seattle – is just as remarkable.

We were on our way to Cle Elum to ride some trails we carefully picked out the previous week by pouring over topo maps of the area.  As it turns out, many of the roads we elected to use to get to the trail head were unmaintained; unaware, we parked the car and climbed aboard our bikes to take the forest and old logging roads to get to the trail.

The mountains are a wilderness, and ill-prepared people die here all the time.  Logging roads are especially dangerous because they look like good, solid roads, but in reality they just wander across the mountainside to provide a means to get lumber out of the area.  The hard fact of the matter is that only one logging road ever leads out of the forest, all the others are dead-ends that branch off the one main road that takes you out.

Michelle and I thought we were riding along the main road but before long, the road didn’t match the map and was getting increasingly steep and difficult to pass. Not hard for a mountain bike, but too rocky for a car – and this was technically supposed to be a road.  Finally, as an innocuous reminder of the wilderness we’re in, the road we were on stopped in a dead end.   We had somehow gotten ourselves onto an logging road.  Rather than try to find the correct road, we retraced our route down the mountain and went back to the car; we arrived about four hours later and, despite not having found the trail, we’d had a spectacular been part of an amazing afternoon in the woods.  We jumped in the car, took it up another road and found the trails we were looking for within half an hour.  We got back on our bikes and rode some incredible single track until it was time to head back home.  After five hours of riding, we returned to the car, packed up, and headed up to Roslyn for a pizza dinner.

Nothing like slapping all those calories back on after a long day in the saddle.

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By the way, I think Roslyn might be the nicest town on the planet.  Everyone we met was beyond friendly.  The topper was when I headed up to the counter to order another couple of beers and, before I got to the counter, the guy in front of me in line turned around and said, “Sit down.  I’m buying your next round.”

“Why would you do something like that?” I asked.

“Because you’re in Roslyn.”

One last point, we found Man-Bear-Pig tracks.  Talk about a scary experience.  We’re super cereal.

For those of you squinting, it’s a Specialized Rock Hopper, circa 1988.  This museum piece is my ride of choice when visiting my in-laws in Boise, ID.  It’s perfect for the miles and miles of dry single-track in the foothills outside of town.  Well, perfect if you consider your joints to be disposable.  Anyway, I logged a few thousand feet of vert on this puppy, and enjoyed every minute.  A few details, like the threaded headset that need two full turns to tighten and remove the “death rattle,”  as well as the luxurious combination of running shoes and flat pedals.  Hey, take what you can get, right?  A day on a bike is a good day.

Things were always better in “the good old days”.  That’s what my mate Johnny Klink always says, especially when we’re talking about mountain biking (which is 99% of our conversations).

We were turned on to the sport around the same time in the early 90′s, and even though we didn’t meet until the latter part of that decade, we’d witnessed the halcyon days of the sport.  At least that’s how we viewed them.

It didn’t matter that bikes and components were heavy and clunky by todays standards, at the time a sweet steel hardtail with an undamped fork (if you were really lucky and/or rich) weighing under 30lbs was the epitome of a ‘dream machine’.  I’d scour the U.S. magazines for the latest race results, even if they’d only make their way Down Under months after the fact, but the internet was still years away and it was all I had to go on.

Revelling in the glossy images of the stars of the day, two riders always were prominent at the top of the results in NORBA and World Cup racing:

John Tomac and Ned Overend.  The Young Lion and The Old Stager.  The flairy, gifted bike handler and the gritty endurance machine.  Johnny T and The Lung.

Their nicknames summed up their differing personalities, both off the bike, and on the race course.  Different, but similar in the fact that they were head and shoulders above the rest, and never far apart.

Photo: Nutsy Fagan

I was always more of a Ned fan, though ‘The Tomes’  was also right up there in my MTB fandom. I probably leaned more towards Ned as my days of riding in the gung-ho style of Tomac were rapidly fading in the rear-view mirror, and I was advancing towards the veteran category which Ned could’ve easily been racing in, instead of laying waste to men a decade or more younger than him.

Johnny Klink gets so excited when he talks of those days, recalling the equipment they were using, the kit they’d be wearing, and the iconic images that they left inscribed on our psyches.

Tomac, hunched over the drop bars, the American Eagle emblazoned on his helmet, blitzing the technical sections, leaving everyone in his wake. Overend, in the pink and yellow Specialized Stumpjumper jersey, climbing the steeps of Durango or Big Bear, where he was king of the thin air, leaving everyone in his wake.

Johnny T

Even in their fading years on the circuit, when the Euros started to dominate and the Americans suddenly were pack fodder, they were never far apart. I remember watching them at the 95 and 96 Worlds, in Germany and Australia respectively, battling away for 30th or 40th place, yet still garnering some of the biggest cheers and support from the spectators.

They were the real stars, the riders of, and for, the people.  Not many of them around today.

Ah, the good old days indeed.

Michelle and I hit the trail on Saturday to take our newly acquired mountain bikes for their maiden voyage on the Grand Ridge trail near Issaquah, Washington.  We were pleasantly surprised with the quality of the trail, and elated with our bikes.   The only trouble we got into was with me going a bit too fast on some of the descents and learning the hard way that brake pads tend to harden considerably in 18 years and that hard brake pads aren’t very effective if your goal is to reduce your speed.

The Zip was exactly what I remembered it being: quick, responsive, and fun; I felt immediately at home on it.  So much so that I was probably a bit too cavalier about descending and overestimated my skill.  Anytime you’re descending and you think to yourself, “I’m going a bit fast but it will be OK as long as nothing unexpected happens” you know you’re on shaky ground.   I realize that’s not a very clever way of riding, especially given the luxury of 20-20 hindsight and the fact that now I know two unexpected things were about to happen.

First, there was a huge root just up the trail.  Second, pulling on the brakes did almost nothing to slow my bike down.  Had I been my old self on a mountain bike, I would have committed to the root and jumped it, but instead I hesitated and tried to stop, piling into the root with enough force to crack my headset.  I Superman-ed off the bike and, although I was mostly unhurt, I rattled every part of my body, down to my teeth and toenails.  That said, I’m reasonably certain I did not let out any unmanly wails or squeals that echoed through the mountainside.

Michelle spent the first part of the ride getting used to her Prophet.  Before long, she was climbing better and faster than me, blowing by me on the long climb out of the valley on the way back.  It is really amazing how good she is, especially given this is her third time on a mountain bike.  She flew over technical sections and floated up the climbs before descending like the downhill ski racer she is.  About halfway through, we stopped for a snack and she was just giddy.  Eyes wide, she said, “You just don’t have to worry!  This thing just carves down the mountains and floats over rocks and roots like they aren’t there!”  Having just excavated the land around the root that broke my bike, I can assure you: those rocks and roots were indeed there.

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The most obvious is the suspension.  Not only that there is suspension, but the way it changes the design of the bike.  The bottom bracket just floats beneath the bike, seemingly in a vacuum.  One of the most visually dramatic details of the bike is the Lefty fork: there is only one beefy blade with 140mm of travel.  Compare this to the Zip with it’s roots firmly planted in road bike design and simplicity, and it’s hard to realize these two bikes are built for the same purpose.

Technologically, I’ve stayed pretty well in tune with the changes in bike design, but one thing that caught me off-guard with the Prophet is the hydraulic disc brakes.  I’m aware of the switch to disc brake technology, but didn’t realize there were hydraulics involved.  We’ll have to see how they perform, and I’m looking forward to figuring out how to service them.

Now it’s on to customizing and tweaking both the bikes, which, in my opinion, is the most exciting and reward aspect of owning a bike.

The Bridgestone Factory Racer

When I was growing up, my family and I did a lot of mountain biking.  It was really just a matter of training; we were nordic ski racers and the heart-rate patterns in both sports seemed to be more similar than between road biking and skiing and the intense efforts to ride up steep, technical hills was better interval training than anything you can do manually.  We even had our own, private mountain bike trail – probably the most technically challenging route I’ve ever ridden: an old, abandoned motocross trail in Norther Minnesota.  The hills were steep, the terrain technical, and the insect life thick enough to keep out everyone with any sense. It doesn’t sound like much, but it was crazy.

I rode an old Schwinn which empirical evidence indicates was made out of sand-filled tubes.  My dad and my brother were riding Cannonwhales, and I can’t remember what my mom and sister were on.  It was all first-generation mountain bike gear: weighed like a tank, and was designed for riding ATB trails and dirt roads – not the single-track hell were were riding.  Then, one fateful day, Spankles came to ride our crazy trails.  He came aboard a Bridgestone MB-2.

I have always preferred riding on the road.  The responsiveness of the bike, the rhythm; the feeling of spinning a gear at just the right cadence that seems to put you, the bike, and the road surface into a sympathetic vibration is unmatched in any other sport.  Our mountain bikes were big, clunky, and stable at the expense of being responsive.  Not the MB-2.

I got on his bike and rode it about 200 meters before I found myself thinking, “This feels like a road bike.”  The Bridgestone was quick, light, responsive, and your position on the bike was like a road bike – you were low, stretched out, and in control of the machine.  When I told him it felt like a road bike, he answered, “That’s the point.”  I was hooked.

During a time when bike manufacturers where were starting to experiment with rear suspension in order to smooth out the inevitable bumps that come along with riding off-road, Bridgestone was taking a very different approach.  Recognizing that there is no suspension more effective than the human body, they decided to focus on building small, responsive, and light bikes that could bounce beneath the cyclist with the rider proving the suspension rather than the bike.

Intrigued, my dad snapped up an MB-1, which was the top of the line Bridgestone at the time.  He fell in love, and so did I – from a distance.  I watched from my sand-filled Schwinn as he learned to ride his MB-1 over the most technical climbs that none of us had managed to climb before.  The next year, Bridgestone produced an MB-0 (or MB-Zip, as they called it) and my dad had to have one.  They were only produced for two years, but they were the lightest, quickest mountain bike available for many years (the Zip weighed 19 pounds back when road bikes hardly weighed so much.)  Bridgestone only produced the MB-0 for two years, and went out of the bike-building business shortly thereafter.

In a strange twist of fate I happened by a bike shop that had only recently opened.  As I passed by the shop window, I noticed none other than an MB-0 hanging in the window.  Upon inquiry, it turned out that it was my size.  And completely, 100% stock.  And, with that, let Project Zero begin.  I will make no irreversible changes, but this bike will become my primary mountain bike and I am embarking on a quest to make this thing rule.  Stay tuned for updates.  Oh, and the serial number is “1111″.  How cools is that?  They only made this bike for two years and made only 1000 per year.  This is the 111th bike built in the second year.

Trivia: who is the man in that photo above?

Read more about the MB-0: Pedal! Damint! and Another Insepid Dot Com

And, the creme-de-la-creme, the 1991 Bridgestone Product Catalog (click the pictures to browse through to relive my 8th-grade summer):

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Boy, that catalog really brings me back.  I loved the humor and the technical tips such as Gene’s climbing technique and Michael’s descending techniques.  Dig those crazy Scott Drop-Ins!  And, for the record, I totally had a crush on Karen, the Cycling Marine Biologist.