Midaregami

I have a new Harebrained Scheme.

Back in the early 70s, my dad was an amateur bicycle racer. He got pretty good, and was a notoriously fast climber in the area (rural SoCal) until a truck plowed into him and his buddies during a training ride in ‘72, killed one guy, put Dr. Greg (atlhough he wasn’t yet “Dr.”) into a coma for two weeks—just bad news all around. Didn’t stop my old man, though, and once he recovered he continued touring and commuting to this day, although he made the switch to a recumbent a couple of years ago.

I grew up with tales of his Geoffrey Butler frame and hot-rod Italian Campagnolo components, hand-built wheels and so on. My family watched le Tour religiously; when LeMond won in ‘86 we rejoiced, and when he won in ‘89 we (along with the rest of the cycling world, no doubt) looked on in slack-jawed awe.

When I was 13, 14 years old (I’m 26 now) my parents got me a pretty trick (I thought) mountain bike, a Kona Lava Done with Shimano Deore (as I recall) components. I rode the daylights out of that thing with my pal, another MTB nerd. We were such dorks. I remember poring over Bike Nashbar and Performance catalogs, trying to figure out which bar-ends to spend my allowance on. Ah, the halcyon days of youth.

That all ended one fateful day. I went to a particular bike shop in my home town of Albuquerque, NM, and the mechanic there who wrenched on my bike (I think it might’ve been for those bar-ends) took one look at my beloved yellow Kona and said (I’ll never forget this) “Kona Lava Dome? What, your mother not like you or something?”

I was a scrawny 14-year-old, and I didn’t know what hit me. The bike shop guy had just mocked my bike with no provocation. Shame! Humiliation! I slunk out of the shop, totally defeated. Those bar-ends cost me the sport. What was the point of mocking a little kid and his bike? To this day I don’t understand it. That incident killed my interest in cycling for a decade or so—well, that and the motorcycle I got when I was 16.

But I’m coming full-circle now. It’s time to get back on the bike, and this time I’m doing it right. I’m building up a ride for commuting and some touring if the mood strikes me. Seems like a steel frame is the hip setup for this—The Surly Crosscheck has been recommended as a frame that can take arbitrary amounts of abuse, and everybody that has one seems to love it. The Bianchis I saw in the local bike shop were dead sexy, but I’m set on building it up myself, and I guess the shop can’t get just the Bianchi frames.

So the Crosscheck it is. Next come the components. I’m going with the Campagnolo Veloce group—the cream of the crop for mid-range componentry. It’s appropriate that dairy products should come up, as I recently test-rode a bike with Veloce parts, and the shifting and drivetrain were smooth as butter is smooth.

Given that I plan to purchase a new computer this summer, the bike project may have to wait, or proceed slowly. But it’s taken root, weedlike, in my mind, so I doubt it’s going away.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 13th, 2005 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.