Bay Area Biker

This year I succeeded in getting my buddy Jared back on the mountain bike. It’s because of Jared that I got into mountain biking as a teenager, having always fashioned myself a BMX freestyler since early childhood. It was when he got his first mountain bike that I realized what the benefits of having big wheels and multiple gears would be to a kid like myself who lived way out in the middle of nowhere and was a few years away from legally being able to drive a car…

Jared had been “off the bike” for the better part of a decade; his last barely-ridden bike was stolen from his apartment in Phoenix some six years prior and he’d never gotten another. Since he moved back to the Bay Area last year, into my jurisdiction, I decided that he would ride again.

To accomplish the feat of getting Jared back on the trails I had to act as a sort of unsolicited-broker, first convincing him that he needed a bike, then finding just the right bike on craigslist for just the right price – a price that Jared wouldn’t balk at any more than he would balk at the idea that he was in the market for a mountain bike, since he wasn’t, necessarily.

It didn’t take long for me to find the right bike and I got a confirmation from Jared, through text message, that he would reimburse me the cost of the bike upon delivery, so long as it wasn’t purple. Done deal. In one of those miracles of timing, already having plans to drive up to Santa Rose that weekend, I was able to swing by the Alamo Square neighborhood to pick up the bike on my way out of town and deliver it to Jared straightaway.

When I got to Jared’s house I slyly parked just down the street so that I could grab the bike out of the hatchback and ride it up to him as he wrenched on a car in his driveway. I pedaled up, smiling, knowing that the steel framed, mechanically perfect, 29er singlespeed (convertible to geared) was the perfect bike with which Jared could reacquaint himself with the trails of Annadel. And I knew that he, being the mechanic that he is, would glance at the machine and instantly know and appreciate these facts as well. And I knew that S. Burma Trail in Annadel, which played host to the yardsale that I remember killed Jared’s nerve so many years ago was fearing the wrathful return of this once magnificent rider… So it was, with bells chiming and choirs singing in my head I rode up the driveway and Jared looked up, saw the bike and he said, “it’s purple.”

“It’s metallic purple-ish. More like ‘gunmetal purple,’ really,” I said, softening my pronunciation of the word ‘purple’ as best I could. “Anyway, it’s just paint – it can be repainted. I promise, if you can’t handle this ‘killer lavender,’ then I’ll come up some other weekend and rattle-can it some color you like.”

“Camo?”

“Uh, sure, that involves buying three cans of paint as opposed to one and doing a lot of masking, but yeah we can do that…”

He walked over and took the bike from me, hefted it, and threw a leg over it. I suggested he ride off a couple curbs to get a feel for the big-wheeled bike, realizing that he might not remember 26-inch wheeled bikes well enough for a comparison. He asked about the rigid steel fork and I said that if he got back into riding and found the fork to be a hindrance, then I’d broker him a good deal on a suspension fork. He expressed some concern about the singlespeed aspect, and again I told him that if he really got back into riding and wanted some gears, that the frame could be setup with gears. At last he smiled.

We rode Annadel that weekend and I was really surprised that being off the trails for the better part of ten years hadn’t much dampened his technical riding abilities. He was a bit sluggish on the climbs, but he could still rip a rocky singletrack downhill switchback, on flat pedals no less!  For his first climb back I subjected him to Two Quarry. This trail, like many in the park, is nothing like it used to be when we rode there as teenagers. It used to be a…fire road of sorts – more like a river of baby-heads and micro-glaciers, as difficult to descend as it was to ascend. Now the trail has been reformed into a beautiful twisting singletrack, comfortably rocky and still difficult enough to test one’s resolve. Jared had to walk a few of the sections, but he wasn’t deterred. I’m pretty sure it was the subsequent ride along Ridge Trail – tailor made for singlespeeding – that resealed Jared’s fate as a mountain biker. Within a month Jared began talking about getting a suspension fork and I found one in his price range, again fairly quickly.

Aside from hitting the trails at least a couple times a week, the guy even occasionally rides to work! In fact, his only one-speed complaints are about spinning out on his commute rather than about having to grind up a difficult climb in the park. However, when I break out my bicycle-kaleidoscope and I start speculating about the various ways we could get 2, 3, 8…24 speeds on his bike, he always brushes me off saying he likes the bike just the way it is. It’s great to have him back on the bike.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.