Let's redecorate the living room!

It was just about a year ago when my now ex-wife revealed the first of many reasons she had for needing to leave me (ultimately there were more than 20; I kept a list). In October 2024, about two weeks before she actually got around to telling me that she didn't love me anymore and was moving out, she told me that it was deeply upsetting to her that “everywhere I look around here, I just see your shit. Especially the garage!  Oh my god, you have completely taken over the garage!"  

True, I'll admit, but only to a point.  Lots of bikes and skis, workbenches and tools out there.  Hard to be a bike rider without owning a few bikes, or a skier without a quiver of skis...

My Week of Riding Dangerously [UPDATED]

The following essay was posted to both the Rigid/Hardtail and the 50+ Years Old forums at mtbr.com on 24 November 2023.

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Turned 57 a couple weeks ago. Means I've been riding mountain bikes for close to 40 years now. 

As happens to some of us, I ended up hanging on to many of my old bikes, and have acquired and restored a couple other vintage rigs over the years, too.  Several of my older bikes are still intact and quite rideable.  The rest have essentially become organ donors or wall-art, so in a sense still "around" if only in spirit.

Quite literally hanging on (the ceiling) to several old bikes

Had an idea pop into my head the other day, as a kind of 57th birthday commemoration, that I'd ride (as-in really ride, on singletrack trails, out in the woods, just like I used to back-in-the-day) some of my oldest bikes over the course of a few days in the vicinity of my birthday and try to hit as close to an aggregate 57 miles as I could in the process. Rounding upward by just a few tenths, I pretty much nailed it at the end of Day 4 of what I've decided to call: My Week of Riding Dangerously. 

It was brutal. It was amazing. Effort was expended. Flow was elusive. Skin was lost. Blood was shed.

Old number 64

My fancy bike is broken and I'm too embarrassed to take it down to the shop and admit that I don't know how to fix it.  It's got a bubble or something in the rear brake system which has progressively been causing the brake to perform more and more poorly.  In the course of the 20 years that I've been hanging around at Absolute Bikes, I've maybe had a bike in for a legit repair two or three times.  And I've never filled out a repair ticket in the past 17 years when, as an official employee, I was always able to fix all of my bikes on my own, or hang the broken one in the stand after work and ask the mechanics for help as-needed.

No more.  My new job pretty much prevents me from working for the shop this coming summer, just as it did last summer.  So my opportunities to get free advice or assistance from the pros after-hours, in exchange for beers, are basically gone.  I could take advantage of one of them, and beg for help, but that just feels so lame.  So I'm stuck.  One of the things I like about all the other bikes in my garage is that I know how to fix all of them.  This new bike, with its fancy suspension, indexed shifters, and disc brakes is quite foreign to me.  And, at the moment I've neither the time nor the inclination to learn how to repair these components on my own.

So, as I said, I'm stuck.  My new bike has now been broken, just hanging there, unused, in the garage for two weeks.  Drives me crazy.

Fortunately, when it comes to other bikes to ride in the interim, I'm not without a few pleasant options.

So pretty.
Click to enlarge

Today I rode my Retrotec, old number 64.  It was super-fun!  Up Super-moto and across Newham.  A great ride!  Something about that bike, dunno what it is... the way it handles, the way it rails through corners, that it was my first-bike... Hard to put a finger on it.  But it never fails to disappoint.

Love that bike!

But I've gotta get off the dime and just eat my pride and take the big, broken fancy bike down to the shop and drop it off and let the pros fix it up for me.  Otherwise it's just gonna hang there forever, languishing until it turns back to dust.  It sure as heck ain't gonna fix itself.

Maybe I'll take it in tomorrow.  It shouldn't be such a big deal, huh.

Yeah.  I'll take it in on Sunday.  And then go ride the Retro again!

Just about a bike: Retrotec

I wish I could tell you my first mountain bike was a Raleigh Elkhorn.  But it wasn't.  My little brother's first mountain bike was a Raleigh Elkhorn.

To me, his second-hand Elkhorn was a very cool bike... I envied it from the git-go.  Right down to the one-size-fits-all paint-color (forest green, natch).  In 1991, to my untrained eye, his Elkhorn just seemed to be a bike built for one thing: riding around in the woods.  I envied it then.  I'm still a little envious of it now.  And I'm more than a little disappointed that he sold it... probably to some dirt-bag who ruined it leaving it out in the snow all winter, or let it get stolen, or let it disintegrate into just another a clapped-out beater bike downtown.  Tell ya what: someday I'm gonna find me a really sweet old Elkhorn of my own... one that someone's been keeping in a nice, dry garage for like 30 years.  And I'm gonna ride it a bunch, in the woods, and I'm never ever going to sell it.

No. My first mountain bike was not an Elkhorn.  

My first mountain bike was a Motiv Ground Pounder.  A what?

Cactus Cup, March 1992

Motiv's were everywhere in the 1990s.  Sold then, and until recently, by Price Clubs, Costcos, and other similar big-box-bulk retailers, Motiv bikes were inexpensive mountain bikes aimed squarely at the mass market.  Back in mountain biking's hey-day they sported pseudo-exciting names (like Ground Pounder, Rock Ridge, and Stone Grinder), garish color-schemes, goopy Taiwanese TIG-welds, super-wide, deeply-padded saddles, and cheap Shimano gruppos (mine was Exage 500LX) with the number of gears (21-speed!) labeled prominently on the chainstay.  Lots of people had them.

But today, if you scour the Internet for any information on old Motiv mountain bikes (I know; I tried.) you'll come up nearly empty-handed.  Nonetheless, I will always credit my old Motiv, my first mountain bike, as the important and valuable... seriously: life-changing... bike that it really and truly was.

Scottsdale, AZ, 1992

But I didn't ride the Motiv for long.  

I owned it for a little over a year before I gave it (sold it?) to my other younger brother so it could become his first mountain bike.  

I moved to Flagstaff in 1991. By the time the summer of 1992 rolled around I'd finally saved up enough money working the night shift at Bookman's to buy myself a new bike... actually just a new bike frame... stripped naked and devoid of any-and-all parts, accessories, or accoutrements such as frame decals or head-badges.  Nevertheless it was, at the time, The Bike Of My Dreams... a Bob Seals Retrotec... Number 64, to be precise.  Not exactly a custom bike, built just for me... but a brand new, exotic, handmade steel mountain bike like no other that might as well have been built just for me.

Moab, UT, 1993

Within two weeks, I'd had it powder-coated (black), built it up with whatever discounted parts I could scrounge at my local bike shop, and got busy riding it.  It's silly, and probably still a figment of my imagination, but I swear: the bike immediately improved my abilities as a rider.  I'd never crossed Rocky Ridge, the then-super-challenging, quite-well-named, local trail I'd been practicing my skills on for at least a year, with fewer than 4 dabs... until my first ride across its undulating traverse on the Retrotec... when I cleaned it, in its entirety. No dabs at all!   Needless to say, it was more-or-less at this moment that I became a believer in the value of a good bike... and in the assertion that my Retrotec, more than most other bikes in the world, possessed some sort of special magic that made me a better rider.

The Retro's still a favorite-bike.  And I still ride it a lot, several times a month, for sure.  But it's changed character more than any of my other bikes in the intervening years.  It's had flat bars and riser bars, as well as a Surly Torsion Bar with huge sweep... it's had rigid forks and suspension forks, cantilever brakes and widget brakes, toeclips and clipless pedals, bar ends or not, several wheelsets, all kinds of new gearing, and more than a couple different stems... including, at one time, an Allsop suspension stem which failed rather catastrophically on me while I was riding down a big rock in Sedona.  Ka-blooey.

Now, some 20 years later, the Retro's become a bit of a relic, I guess.  Over the years it's been broken and repaired (by Curtis Inglis).  And it's broken me pretty badly a couple times, too.  It's really just another in a long line of well-worn old hand-built mountain bikes from the 1990s.  They're not all that rare.  Not really.  That's certainly one way to look at it anyway.  And, indeed, that's the most common reaction to the bike when I show up for a group ride riding it.  But I prefer to view it as more of a period-piece... a good, solid, working example of a by-gone but-good era, of a time not so long ago, back when mountain biking was a lot newer.  That makes its mostly eclectic and almost universally obsolete parts-mix a little more interesting and a whole lot less sad.

Coconino National Forest

I like the bike's unpainted clearcoat finish and the way the brass fillets add golden details to the bike's otherwise gray color.  I'm quite proud of the clearcoated Koski DuraTrack fork and Salsa ProMoto stem, too, as well as the black-anno IRD seatpost, silver IRD Widget brakes, and black IRD rear-brake booster.  I like the old ratcheting black Shimano Deerhead top-mount shifters, the Dia-Compe SS-5 brake levers and the Oury grips.  I think the gun-metal-blue and silver XTR M900 rear derailleur is the best looking bike part Shimano ever produced, and that the polished silver XT hubs and the 110mm 5-bolt XT cranks run a close second and third (in that order).  I'm convinced the hand-laced wheels built on gray Mavic 217 hoops match the frame color almost perfectly.  I still think they're simple-n-cool, so I have old-school Onza clipless pedals on most of my bikes, including this one.  And finally, I think the black 1-inch Chris King 2Nut headset and the stainless King bottle cages add a nice touch of class.

For what it's worth, the black Ritchey Pro 30mm riser bars and the Specialized BG Pro saddle aren't really period, but they're not ridiculous either.  Plus, I like them.

It started with a Motiv.  Sure.  The Motiv set the hook in me, no question about it.  But the Retrotec will always be the bike that taught me how to ride well and moreover, how to become a better rider.  And for that I'll always sorta consider it First-Bike.

The Motiv's long gone, and that's okay.

The Retro will always be with me.

Click images to enlarge

Mountain Bike Action - Dec. 1992

Bicycling+Mountain Bike Mar. 1993

Bicycling+Mountain Bike - Mar. 1993