This is a post about a vintage mountain bike.
Back in the 1980s, I lived in Southern California. I didn't have a bicycle. My college bike, a 1974 Raleigh Gran Sport, had been destroyed in a crash a decade previously, and I hadn't thrown my leg over a bicycle since then. We were living in the foothills of the Angeles Crest mountains, and just a few minutes up the hill began a network of fire roads and rocky trails through the scrub and chaparral. I bought a mountain bike, a Raleigh Seneca, and started riding. How different this sort of riding was, than my previous road riding! I coughed my lungs out and lost strips of skin, leg-pressing up steep sandy climbs and tumbling down gullies and loose scree descents. My legs regrew and I started spending my weekends on dusty ridgelines high above the smog, with the lizards and coyotes. It was the era of Mountain Bike Action magazine and crazy anodized bikes with bizarre chainstays and the first suspension forks. The Seneca, with one of those early sprung forks grafted on, was passable, but only just. I decided to buy myself the best mountain bike I could.
It was the heyday of Bridgestone, and I completely bought into Grant Petersen's folksy catalogs and quirky, defiant philosophy. Bridgestone sold a line of mountain bikes, the MB models, from MB-5 to MB-1. The famous mountain bike racers, guys like Johnny Tomac and Tinker Juarez, and girls like Missy Giove, were riding bikes that I couldn't afford, like Ritchey P-23s. But Grant and Bridgestone started offering a superlight machine that was so cool, it didn't even have a number, but was just called the Zero, the Zip. The MB-Zip. By 1993 I was ready to buy one. At that time, the MB-Zip was a pure race bike, and by 1993, more or less, it was no longer the latest, fastest race bike, and such is the way of mountain biking that last year's hot race bike was this year's chopped liver. My local bike shop had an unsold Zip and they were ready to deal. I went into the bank branch, spoke to an actual human bank teller - remember them? - and emerged with a fat envelope of fifties totaling over a thousand dollars. I recall the list price was over $2000 then. The bike shop was willing to sell me the Zip at a steep discount, for cash, with no tax or receipt involved. Like a drug dealer, I carried the envelope to the back room and exchanged cash for bike, and departed by the back door.
My mountain biking career with the Zip was fairly short. It was perhaps too much bike for me. The bike was deliciously light, especially after I added a Flite Titanium saddle and a superlight Ritchey Pro bar, with the heavy rubber grips discarded and replaced with a few turns of Cinelli cork tape. The weight weenie sickness was in me even then. But after the slack angled Seneca, the Zip felt twitchy and unstable. The front end washed out terrifyingly in fast sandy sweepers. Around then I got sucked into the vortex of fly fishing, and during the early 90s I found myself stalking trout more often than bombing hills. A growing collection of custom Sage flyrods and a desk covered with fly-tying projects gradually pushed aside the stacks of MBA magazine, and my weekends were spent grinding on dirt roads in my Land Rover to find secluded trout streams and camping sites. Then we had a little girl. The Zip last tasted dirt sometime in the mid '90s. We left SoCal and went abroad, the Zip went into a storage unit along with the rest of our stuff, where it slept until 2000 When it re-emerged, the Zip was just a dusty old bike.
For the next decade or more, the Zip was just a transportation bike. I took reasonable care of it, even added a RockShox Mag 21 fork that I found for cheap, but its dirt days were over. When I went back to graduate school, the Zip spent its days locked up on the Cal campus. Then I started working in San Francisco, consumed with the daily grind of the office and providing for our two children, and forgot all about bikes or fishing or indeed any sort of physical activity. I grew older, fatter, weary and sick. The Zip gathered dust.
In 2006 we moved to Portland. I was overweight by now, starting to be afflicted by the middle age diseases of the under-active, over-stressed office worker. I took four or five medications daily, for cholesterol and blood pressure, and then for gout. Diabetes medications were next on the list. My gallbladder started attacking me, hours of vomiting and pain, and then my kidney began spitting out excruciating stones. A few years later, I was significantly overweight, walking with a cane, and in really bad shape.
I don't know why I decided to start riding my bike to work. I think I wanted to do something, but my gouty ankle was too painful and stiff to walk far, so I tried pedaling. The Zip came out from the basement, went to City Bikes for an overhaul, was fitted with street tires and fenders, rack and panniers. For the first weeks, the not-even-four mile ride home was exhausting. I remember struggling up the slight grades on my route, pushing weakly on the small chainring and the biggest cog, pouring sweat, seeing double, collapsing into the bench at my local pub to gather strength for the remaining four blocks to home.
You probably know what happened. There are a thousand stories like this here.The miles became shorter, the hills flattened. I started losing weight, riding faster, riding everywhere in the biggest ring, sprinting over the bridges. Sure, weighing my portions to the nearest gram and counting every calorie was the main change. But the Zip helped me not only get lighter, but also get stronger, healthy, and cured of all my diseases. I owe that bike my life.
Eventually I made the fatal mistake of getting interested in bicycles again. n+1 is so easy when n=1. I bought an old Peugeot road bike, then another. My commute ride was now done on a 1980 Peugeot PSV with drop bars and skinny tires. The Zip was reserved for rainy days. Then I bought some more road bikes, put fenders on the Peugeot to make it an all-weather commuter, and the Zip was retired to the basement again, to sleep.
Last year, on our annual week with friends in Lake Tahoe, my friend John brought a spare bike. I rode it, a recent Specialized Hardrock, on the trails above the lake, and rediscovered mountain biking. A little idea was planted. Last winter, I found a set of NOS '90s Ritchey Z-Max knobbies at my local bike shop. This summer, I stripped the fenders and other commuting accessories from the Zip, mounted the knobbies, and on this year's trip to Tahoe, brought the bike down on the rack. My friend brought his spare bike again, and it fit my son. We all went riding on the single track above South Lake Tahoe, climbing around the Heavenly Valley ski runs, on rocky sidehills, lumpy climbs, and flowing trails in the forests.
It was great. I went up the mountain several times, my son too. It must be recorded that, having never ridden a mountain bike before, my son comprehensively dusted his old man, and every time it made me smile. Note also that he went head over heels once and embedded himself in downhill prickly bushes twice, while the wisdom of the years and whatever fragments of mountain biking memory I still had kept me upright. Also let it be said that all the while my friend John, now in his sixties, was just a disappearing jersey in the distance. I can drop him on a short paved climb, but on anything that requires endurance or skill, he is the Master.
So here is the Zip, restored to dirty duty. The seattube is wrapped, which was meant to protect the decals back when a daily U-lock-ing was its routine. The foam on the top tube is there to make shouldering the bike a little more comfy, and also to cover up the signature of Grant Petersen, that was put on there a few years ago. The original fork hangs in the garage, and the vintage NightSun lights are the last remaining relic of its commuting days. I think the front rim must have been worn out along the way, anyway it was replaced for some reason that I can't recall, the Ritchey headset too. Otherwise, the bike is all original and in pretty decent condition. Not a garage queen or wall hanger, but a survivor.
And here is my son (left, in the Klein jersey) and my friend John (right, in the long white socks), and a sample of the rocky trails that I confess were more often walked by me than ridden, but that John and my son mostly navigated on wheels rather than feet. My son is apparently also happy to tumble down, since he bounces like a Nerf ball.
So now that we are back home, what to do with the Zip and with my son and with mountain biking? The mountain biking close to Portland is not very good, I'm told - we have miles of forested hills but the birdwatchers and walkers have kept them off-limits to bikes, except for a few tame dirt roads where families pedal their hybrids and trailers. But drive an hour and there is supposed to be some good riding, even some single-track. We have a 90's Hardrock that I fixed up for my daughter to take to camp a few years ago. It is just a simple rigid bike, but in very good condition, and maybe I can find a decent older suspension fork for it and make it my son's starter mountain bike. As for the MB-Zip, I doubt I will make any changes to it. For now, the old race bike is capable of far more than its rider. Someday, maybe I will get myself a fancy full suspension machine. But I'll never part with the Zip. For almost twenty years it was my only bike, and then it saved my life.