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33 Years Later
I've been absurdly fortunate. People used to pay me to ride their bikes. I did try to keep in mind that I was really paid, not to race, but to convince others that they wanted to purchase the bikes with the same logo as the one I was riding, but being given bikes, and then eventually even given money along with them, changed my perception of the value of spending my own money to buy a bicycle. I decided I have the luxury of enough ability to ride even a pretty lousy bike effectively. That's not to say I don't like nice bikes. Granted, my definition of "nice" may not always be the norm, and that has worked to my advantage, given the price resulting from the supply/demand equation, although if I treat the / as a division sign, that order should be reversed. Used bikes seem to find their way under me in exchange for very little money. That started a long time ago.
At the end of 1992, when my first bike sponsor had enough of a snotty kid who didn't produce many results as a result of trying to race with the adults, I was heading into the 1993 season without a bike. The owner of the local bike shop, Pig Iron, was a friend of mine, as in I'd helped wallpaper the shop when it opened a year early. He was supportive of my racing, so I was given the chance to buy a Kona Hot frame at wholesale pricing. At the time, I was in my freshman year of college at Lehigh University, where mountain biking was popular with maybe a handful of students, so when someone had advertised a race worthy bike on the school's list serve, nobody bought it. The seller kept lowering the price, and eventually I learned about the list serve, found the ad, and bought my first used bike cheaply enough that I turned a profit reselling it after a year of races. I never bought the Kona.
A few years later, Kona became the first company to pay me to take free bikes from them. I still remember the fall morning of 1995 when I came upstairs in the house where I was renting a room while in school (now upgraded to the better education, for less money, of UMass), to find a message that Pat White from Kona, whom I'd sent a resume, had called. Likely I was being theatrical for just my own benefit, but I let my legs collapse and tumbled to the kitchen floor. It was happening: I was going to achieve one of the life ambitions printed in my high school senior yearbook, "to get paid for it"!
Kona did give great support and opportunities, and I did return two of my three best national finishes, and I was told by Pat years later that the New England race series leaders jersey I'd sent was still hanging in the office. I had the chance to race as the slowest member of a star studded team that included a former US national champion and a future world champion. With half the company's ownership Canadian, the team was largely populated by riders from north of the border, with just three riders from the United States my first year. The second year, only two 'muricans remained, solidly making me the slowest team member, and the next year I was the last US rider after the former national champion became a more expensive expense that the company wanted to afford.
Yup, keeping to the tend, the fourth year, I was gone, and while I was a little sour about being dropped, it was done honorable, with good communication, and I eventually, years later, got over the sting and appreciated the opportunity they gave me. I was even pleased that the used bike I'd bought in 2022 to try a return to racing, before that was abruptly ended by a car's bumper, was wearing a Kona logo. I didn't even cover it with tape, which I would have for any other brand.
I was also happy that Bath Cycle and Ski, along with their online business, Bikeman, who set me up with the Carver rigid fork I raced, was a Kona dealer. I'd met their founder, Davis Carver, back when I was first racing Konas and had visited a friend in northeastern Massachusetts for a Saturday ride in the late fall. He'd wanted to take it easy as he had plans to race in coastal Maine the next day. "There's a race?" I asked. Yes, he and his brother had started buying all their bike gear from this little company up there and always had such a positive experience that he wanted to support the race. I was a racer, so I joined him even though I had brought the full suspension bike that wasn't my default choice for most races.
It was the perfect bike for the Grillz Memorial Race. The Maine coast can be rocky, and the park where the race was held was even more so. When I arrived and saw Skip Brown from, I think then it was still Merlin, not yet Seven, and he saw me, he greated me with, "I figured little fall race in Maine, I might win, but you, on that bike, on this course, I guess not." We started on grass for fifty yards before hitting the first rock garden where I passed the couple racers who'd easily outsprinted me and my full suspension bike, and after that, I rode a very lonely race to win a factory-seconds Patagonia fleece top, that I still have somewhere. I also met Davis, and in a industry full of interesting people, both good and bad, he is one of the exceptionally good ones. I remember noting years later that Bikeman was the only eBay user I ever saw with sales in the thousands and still a 100% positive feedback rating. He's that kind of person.
A few posts back, I'd mentioned the game I'd started playing of collecting returnable drink container trash to redeem for the deposit, figuring I'd put the revenue toward paying for bikes and parts. When people have been surprised to hear I'm retired, possibly especially given that maybe I don't look or act my age, I explain that I was better at saving money than spending it, and that my retired lifestyle, while a great fit for me, wouldn't suit a lot of people. It seems I'm still not a good spender, so given my love of cheap bikes, I haven't really been keeping up with draining the revenue found five cents at a time. I needed, even kind of wanted, to buy a new bike.
Part of lacking the skill of spending money comes from my high degree of contemplation before buying anything. I'd been thinking about a mountain bike purchase for at least a year, pouring through geometry specifications, and figuring out how to source a rigid fork that was long enough to replace the long travel forks on the bikes with the geometry I wanted. I'd even contemplated a custom build. In the mean time, I played with what I had, eventually putting a smaller rear wheel on my race bike from 2022. I liked it! I just wanted slightly wider rear tire clearance (Ironically, the smaller wheel had less clearance as it moved back to come close to the bulge of a weld.) and a slightly slacker head angle. Most of the even slacker bikes were newer, which meant even longer forks, but by accepting that I might try a suspension fork, the possibilities suddenly expanded, a lot.
One of those was a newer Kona. With the switch to the wider boost rear axle standard, tire clearance had increased, and they'd also steadily slacked the head angle of their bikes since my race bike was produced. Alas, they'd also started speccing much longer forks as well as super short seat tubes to allow for long travel dropper posts, which really don't suit my tastes or my relatively long legs. There was a sweat spot of fairly slack designs, with still with a not huge travel fork nor short seat tube, sometime around 2021, which had me searching for "Kona Honzo 2021" as a way to navigate to the company's archive page.
But there was another hit: Bikeman had a closeout on leftover base Honzo frames, only in one size. It just happened to be mine. And it will be mine. UPS tracking predicts delivery today, so I'll see what they do about a driveway with just a two foot wide shoveled path, and thirty-three years later, it seems I've, for the first time, bought a brand new mountain bike frame from two of my old supporters. I've been pretty excited, and that was even before I noticed that it predates the switch to, awful in my opinion, internal cable routing. The colors are pretty rad too!
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