New Bike Day

It’s almost New Bike Day for me. Thanks to the fine folks here at NSMB and their slew of sponsors, I’ll soon be going for my first ride on a big, pink, loam-eating machine. Over the past month, the pile of parts has grown box by box, bringing me closer to the bike of my dreams. I can hardly wait, and most nights I drift into my basement to look at the boxes and remind myself that they’re real.

Next to all these boxes of goodies, there’s a filthy blue frame, encrusted with mud, sporting an array of mismatched parts. This is my current bike; a beat-up Norco Sight. I’ve only had it for half a year, but most of its components have made two trips across the continent and seen all different geographies of dirt. And beat as this Norco is, it reminds me of all my old-new bikes, back when they were fresh and sparkling.

I was 13 years old, and I needed a new bike for summer dryland training. My Dad took me to the rental shop at COP bike park, where they were having a sale on ex-rentals. The stallion we came to inspect was a bright orange Norco Storm. Hardtail. 29 inch. Seven hundred dollars. The poor bike was thrashed, as rental bikes tend to be, and the mechanic was no salesman. He told us to think about it, so we went down the road to Bow Cycle, where they were selling a bright orange Norco Storm. Hardtail. 29 inch. Brand new and on sale for … seven hundred dollars. Steal of a deal, we thought, so we took the damn thing home. It was my first ever New Bike Day – the best day of the year.

I rode that Norco to school all through the spring of ninth grade and began to explore the trails around my house. My friend Nick and I went to the bike park on the last day of classes, where I nearly folded the rear wheel in half. The rental shop mechanic tried his best to true it, but that wheel wobbled for the rest of the Norco’s life.

A year later, the hanger snapped off when the derailleur got mangled in my spokes. I learned the simple joy of walking into a shop with two small and bent bits of metal, praying they might “have something in the back.” I also learned the most basic equation in this sport; that the more you ride, the more you break. Between my rudimentary knowledge of derailleurs and our friend Calvin from Park Tool, I managed the repair myself, but the shifting was never quite right again. It was a nice complement to the rear wheel wobble.

After years of wrestling that orange Norco around Calgary, this thing called full suspension began to crowd my thoughts. A ski coach of mine hooked me up with a sweet deal on a demo bike, and so, five years after my first New Bike Day, Dad and I met the guy in a parking lot to look at a lightly used Scott Genius. 27.5+ tires. 120mm of travel in the back. Carbon front triangle, hydraulic brakes; the whole meal deal. It was the nicest thing I’d ever owned, and it cost a whopping thirty-five hundred dollars.

It took a whole summer to pay that bike off, working as cheap construction labour renovating my best friend’s basement. The work was hard and messy. We learned to frame and drywall. We tore carpet and demoed walls. We painted, and we painted again when one wall came out a shade lighter. It was fun, to be honest, but the best part of my day was always the ride to and from work, pavement princess on my brand-new bike.

I first loved The Scott because I could measure its worth in long days spent hauling drywall, but I grew to cherish it because it was a strange, strange beast. The two-pot XT brakes faded on long descents, the suspension linkage was creaky and self-loosening, and the cockpit was a nasty mess of cables thanks to the 2x drivetrain and Scott’s remote lockout system. It was sluggish in corners but snappy on tech, lightweight but slow-rolling, big in some ways, small in others. The generous cushion of those tractor tires mostly made up for the limited travel and aggressive geometry. Mostly.

Eventually I hauled The Scott across the continent to school in New Hampshire and rode with new friends who had bigger, burlier, faster bikes. I was completely naïve to the world of long and low, of slack angles and pillowy travel, and continued riding the Scott like it was something more than a pudgy tired XC bike. After one particularly long day at Highland bike park, I came to the reluctant conclusion that my bike was not, in fact, suited for hard downhill riding. In the name of safety, I listed the Spark for sale and started shopping.

Salvation came in the form of a “gently” used Giant Reign. Full 29er. Generous 170mm up front. Heavy-duty GX components. It set me back just over three grand, a little more than I managed to get for my Spark. I considered it a pretty reasonable upgrade, except for the crack in the frame, but I didn’t know about that quite yet.

The Reign was everything I had hoped for; bigger, burlier, cushier. I learned to fiddle with all the knobs and dials on my souped-up suspension. I floated down the Razor’s Edge, a Bow Valley classic and the scariest trail I’d ever seen, where Paul and I both flatted on the same fin of rock. It punched right through the sidewall, my fresh new sealant ineffective at best. I flatted again and again after that, dented my rims and chewed through tires.

I loved my Reign until the end of that summer when, poaching laps at COP, I landed a couple feet too deep off a drop and felt a percussive crack up through the bones of my legs. Inspecting the frame later, yes, there it was. A hairline crack spread right up through the bottom bracket, woefully confirmed by a throng of mechanics at the shop. Not all was lost, though, and a couple hundred dollars bought me patched-up bottom bracket, good as new if you didn’t look to closely.

Bit by bit, parts on the Reign broke, stopped working, or otherwise jammed up, but the repaired bottom bracket held firm. Yes, there was a creak, and yes, there were skeptics, but I loved my Reign. It came to Vancouver with me, but by then the creaks were getting louder and the rear end was suspiciously sloppy.

As bomber as it may be, the trouble with patched carbon is that nobody in their right mind will buy it. Then Bailey, who knew a guy or three, managed to rake up a solution to my fun little problem: a sparkling blue Norco Sight frame, with near-identical specs. Aluminum. Little bit longer, little bit slacker. I transferred the bulk of my Giant branded parts onto this Norco frame over a couple quiet days at the shop where I worked, and there it was. New(ish) Bike Day again.

Luke at the shop called it a frankenbike, and he was right. Within months, a carved-up stanchion had been repaired with nail polish and the rear wheel replaced after an incident involving a rusty nail. I don’t clean it as often as I should, and there’s a persistent rattle that I can’t quite track down. It’s the best bike I’ve ever owned, but isn’t that how it should be?

All my bikes have been more than good enough. Always a little weird, scarred by one too many dings and dents and things-that-shouldn’t-be-bent. Often the butt of the joke, with nineteen cables out front and 2.8” tires, a sloppy carbon patch, a chorus of creaks and rattles. Yet I loved them, all of them, because I wouldn’t be here otherwise.

New Bike Day is coming again, soon. The Newest Bike of them all. I’ll deck out my fancy frame with the latest gadgets, and I’ll love my Santa Cruz with all my heart, but I don’t think I’ll sell the Sight just yet. I’ll keep it around in the basement. Sometimes, when I start to forget the sound of that rattle, I’ll take it out. Like calling an old friend, we’ll settle into an easy conversation. The kind only we can have.