I don’t know what possessed me.
Actually, I do.
Herself joined me for a ride on Friday, her first of 2025. We covered a moderate distance at a leisurely pace. The idea was for her to ease back into the activity while we looked for Gambel’s quail in the foothills. Not to eat. Just to see.
Both missions were accomplished. The high point was a pair of quail leading a dozen or so thumb-sized chicks through the scrub.
Back at the ranch, I glanced at Herself’s dusty, cobwebbed old Barracuda A2T mountain bike, slouched on two flats in a corner of the garage.
It’s so old I can’t remember just when I acquired it. But I remember where. Durango, during some long-ago Iron Horse Bicycle Classic, possibly the 1995 edition. So, exactly 30 years ago.
That would’ve been the year that Barracuda was sold to Ross Bicycles — you can read more about the company’s history here — and was blowing out Taiwan-built Tange Ultimate frames for $75 a pop during the Iron Horse.
“Why not?” I thought, being a cash-strapped freelancer trying to make his mark in Bibleburg. So I snatched one up and Old Town Bike Shop built it for me with some stuff I had on hand and a few bits I had to buy. (Sound familiar?)
There’s an anonymous RockShox elastomer fork, Deore V-brakes and levers, Crank Bros. Candy pedals, STX triple crank and rear derailleur with XT front, GripShift twist-shifters, Avenir stem and Zoom bar, and a mismatched wheelset — Mavic 230 SBP rim and anonymous hub (front) and Araya TM18 rim with Parallax hub (rear). A Terry saddle perches atop some ugly-ass no-name seat post.
And that was the high point of the 1995 Iron Horse for me. I had a shit road race, pulling a hamstring on Coal Bank Pass while leading a chase group and still facing the ascent of Molas Pass plus a snowy, wet descent into Silverton — “Worst time I’ve ever had at Iron Horse,” as I wrote in my training log — and spent the rest of the holiday weekend limping around Durango, covering the Roostmaster and the cross-country MTB race for VeloNews.
So, for the 30th anniversary of all that, I replaced the tubes in the Barracuda’s tires, checked the shifting, and took ’er for a spin round the cul-de-sac to see if everything worked.
It did. Including the hamstring.
Mad Blog Media 
Glad you resurrected it. It’s probably worth more to you than anyone else. Have the elastomer plugs in that fork turned into hard rubber? If you decide to keep it, maybe you could find a rigid steel fork for it. Is their an empty hook in the bike shop, I mean garage, for it?
There’s still some boing-boing in the old fork, but I think I’d like to have a pro check that out. Since HippieTech went away a few years ago I expect finding replacement elastomers might be a bitch.
And the tires? Mmm, those old WTBs are a little crispy, I think.
But everything else is in pretty fair shape. New tires, new housing and cables, some lube, p’raps a rigid fork if the boing-boing has gone bye-bye, and Bob’s your uncle.
I’ve not performed the task myself but I suspect with some investigation a person could pick up new urethane cylinder stock from McMaster-Carr that would work admirably well in the old Rock Shox fork.
If the terrible tariffs go into place, might be worth a spin on Herself’s buy and sell page.
You’d think that. But the swill I’ve been peddling on such a site isn’t doing that well at this time. I’m down about 45% from last year. It would be easy to say that the guidance of our good ship mira lolly pop is responsible but I suspect there’s a lot more involved. But I’ll happily use it as another reason to confirm the oval office chair heater hasn’t a clue.
Herself reports a similar decline in sales. “Maybe a combination” of factors, she muses. The thinking going into 2025 was that the e/Bay/Facebutt Marketplace resale market would be booming. Maybe people are sitting tight on their wallets waiting to see what’s what.
Although 45.1 million of us were supposed to travel for this holiday weekend. So … who knows? Spending on big-ticket items like vacations, travel, cars, and tech, while cutting back elsewhere?
Why would you spend money on that stuff when you could have a bike or guitar?
Or a bike and a guitar!
I added Grip Shift on a earlyMiyata Mtn Bike and loved it. Bullet proof. I’ll bet that Barracuda would ride just fine with the right steel fork and cushy tires. I wonder which factory built it as they were nice frames. Giant? Ideal? Fairly? Merida? In that same vintage time frame, I had a glued together Reflex from Easton. And it stayed bonded through some gnarly rides too. But I admit to always being scared by every squeak and rattle and worried about the WHEN not IF. Maybe that frame is still going strong out there somewhere?
what a great bike
Michele came down close to buying one oh Lisa Munich’s Barracuda cyclocross bike which she rode to a National Championship in 1993 when they hosted them at the Colorado School of Mines. Michele’s teammate Nancy Reynolds finished 2nd and former teammate was 3rd.
In the men’s race I believe Mark Howe made the correct choice of his steed on that particular day by going with
. I have a photo of you navigating the frozen ruts on an off camber turn 😬In the masters race
Good times
That was 1992, actually (still got the T-shirt). It was the only time I raced nats, though I helped lay out the course five years later in Lakewood and covered the races at Sea-Tac and San Francisco.
That Golden course was a bitch. Wet for a week of test rides and then a hard freeze turned all the ruts into a “Twilight Zone” slot-car track. I got edged out of a top-10 finish in the Masters 35 by a dude on a mountain bike. Man, was I ever pissed off.
Lisa was one of the good ones, like Ned Overend — never too cool to talk to us Little People at the races.
Lisa Muhich was a Mitten State native as was Johnny Tomac. Along with Roger and Sheila Young and of course Connie Paraskevin . Jeff Pierce and the Meingast Boyz along with many others. A lot of Olympic riders trained under legendary curmudgeon Mike Walden who had them speed skating in winter cause ….well …putting snow chains on your bike sucks. One of the coolest cycling venues is the Lexus Velodrome in Detroit brought into being by Walden’s family members and simply one of the more exciting evenings you’ll spend only a few feet away from the action.
Mike Walden. There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. Those speed skaters had thighs like T. Rex. The Thunder Lizard, not the band.
I’ve been upgrading and fiddling with the 2002 CAAD-5. Gotta write it up sometime as though I had O’Grady’s talent for bike reviews.
I call them “reviews,” but they’re really more like feature stories. SInce I can’t dazzle with technical brillance, I baffle with journalistical bullshit.
It can be illuminating to talk to the people behind the bike, see what they were aiming for, why they made some of the choices they did, explain any supply-chain difficulties that might affect component choices, and so on.
And of course to put my own biases — steel, rim brakes, friction shifting, fat tires, etc. — right out front to get them out of the way.