Ridin’ the storm out, waitin’ for the thaw-out
On a full-moon night in the Rocky Mountain winter
My wine bottle’s low, watching for the snow
I’ve been thinking lately of what I’m missing in the city — Gary Richrath, REO Speedwagon

Rolling out of bed this morning after dreaming of bicycles I fell right into the old spin cycle, rolling down Memory Lane.

While inhaling my first cuppa I browsed over to Rivendell where Grant Petersen was musing about a well-used Centurion Accordo he saw recently, parked at a BART station. He made it for a 1985 model, priced in the low-$300s, which set me to recalling my own Centurion, the bike that put me back in the game in 1984.

Mine was a $320 Le Mans 12, red and silver, at 60cm just a skosh too tall for me. Didn’t care. I was an old Schwinn guy trying to quit smoking cigarettes and snorting cocaine, dial back my gargling of the tonsil polish, and in the process maybe shed a few elbees. I weighed 184 at the time, and sometimes — depending upon how many bumps and beers I’d had the night(s) before — it felt more like kilos than pounds.

I was already swimming laps in the overwarm pool at the Pueblo YMCA, and lifting weights. But the scenery never changes in the pool or the gym. So getting back on the bike seemed just the ticket.

And it was! It just took more than one bike, and more than a few years.

• • •

Moving on from Centurions (and their resemblance to his own A. Homer Hilsens) Grant went on to extol the virtues of SunTour components, in particular the Cyclone group, which did battle with the more expensive Shimano 600 group. He writes:

Shimano’s derailers were fine, too, but [in terms of] purely beauty and strength and value, nothing could beat SunTour’s Cyclone derailers. SunTour’s Cyclone went head to head against Shimano 600 (later, Ultegra) and I remember Bridgestone engineers explaining to me in great detail how much better it was … metallurgically, polish, design, and value (it sold for about 20 percent less than Shimano 600). That was SunTour’s strategy to fight Shimano’s better indexing, but partly because the Cyclone stuff was cheaper, people thought it was worse. 

Well, wouldn’t you know it? My next bike, a 1985 Trek 560, was equipped with SunTour New Cyclone-S, and I certainly didn’t think it was worse than whatever was on that old Centurion. Sleek and smooth, or so it seemed to me. As for the frameset, its main triangle was double-butted Reynolds 501, the stays True Temper cro-mo, and the fork Tange Mangalloy CCL. This was the bike that got me riding centuries and, eventually, racing.

Racing was good. I wasn’t, but trying to be helped me keep my nose clean (har de har har). And instead of pissing away money on expensive and illegal drugs, I pissed it away on equally expensive but completely legal bicycles and related gear, apparel, and aftermarket “upgrades.”

Like everyone else I left steel, SunTour, and friction shifting behind for aluminum, carbon, and Shimano STI. The old Trek was demoted to a bad-weather/wind-trainer bike, and eventually went away altogether, drifting off the back as technology drove relentlessly forward, Your Humble Narrator clinging to the wheel.

But the Great Wheel also spins, and I eventually found my way back to the idea of that bike.

• • •

We got a bit of winter this week that kept me off the saddle and in something of a mood. Trying to fill the frosty void I spent a little time swapping handlebars on my red Steelman Eurocross. I’d been muttering about getting rid of its deep-drop, long-reach Deda 215 road bar for a while, and with an assist from Old Man Winter I finally got ’er done, swapping it out for a Soma Hwy One bar just like the one on my other Eurocross.

The red Steelman, like my old Trek, is a blend of Reynolds and True Temper. No classy SunTour jewelry, alas; just clunky, scuffed Shimano ST-R500 Flight Deck brifters running Shimano 600/Ultegra derailleurs and Spooky cantis. I thought, briefly, about going to bar-end shifters, maybe nine-speed; new cassette with more teefers on the fat side, new rear derailleur, new chain, new brake levers and … and maybe not.

Frankly, it felt just a little bit too much like work. Skill set and personal preference dictate that I ride these things rather than wrench on them. Maybe some other time, on some other bleakly cold snow day.

And I couldn’t have gone back to downtube shifters even if I wanted to. There’s a set in the garage, awaiting the callup, but the Eurocross routes its cables along the top tube. No shifter bosses on the downtube. Maybe some bridges are better off burned.