I have many reasons to be grateful to my father - and, it must be said, to my mother as well. Hi Mom! - but one of the best is that he forced me to abandon the idea of making a living in BMX while I was still young and impressionable. Had he not grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and forced me to go back to school many, many years ago, it is entirely possible I would today be working full-time in the industry, perhaps as a "BMX Journalist". And what a miserable job that would be.
It's not just the long hours, low pay, and abject prostration before seventeen-year-old dirt-jumpas that makes the BMX color rag trade such a lousy one - it's the need to write the same story over, and over, and over again. "Grand Nationals Feature Intense Racing Action!" "Dave Mirra Interview!" "Awesome Street Comp Rocks The City!" "Factory Pro Caught At Nightclub With Farm Animal!" In a sport with fifty percent annual turnover and a limited number of proven "exciting" subjects for articles, most color rags are forced to print the same stories, lightly whitewashed with different factory pro names and currently popular turns of phrase, (such as "Rad!" "Super-Sano!" "Dawg!" "XXXtreem!") year after year. To the new riders who read them, they are new; to the old riders, they are skippable filler. Only their editors are forced to look behind the curtain and see the rusty machinery which turns the gears of their stilted prose and blurry photos. These are the zombie stories, the tales which march back and forth across the thread of BMX publishing history... oh, man, somebody stop me. Okay. They were pretty much the same articles every time. Get it?
One such article, and it was one that appeared with clockwork regularity in every fourth BMX Plus! and BMX Action for the duration of my cycling youth, was "How To Make Your Bike Better for (insert amount of money here)". Install super-light tubes! Put nickels in the ends of your grips! Add a Skyway Spinmaster! The possibilities were nearly endless, limited only by the wishes of that issue's largest advertisement buyer, and riders were held spellbound at the idea of having a much cooler bike for very little money. It was a great story, eminently repeatable, and it filled a lot of space for a lot of editors over the years...
... but it's seemingly disappeared lately, replaced by the endless and cheerless parade of brown bikes and brown-bike people that has infested every color rag from Plus! to Transworld BMX. What a shame. It was a BMX tradition, a much better BMX tradition than, say, the Florida-based Christmas Nationals, which is not a tradition at all but rather an example of how easy it is to bully and intimidate the NBL Board of Directors... so we might as well revive it here. The story, that is, not the bullying. Hope I'm being clear on this. Without further ado, then, let's go faster... for five hundred bucks, for fifty bucks, or for free. And we'll do five of each, just to make sure the letter "f" appears in here as often as it does in a brown-bike mag, albeit for different reasons... and just because this is BMX Basics, we'll include one "Useless" entry for each section, too.
Lucky you! You've got five hundred dollars to go faster with. This should be the easiest of my three sections to write.
#1: A New Factory Complete. Some super-insightful BMX writer I am, huh? Suggesting a new bike... of course! But wait a minute. The fact is that, given five hundred dollars, most riders wouldn't buy a new complete. They'd drop the money into the bike they already have, when in reality that often is not the best option. Why buy exotic wheels or cranks for a bike with a tired frame, worn-out bars and headset, or just plain rusty and corroded components? There are some great factory completes out there for four and five hundred dollars. MOSH, Redline, and Free Agent all make standout completes in that price range, often with the same components you'd pay a few hundred bucks more to assemble yourself on a similar sold-separately frame. A new bike, with all-new parts, can be a great alternative to expensive upgrades. Think about it.
#2: A Week-Long Racing Roadtrip. It's a simple concept for older riders and ones with understanding parents. Load up the car on Sunday. Visit one track a day for five days, preferably ones you've never seen before. Spend all day at the track dialing each one in. Take some video if you can. Learn the different features of each track and the best way to get over them. Sleep in your car each night if you have to. Drive home on Saturday. Get some rest. For the properly motivated rider, this can add more speed potential than any carbon fiber, super-trick part in the world.
Most riders have trouble adjusting to new tracks in a hurry, because they don't have a lot of experience doing so in a success environment. What's a "success environment"? It's one where you are not immediately punished for mistakes. It's common practice for many riders to ride their local track until they have it dialed and then suffer at Nationals because they don't have the experience of successfully learning different tracks. Try spending one day each at five different tracks, learning the pitfalls, perils, and passing lanes of each one, and that experience will stay with you. Ask a freestyler - riding other parks makes you a better rider at your home skatepark. The same is true for racing, but most of us only travel when we race. Problem is, that makes for some stressful track-learning. Try it without the stress, and see how well you can train yourself to handle tracks "generically". Wouldn't it be nice to arrive at a new track for a National and realize that you have seen most of the jumps before, somewhere else, and that you have a pretty good idea of how to handle them all? That's what a low-stress traveling environment can do for you.
#3: A street/dirt/vert wheelset. Once upon a time, everybody rode their race bike everywhere... to the track, to work, to the local trails, to the skatepark, you name it. I have always believed that it was best to focus on a single bike and really get to know that bike... unfortunately, today's off-track challenges can rapidly prove to be too much for a modern racing bike. Still, you can have 90% of the benefit of riding the same bike all the time while reducing your damage potential significantly, just by buying a second, off-track-oriented wheelset. You could, for instance, get a heavy 36-spoke wheel up front with a flat 14mm-axled 48-spoker in back, or you could get a general-purpose set of 48s. Changing the wheels on your race bike won't allow you to frame grind the coping on a spine, but it will permit you to ride box jumps or trails with a little more confidence. Of course, you're not riding one of those "Ultra Box"-style frames, because if you were you'd better just go ahead and get another bike to ride street/trails, just for safety's sake... and while you're at it, get another bike to race, just so nobody gets hurt...
#4: Upgrade your interfaces. Handlebars, particularly sub-.049 tubed handlebars, wear out and become flexy. Headsets ovalize and bind. Pedals wear unevenly. If your bike feels "old", and your wheels and frame are in decent shape, try upgrading the "interface" - in other words, the way you connect to the bike and track. Get a new set of lightweight bars, a decent stem, a King or Cane Creek headset, a new-generation lightweight Cr-Mo fork like the ones sold by Odyssey and Supercross, and a good set of pedals.
For $300 or a little more, depending on your pedal choice, you can completely improve the way your bike feels at speed. In my case, replacing the flexy, worn-down Snafu pedals on my ramp bike with new-generation Crupi platforms took virtually all the tactile flex out, making me more confident on large halfpipes and street drop-offs. Riders who run SPD are particularly likely to wear out their pedals, as there is less flex absorption in the shoes, so it's always worth taking a look at your clippy pedals to see if they need a swap-out. Even if they are very far from breaking, the increased stiffness provided by a new spindle and pedal body can make a usable difference.
#5: A complete cycling toolset. Many is the time I have seen someone using a Vise-Grip and a flat-head screwdriver to fix a thousand-dollar race bike. These same people wonder why they have the best of everything on their bikes but their riding experience is so poor. Time and time again, it has been shown that a well-adjusted $300 bike is faster than a slopped-up $1500 one. The increase in longevity can be substantial as well; when you adjust and tighten parts to the proper spec, they are far less likely to break.
The problem for most young riders is that having a decent set of cycling tools doesn't impress their buddies the way having the newest carbo-wrapped-ultra-luminum gimmick does. Maybe they'll be impressed by the way your bike outlasts theirs, or the way your bike doesn't creak and squeak over every jump. Or maybe they won't... but the benefits of having and using the correct tool for the job outweigh the rewards of posing any day, particularly race day.
The "Useless" prize: a new frameset. This is the fashion victim's choice. In reality, and beyond the color-rag hype, most current race bikes have pretty similar geometry, weight, and performance. If your frame is dangerously worn, or if you have outgrown it, go ahead and replace it, but the fact is that most frame replacements are done just to show off to friends or to scratch the itch that six-page color advertisement put in your head three months ago. A high-quality Cr-Mo frame will usually outlast nearly everything you can attach to it. Many riders are too quick to attribute flex to a frame when the real culprit is their wheels or handlebars. Naturally, if you have an aluminum frame you will want to make sure you do not exceed the lifetime of said frame, but the rest of us can spend our money elsewhere.
Fourteen hours of minimum-wage employment, post-tax; playing rhythm guitar for a well-liked bar band; donating plasma twice. There are a lot of ways to come up with fifty dollars. Many of them are illegal. Regardless, if you have fifty dollars we can make you faster, and how you came up with the money is between you and your conscience.
#1: Less knobs, more speed. The BMX tracks of the Seventies were pretty rough. Rocks, tree roots, "washboard" sections... it was a lot like the motocross of the day, which is why it was called Bicycle Motocross. In the so-called "modern" era of the sport, with mechanical rollers, clay top layers, and watering-down between motos, why are you still running tires designed for the 1979 JAG World Championship? The worst current offender in this regard is the Tioga Comp III. It's a great tire for dusty, rough, or just plain slippery tracks, but on a well-groomed surface you can feel every one of those eight-millimeter-tall knobs drag along. Take your fifty bucks and get a set of smoother, trail-oriented tires. If you are feeling brave, you could try a semi-slick tire in the rear for even more speed. The difference you get by running a lower-rolling-resistance tire is very real, and the faster you go, the more benefit you will receive.
There's just one problem: some day, you will have to race a crummy, Seventies-style track, and you will end up doing what I did last year in front of "BMX Basement" webmaster Rich Hetzel: taking a high-speed front-wheel slide-out right off the top of a berm onto the rocky surface below. Ow, ow, ow. Better keep a Comp III around for the front, just in case, along with a spare tube... but nine out of ten times you will be much faster on low-knob tires. In fact, it's the easiest and most dramatic improvement you can possibly make. Trust me.
#2: Drivetrain upgrade. After your tires, the next highest source of friction on your bike is your chain. Most riders are running the wrong chain and suffer as a result. Save the moped chain for your skatepark bike, and save the cheap, heavy chains for your garbage can. Try running a top-quality eight-speed mountain/road bike chain like a Shimano IG91 or Sachs PC81. If it fits your freewheel and chainwheel, you will be surprised at how much less friction your drivetrain has as a result. Make sure you get the best chain possible, and make sure it fits, which means avoiding nine-speed chains at all costs. While you're at it, swap your freewheel, too.
Larger riders will want to be careful about this. I snapped an upper-range Sachs chain last year during an all-out gate start, and if you are in the 200+ pound weight, 500+ pound squat range it's worth being a little cautious. I run an IG91 on my race bikes nowadays. It's a little heavier than the hollow-pin chains but I feel more confident with it. Still, a better chain will add easy speed for almost any rider.
#3: Chainwheel timing day. Buy a smaller or larger chainwheel. Go to your favorite track. Have a friend time you around the track, running your original gearing and your new gearing. Make sure you don't bias the test: warm up for a while and then stay rested. If your new chainwheel makes you faster, keep it. Otherwise, return it or sell it, and try a chainwheel in the "opposite direction" - if you were running 44/16 and were slower trying 43/16, try 45/16 and see what happens. You could also get another chain and try a really weird gear combo, just to see what happens. Former MCS and GT pro David Milham won quite a few races on 52/16 gearing, even at the age of fourteen! You might be the next Milham, but if you never try, you'll never know.
#4: Video gate day. Borrow a video camera and notepad. Go to the track for gate practice night. Videotape each of your gates from the same location. After every run, take your notepad and write your impressions, being sure to number each run. After ten gates, sit down with the camera and review your performance, comparing your notes with the actual performance you see on tape. Do this three or four times. Go home and watch on the big screen, reviewing against your notes one more time. Rinse and repeat. If you do this a couple times, you will not fail to improve your gate. Furthermore, if you learn how your impressions, as written in your notepad, correspond with reality, as seen on the video, you will be better able to tune your gate on the road, where you will not have the time to review with a camera.
#5: Blueprint your bike. Time to make your bike as good as, or better than, new. Buy some Phil's Waterproof Grease if you can find it, or some general-purpose automotive grease if you cannot. I've used disc brake grease in the past with some success. You will also want to get some real bicycle oil from a manufacturer like Pedro's or Finish Line. Remember, WD-40 is great to displacing water (which is what it was originally designed for) but it's really a lousy bike oil, no matter what the people at GT say. While you're at it, get some automotive metal polish - "Mother's" is pretty decent and can be found at most large stores. You will also want some "orange cleaner" or Simple Green. Buy some new rags. Make sure you have all the tools you need to take your bike apart and put it back together. With the rest of your fifty bucks, buy a new set of grips and some replacement pins for your pedals (or maybe a new set of cleats for your clipless shoes, if you use them.) Last but not least, spend five bucks on the correct Park spoke wrench for your wheels.
Take your bike all the way apart. Using the rags, the cleaner, and maybe a toothbrush, scrub everything down. Get all the old gunk, dirt, oil, grease, and other offensive substances off. Once everything is dry, you can polish the bare aluminum and steel surfaces with your metal polish. If you have a truing stand or can borrow one, now is the time to retension and true your wheels. (I've written a couple columns about how to do so.) If you feel comfortable breaking the seal on your crank or wheel bearings to regrease them, go ahead and take care of that now. Got a couple bucks still burning a hole in your pocket? Why not take all your Allen bolts to the local hardware store and see if you can find stainless steel replacements for them, or at least new Grade 8 bolts which you can polish up a bit?
Now you can reassemble your polished and cleaned bike, taking care to grease what needs to be greased and oil what needs to be oiled. Get everything to spec. Swap your new grips on. Change your pedal pins or cleats. If you use your brake as a wheel truing guide, go ahead and true your wheels now. Congratulations, you're done. If your bike was like most bikes I see at the track - dirty, maladjusted, running on dry bearings - it will be like having a new bike, and everybody knows that new bikes are faster!
The "Useless" choice: a super-trick seatpost. You've been eyeing that $49.99 "clearance sale" gimmick post, but unless the rest of your bike is up to par, what's the point of putting an old, heavy seat on a carbon seatpost and then putting said post in a dirty, maladjusted bike?
In reality, nothing's free, because your time is worth something, but let's face it: most young racers have more time than money anyway. The day will come when you have more money than time, but by then you'll be out of the sport and doing something respectable, like playing golf or running a law firm specializing in mergers and acquisitions. So let's not worry about that yet.
#1: Air it out. If you can't afford a set of modern tires, you can at least inflate the ones you have properly. Most riders don't run enough tire pressure. Spend an afternoon at the track, starting at the recommended tire pressure and inflating five psi every few laps until the front end starts to slide out on you. Do the same with the rear tire. Although I cannot recommend that you exceed the listed tire pressure on the sidewall, because that would be unsafe, I can tell you that I have never blown a tire off the rim running high pressure. I'm currently running 75psi on my race bike and 90psi on my street bike. You feel the bumps a little more, but the first time you roll downhill past people who are pedaling furiously, you'll appreciate the difference. Naturally, you'll want to keep an eye on your sidewalls to make sure they are not fraying or wearing out, because a frayed sidewall is a guaranteed blowout at any pressure.
#2: Straight and true. Make sure everything on your bike is tightened correctly, and that your handlebars, wheels, and cranks are all assembled straight. Don't laugh; about a quarter of the bikes I see at the track have crooked bars. When your bars are crooked, you will not pull properly, and that slows you down. When your wheels are not straight in the dropouts, you have to turn slightly to go straight, and that slows you down. When your wheels are not true, you cannot adjust your brakes reliably, and that means you will brake sooner going into the turn than you should. Get your bike squared and straightened away.
#3: Speaking of brakes... Chances are that your brake pads are maladjusted and covered with a gunky mixture of track dust and chain oil. Take them off, rub them against a concrete sidewalk until the braking surface is rough and dull-looking, (being careful, of course, not to wear them past the stamped replacement line) and reinstall with a slight toe-in. Nearly every rider I have ever worked with hits their brakes too early going into a tight turn. I think this is because at some level they don't trust their brakes. If you can wait half a second to brake, you will leave that turn half a second ahead, which could win you the race.
#4: Stop throwing it all away. There I was... twenty minutes before I was supposed to leave for a big mountain biking trip, and I had just stripped out a derailleur pulley attachment bolt while installing some new pulleys. At five a.m. on a Sunday, there's no way any bike shop could possibly be open. Imagine the horror! In fact, there was no horror at all, because I went to my basement, located a the box which contains all the derailleurs I have broken in the past, and took a pulley bolt from one of those broken pieces, carefully wiping down and replacing the rest of the derailleur in its box.
When you break a part, or replace it with something better, don't throw it out. Clean it up, get the oil and dirt off, spray it with WD-40 to preserve it (I knew it! I knew there was something WD-40 was good for! Just keep it away from your chain) and place it in a well-marked box where you will know how to find it. There's a reason for doing this, even though it may gratuitously anger your parents, sibling, or spouse. You see, bicycles are made up of many parts which may bend, break, or simply fall off at any given time. Unfortunately, most of these parts are only sold in entire assemblies such as a derailleur or brake lever. When you break, bend, or lose one of the parts which is not sold separately, what can you do, besides whimper in terror? You can go back to your store of used parts and find what you need. This is particularly true for brake components, which typically have all sorts of itty-bitty bolts, nuts, adjustments, and sundry custom parts. Why, just the other day my friend Martin received an interesting gift from one of his co-workers: a nearly complete Avid Speed Dial brake lever. It was easily a thirty-dollar item, and his co-worker had cherished it... until the brake adjusting barrel snapped and none of the barrels his local shop offered would fit. So off it went to Martin, who also had no idea where to find a brake barrel for an Avid Speed Dial. Luckily for him, back in 1993 I retired a Dia-Compe X-1 mini-mountain lever to my parts stash after breaking its lever arm. Guess what? Looks like Martin has a nearly new brake lever at no charge. My "stash" has rescued me time and time again. If you get in the habit of saving your old parts in a manner which preserves them and leaves them easily accessible, you will thank yourself years, months, or even days down the road.
#5: Fluid dynamics and cutting the chatter. Get in the habit of drinking lots of water before you go out for a ride/race/whatever, and always bring water with you if possible. A gallon jug in a regular backpack won't impede your riding to and from the "spot" and will help you get more performance once you are there. A good combination of periodic rest and constant hydration can keep you riding long after your friends are tired out. Once you are at the trails, track, skatepark, whatever, try to resist the temptation to just sit around chatting with your buddies. Rather than riding a section twice and talking for ten minutes, try riding the section, having some water, waiting until your heartbeat drops a touch (but not all the way to rest) and going again. That's a proven fitness builder and it will help you get the most from your ride. Most people don't consider a trails section or skatepark a fitness builder, but if you ride it correctly you can improve your skills and your fitness at the same time. You'll feel the results when you are racing your quarters and semis. There's plenty of time to talk once you are tired out.
The "Useless" choice: Skipping track days. In order to be a great BMX racer, you have to spend as much time at the track as possible. I can't express how it frustrates me to see racers at the trails or on the street, sitting on thousand-dollar bikes, saying they can't afford a gate practice night or local race. You can't afford not to spend time at the track. Instead of going street riding and spending six bucks eating at Burger King in the middle of the ride, do a five-dollar gate practice night and then have a ninety-nine-cent can of tuna and some water, Jeff Dein-style. Believe me, there will be plenty of time to ride street and goof off when you are in your thirties and don't have the knees to race competitively anymore. Get out to the track, drop those gates, and ride!
I would be careless of my duty to you, my reader, if I did not close by noting that, in the end, spending money has very little to do with being faster. In 1987, the NBL #1 Pro was a fellow named Tommy Brackens. He had started racing at the age of seventeen, without a decent bike, and without any help from parents, friends, or neighbors. Two hard years later, he had managed to find some sponsorship help; two years after that, he was #1. Tommy beat a lot of people with super-trick bikes, a lot of people who hit every National of the year in custom RVs, a lot of people who were supposedly more skilled, stronger, more likely to win. He shocked the world... and I was there to ask him how he did it. His answer? "I tried really hard." Maybe next month I'll come up with "Fifteen Ways To Try Really Hard"... but what will my advertisers think?