A Thousand Times No

Several years ago, I started leafing through Craigslist ads on a regular basis in hopes of picking up a nice secondhand road bike.  After several months, the most wonderful ride rolled into my life.

An Italian job (Olmo lugged steel frame; Deda stem and handlebars; Campagnolo gear gruppo, wheelset, and brakes; San Marco saddle), it had been custom assembled for its sole previous owner, but it had spent nearly all its life indoors hitched up to a trainer.  A glorious, candy-apple red, it was a perfect fit for me.

Within my first six months riding the bike, I was involved in a major crash: a dimwit riding several yards ahead of me on another bike thought it would be a good idea to make a U-turn across the passing lane without once looking over his shoulder or signaling.  He pulled directly in front of me and didn’t stop.  Moving at over 20 miles per hour, I shouted at the top of my lungs and T-boned him so hard that I literally flew over him, tearing a knee ligament as I came unclipped from my bike.

After several months of physical therapy, my knee would return to normal.  The bike, however, was not so lucky.  The fork was cracked, and the frame was rendered unusable when the headtube was stretched into an oval from the force of the impact.

The first thing I did was to try to find an exact replacement for the frameset.  Since the bicycle was already several years old, I could only pick up a frameset from the latest model year.  The most obvious difference: the frameset was silver, not red, and covered with a set of tacky, overly insistent decals.  It looked like a titanium wannabe, not the product of cool Continental craftsmanship that it actually was.

When I had my bike reassembled using the new frameset, a more serious problem emerged: the new fork was cut significantly shorter than its predecessor, dropping my handlebars down by more an inch and throwing a significant portion of my weight forward onto my hands.  My bike was no longer a good fit; riding for extended distances became tantamount to performing yoga.

I rode a great deal anyway, but I never felt the same way about the reformulated silver bike as I did about the original sweetheart red model — my heart didn’t skip with pride and expectation when I looked at it, or when I tossed my leg over its top tube.  In fact, I tried not to spend too much time looking at it closely: its aesthetic shortcomings acted as a permanent reminder, like a scar, from the crash.

I’ve already known for a while that next year I’m going to need to ride as I never have before.  Since I’ll be putting in more mileage and longer hours in the saddle, I really wanted to be excited about my choice of bicycle again. Not riding enough is simply not going to be an option.

I didn’t need, or want, a brand-new road bike.  After having my hide saved by the shock absorption of an all-steel frame, I was more determined than ever to avoid hopping on the carbon-fiber bandwagon.  My bike was very good, and it was tantalizingly close to being truly great.

Which is why I spent much of the day Friday inside a custom bicycle framemaking shop picking out a new fork looking at paint swatch samples to breathe new life into the current frame.  There were several beautiful blues, some lively greens and yellows, and numerous flirty pinks and reds, but nothing electrifying.

After a couple of hours of dragging paint chips out into the sunlight to see how they appeared in natural light, I was on the verge of giving up. That’s when we started to search for a missing paint chip in a giant color wheel, and I saw the answer:  Perfect Purple.

It was the energy of every snowy Vikings home game that I ever sat through at Met Stadium as a kid, every Prince song I ever danced to or sang along with growing up, all spun into a deep hue with a sparkling finish.  It was love at first sight, and the last word in color.

So starting next year, you’ll know how to spot me:  I’ll be The One With The Deep Purple Bike…and the giddy, deeply enamored grin.