It's been a week since Tour Divide started and many riders have already made it to the halfway point. They're going crazy fast! They can move this quickly thanks to better knowledge and training, but they also benefit from the improved performance of modern bikes and equipment.
In comparison, the bike and gear Mary Metcalf used to race the first Tour Divide back in 2008 feel pretty antiquated. But she did use some novel pieces a gear that many modern riders now take for granted. Check out our interview where she describes how she set up a bike for a multi-week race no one had ever done:
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Mary's Tour Divide Bike
- Custom built Siren Bicycles aluminum 29er softtail
- Titanium flex plate
- Cane Creek rear shock
- RockShox Reba fork
- SRAM X0 Drivetrain
- Middleburn cranks
- Phil Wood BB
- Stan's NoTubes ZTR 355 wheels
- Kenda Small block 8 tires
- On-One Mary handlebars
- Fred Bar "widget" with aerobar extensions
- Carousel Design Works bikepacking bags
Frame design, geometry, and components have gotten so advanced, 15-year-old mountain bikes are essentially vintage bikes now. But Mary's set-up gives us a glimpse at some of the earliest incarnations of mountain biking innovations in that we now consider mainstream: 29" wheels, tubeless wheels and tires, and bikepacking bags.
Mary also mentioned that "Frieda," the custom Siren Song that she rode, was designed to unbolt at the rear end in case she ever needed to pack it into a small box [for shipping]
"One other fun fact," said Brendan Collier, the frame's designer, "I welded on 'Hardpoints' under the bottom bracket where I thought we might have possibly been able to sling some sort of cargo, but we abandoned that idea. Also, I designed the bike with a low bottom bracket, and a relatively tall top tube to lower the Bikes center of gravity, and also provide for a larger frame bag space. We had a friend at SRAM/RockShox that built the fork for us and a friend at Cane Creek that built the rear shock which had been discontinued."
Another interesting takeaway from this story is that Mary and her former husband were actually the people behind the Fred Bar.
This is a segment from a longer interview we did with Mary on what it was like to race the first-ever Tour Divide in 2008.
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