Our Memorial Day sell-off starts at 8 a.m. on Monday, May 28th.  This sale includes rental mountain bikes, both hard-tail and full suspension.  There are very few 29ers in the May Sale.  They are simply too new to sell off.  You may preview the bikes the day before:  Sunday, May 27th.  We won’t have prices until that date.

The sale on the 4th of July will include Specialized demo mountain bikes.  We are not allowed to sell those until after June 30th.  The July sale will also include a variety of road bikes.

All of the sales also feature leftover treasures that are new to you, but old to us.

RAIN?   …always a possibility in Colorado!  Molly will lead a short fit seminar in the store if it is too wet to ride.  Bring your bike!

NEXT:  Beginner riding classes –limit of 5 riders–personal attention to your riding position, starting and stopping techniques, using gears.  Call for times and reservation.  $20/hour. 599-0149

Chick Fil-A Novice rides:  Tori leads a Saturday breakfast ride from Chick Fil-A on Garden of the Gods to Criterium.  Over the season, this ride will help novices prepare for the Ride for Heroes.

Training rides for the Ride for the Cure:  We need a ride leader to train novices for the Komen Ride for the Cure.  Rides will originate at Criterium.

There is a dark side of inflation, too.  The price of black butyl rubber has been steadily rising.   We can’t control this type of inflation, but we can develop some offers to keep your bicycle miles per dollar up.

For example, we did not want to compromise the quality of innertubes that we sell, so we now offer ‘bulk tubes’ of identical quality, without the box.  These tubes are available in most common sizes.  In addition to the bulk tube savings, we offer an additional $3 off when you purchase three tubes.   It gives you an incentive to keep a spare on hand.  Here is the math:   $10 tube in box, OR $6.52 bulk tube – $1 each with 3-tube discount = $5.52 before tax.   …just a little more than a gallon of gasoline, and probably good for hundreds of miles.

Our motto is ‘Start Here,’ and we mean that by age, as well as by location!

Yes, we are open Easter Sunday.  It looks like a good day for an afternoon ride.  Look for our daffodils and forsythia in bloom, and celebrate the season with Jelly Belly Sport Beans if the Easter Bunny skipped your house.

I remember meeting Josh at the counter in the downtown Criterium in the early 90’s.  He stopped by with a business card to introduce himself as a mountain bike advocate.  It sounded good to me, but I had to ask him to explain what it was that he did.   Over the next twenty years, I gradually figured out that attending meetings with public lands managers was as meaningful to him as organizing a team for Medicine Wheel members to swing picks and shovels.   He understood the direct-connect between public policy and having fun, as no other person has ever understood it.

Before anyone called it a ‘tipping point,’ Josh intuitively knew how to get the right thing done at exactly the right time.  He didn’t generally require any funding, which is unusual for an activist.  But there was a time when the County Parks Board could not find the $600 to secure the Section 16 lease, and Medicine Wheel was able to round up the funds in a few hours.  Without that intervention, Section 16 would have reverted to its owner–the State School Board–which was poised to sell it off.  We all learned that if Josh needed funds, we would be able to buy something well beyond our wildest dreams.   Today, Section 16 remains as it was, linking up the new Red Rocks Park with Bear Creek Park.

Josh believed implicitly in the power of riding single track trails.  He loved the idea that a trail could be created by simply using it, maintained by folks who cared about it, and reclaimed without much fuss.  He worked to keep single track on the agenda when land managers were thinking about trail construction that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per mile.   While other communities (think Boulder) have lost single track access and replaced it with big infrastructure (Valmont Bike Park), the Pikes Peak Region added miles of single track in the same period of time.  Our Medicine Man was always on duty.

Josh worked at Criterium as our Marketing Director between careers at Pepsi and Bristol Brewery.  He insisted that Criterium’s logo had to include an image of the bridge.  He ordered bottled water with a private label.  He insisted on a pictorial trail map on the outside of the building for trail users, and he made me advertise our clean restrooms to trail users.   These were not expensive marketing initiatives, but they all worked to establish Criterium as a kind of oasis for everybody on the trail.    At a time when we were complacent, he insisted on a higher standard of customer service to each and every visitor to this business.   There is no more important marketing than service delivery, and he always brought us back to our core business.  Even after moving on to Bristol, Josh came by to check up on Criterium.  This store has never had a greater friend.

–Kay and the entire Criterium crew

Until this year, the cost of a stand alone GPS unit was so huge it was hard to justify the expense.   That’s all changed now with the 2012 Garmin line. For the cost of the deductible on a broken smart phone you can now afford a well-made GPS unit. Keep the phone, too!   

So, don’t invest in a new mount to put your phone on the handlebars, but store it in a nice cushioned bed packed away in a pocket or pack.  The Garmin can handle the dirt, rocks, rain and mud that we come across on an average ride off road.    Stop in at the shop, check out the Garmin Edge 200, 500 and all the rest.

If you have a box of parts, a complete bike, or a skeletonized bike laying around the garage, bring it down to our shop as we are a major donation point for these two clinics.  Do not underestimate the usefulness of what you have–the experience and ability of the volunteers is considerable.