The End is the Beginning

Twenty-some-odd years ago, I managed to fracture my L3, L4, and L5 vertebrae. It’s an injury that has followed me around for the rest of my life; lower back pain and issues are just part of existing. Thankfully, for the past year or so (I’m not actually sure how long) my back has been in good shape. There’s a couple of factors at play here: doing the absolute bare minimum amount of weightlifting my physio will let me, and a significant reduction in the amount of crouching-over-while-jogging that I’ve been doing.

Whether or not you remember it, one or both of your parents spent a lot of time crouched over, jogging along behind you as you learned to ride a bike. My experience as the Primary Jogger went in waves – at first it was for pretty much everything, all the tiny bumps at the smallest pumptrack needed a helping hand, and then my gaining-on-four-year-old ‘A’ had that dialled. And then he started into the bigger pumptrack, and needed help again. Rinse, repeat, add mountain biking roots and rocks and hills, repeat again. Dadcountry is hard on the spine.

I’d wiped my mind clean of this hamster wheel. A was crushing it on his run bike, very rarely needing any help at all and happy to hop off and push up or walk down tricky/steep sections, and he had no trouble doing everything in regular rotation at the pumptrack, BMX track, and North Shore (indoor) Bike Park. I was doing my physio! Life was great, and we had some all-time rides.

But like all things with children, this too was a phase. While I’m sure some grownup out there is still sitting astride a dandy horse, the vast majority of NSMB readers are probably using bicycles with pedals (or an aMTB equivalent). It was time for A to make the leap, and time for me to find out how much harder on your back riding-while-pushing-someone-up-a-hill is than jogging. Saddle dropped, leaned way over to one side, riding slowly uphill with one hand on the bars, always in danger of clocking your riding companion in the head with a handlebar, trying to keep them pedaling, and all the while pushing at the world’s most awkward angle. My back hurts, coach.

Before we go through the details on A’s new bike, it’s worth quickly recapping our story so far, and I need to eat a bit of crow. When discussing A’s previous bike, the Kids Ride Shotgun Dirt Hero, “I remember going back and forth in an outdoor basketball court behind my elementary school, wobbling around trying to figure out how to keep a bicycle upright when on one run down dad said, ‘I wasn’t holding on that time!’ My child will not share this experience.”

This was wrong. Utterly wrong. And while I still firmly believe that run bikes, strider bikes, whatever you want to call them are the best way for young kids to start bicycling… you’re still going to help them up and down the alley way the first few times. But I’m happy to report that after a couple of tears and struggles, we’re back in action, and riding more than ever. Challenges remain, and some parts of pedaling (well, the terrain and features he’s capable of) are a bit of a step backwards. Overall though, A will tell anyone who will listen about his “new bike with golden pedals.” Since he can’t write yet, it falls to me to tell you about it, too.

First though, we need to do a bit of wrap-up on the Dirt Hero. As a quick refresher, the Dirt Hero is a balance bike that can be equipped with 12” or 14” wheels, a disc brake, and is aimed squarely at parents – er… I mean aimed at kids who mountain bike. I’ll keep this brief, because it’s simple; I came away very impressed with the Dirt Hero. The fit and finish, components, durability, and neat kid-focused touches all left me impressed, and confident that it’ll go on to keep many more young shredders-to-be happy. A used it in both wheel configurations, and the Magura MT-4 is the best lever shape for tiny hands I’ve seen. It’s far from the cheapest balance bike out there, but they should also become more prevalent on the used market. If you’re searching for that first bike for your little one – or less than little one - I’m sold on the Dirt Hero. But we’ve reached the end of the Dirt Hero in our house.

Enter the Prevelo Zulu One. Despite being around for the better part of a decade now, Prevelo was off my radar until recently. But maybe isn’t a total shock; I also wasn’t in the market for kids bikes until recently either. The Prevelo story also isn’t a surprise; founded by a parent looking to maximize their children's early cycling experiences, and eventually turning that into a business. They offer a large line of kid’s bikes, covering all the major wheel sizes, and with different spec and geo options. There are also house brand components under the Heir moniker, covering cockpit, cranksets, and pedals.

This is the smallest pedal bike in the lineup – the Zulu One.* It rolls on 14” wheels, is ready for front and rear disc brakes, has the requisite single gear, and has geometry that is distinctly more “mountain bike” than some other kid’s bikes out there. There are some teeny cranks, some teeny pedals on the end of them, and handlebars designed for teeny hands.

*Yes, they’re just numerically ordered, and you go up in number through the line; Deniz and his progeny recently reviewed the much larger Zulu Four, with positive impressions.

The not-so-proverbial elephant in the room for kid’s bikes is their weight. The founder of Prevelo, Jacob, also acknowledges the challenge of kid’s bikes. Making them light is critical, but kid’s also lack any semblance of mechanical sympathy and abuse bikes like no reasonable adult ever could. These are fundamentally at odds with one another, and there’s no perfect solution. If you simply scale everything down perfectly in size and weight, one of the times it gets dumped, frame first on a parking curb by the playground, it’s going to break. Where most small pedal bikes land is somewhere in the 13–16-pound range, which sounds light until you realize this can easily be 50% of the mass of the rider. It’s the equivalent of me riding an 80-something pound bike. It's why you see the smallest BMX race bikes with road tires, and that every gram you can reasonably cut counts more than it would on a full size bike. Frames need to be tough, but I’ve already worked to strip weight off the Zulu One where I can. This has taken it down into the 14-pound range, from its initial ~15.5 pounds, and hopefully we can pull a bit more weight off.

The Zulu One comes with a host of features that are good for kids – good geometry, purpose-built components, and perhaps most importantly, A loves it. I’m looking forward to seeing how he progresses on it – a step in the very near future is adding a front brake (and annoyingly, the required half pound), which will be another big step he’s excited for. The gravel path to daycare is the bane of my existence as it maxes out at 15% or so, which is awful towing a trailer up. And as we’re discovering on our new rides home together from daycare, it’s just about too steep for one brake.

We're back at the weekly neighborhood BMX races after a haitus getting used to the new bike, although the dropping out of the gate into the fullsize jumps was something he could do on his run bike, he currently can't get up the faces of a few of them without help. Two steps forward, one back. He'll get there when he wants to, I'm sure.

I’m confident at this point that the Zulu One is built to last for not just one kid, but several. This is good because at 549 USD, it’s a premium priced product. I’m going to work to get some more grams off this thing, and A gets to find out that pedals can take you as far as you’re willing to go, and biking places can change the world.