Repack By

[Raina Giorno]

Lookingback from the perspective of the 21st Century, there is no reasonable explanation for the fact that the Repack Downhill "clunker" race managed to take place for four years from 1976 to 1979. It came back for two encores in 1983 and 1984 as NORBA-sanctioned races, the first ever sanctioned downhill races in the history of mountain bike competition. The last Repack race saw 95 competitors, and attracted the type of attention that ended the event forever. Because it is such a departure from all previous forms of bicycle racing, I often wonder whether downhill racing would have become a sanctioned event had Repack not been recognized so early by NORBA.

The Repack Downhill, vertical skateboarding and BMX all began at roughly the same time, the mid-seventies, and these California expressions of exuberance are the origin of what are now called Extreme Sports, leading to the "X-Games."

We had a pretty good run. After working out the bugs in our timing system over the first few races, I promoted five or six races each year, with prizes and posters for the last couple of years, and no entry fees. Despite the facts that all the local off-roaders knew about the race and that several of the racers were firefighters, the authorities never caught on, and we never had to deal with any sort of official presence interfering with the races. There were a lot of cuts and bruises and probably a few concussions because helmets were not required and hardly ever used, but the worst injury I remember seeing was a broken arm, fortunately not mine.

I first saw what later became known as "Repack" from the back of a motorcycle driven by Fred Wolf in 1973, poaching fire roads. He had found a very steep road that we drove up during an exploration trip that took place before all fire roads were closed to vehicles. Or maybe a little while after they were closed. Some time later, Fred and I and Peggy Madigan spent a long day with our coaster-brake one-speeds, pushing them up the supersteep hill and coming down by a different route.

In the early seventies, my roommate Gary Fisher and I were both road cyclists, equipped with the best Italian road race bikes, but these were not very practical for local transportation, so we had put together a couple of old one-speeds for use running errands. We were both members of Velo-Club Tamalpais, and a contingent of club members such as Joe Breeze, Otis Guy and Marc Vendetti also took up using old one speeds for town bikes. With the example of the Larkspur Canyon Gang and their longtime practice of bombing down Mount Tamalpais, it wasn't long before we started hitting a few of the trails and fire roads around Fairfax.

In 1974 a half-dozen riders went on the first of what has become an annual ride, the Thanksgiving Day Appetite Seminar. The route we chose ended with a trip down Repack, and it was shortly afterward that someone applied the name that has become one of the most famous in mountain biking history. It's not a joke, it's just the truth. One trip down that hill put years of wear onto a coaster brake, and if you did not immediately disassemble it and repack all the bearings with grease, the hub would seize up very shortly afterward.

You couldn't use just any coaster brake either. All the kinetic energy of the descent is turned into heat, and the old brakes had no means of dissipating it from the relatively small surface area. The most common coaster brake found on old bikes is the New Departure. The reason they were so common was that they were the most cheaply made of the coaster brake hubs; they worked very well under ordinary conditions, but would explode halfway down Repack. Bendix brakes were good, as long as you found an old one, machined out of a solid piece of steel stock. The newer Bendix brakes were made in Mexico, and the stamped hubs were no comparison to the real thing from the 1930s. Mussleman brakes were pretty good, but the gold standard was the Morrow. You might even get away with a couple of trips down Repack with a Morrow before having to maintain it. Good luck finding a Morrow, though. I never had one of my own, and made do with a series of Mussleman and Bendix brakes. If you abused your coaster brake by riding off-road, you had to be familiar with the insides of it, because you had to tear it down a lot.

An entire generation of mountain bikers has grown up and worn out several bikes since those days, and few of them ever had the opportunity to ride a coaster-brake bike in the kind of scary terrain that we learned our skills on. There is simply no comparison between modern suspended bikes with hydraulic brakes and multiple gears, and the patched together, coaster-brake one-speeds that first conquered Repack. Now when I ride the same roads on modern equipment, it astonishes me that I survived all the rides I took on coaster brake bikes. Some of these hills are challenging enough even on modern dual-suspension bikes.

The first thing you have to learn about coaster brakes (and no front brake) is that stopping is out of the question. Fortunately, because you have no front brake, the front wheel rolls through and over just about anything. As long as there is some road in front of you, and as long as you can stay on it, you're probably all right. Once we had made a few trips down Repack, the skidding tires marked the proper line through blind corners. All you had to do was lock up your brake somewhere near the top of the hill, and point the front wheel down the groove worn in the road surface. On turns you had to brake with the outside foot while dragging the inside foot, and sometimes that meant letting off the brake briefly to switch feet. That was always a scary moment because you had to take half a pedal stroke to set up the pedal for braking on the other side.

The balance of a coaster-brake bike is completely different from a modern bike, because the braking pressure is applied a crank length behind the bottom bracket, while a modern cyclist balances himself on the bottom bracket. A front brake throws the rider's weight onto the front wheel, which has more braking power than the rear, while the coaster brake rider tries to throw as much weight on the rear wheel as possible.

The further you get down Repack the less effective your coaster brake becomes. It's not the hill, it's the heat causing the brake to fade. I had several rides where it was not possible to lock up the brake by the time I hit the bottom, and that's fairly serious on Repack. You would certainly get a third-degree burn if you touched one of these hubs at the bottom of the hill. You might as well heat a frying pan and put your hand on it. There is smoke pouring out of it, because the rider put a lot of grease in before the ride and it's been heated far beyond whatever it was made to do.

At a Marin County cyclo-cross race in 1974 several fat-tire riders from Cupertino about 50 miles to the south showed up with derailleur gears on their old Schwinns. Russ Mahon was the driving force behind a group of riders with ideas remarkably similar to ours, but they had already gone to derailleur gears. Gary Fisher was the first in our crowd to follow suit. One day in 1975 he came back to the house from the flea market with a disassembled tandem, a wreck really, missing too many parts and far too small for either of us to ride. But it had a huge, heavy, steel drum brake rear hub set up for a freewheel. Gary laced up a rear wheel and after some frame bending got it to work on his old Schwinn, and the improvement in performance of his 50-pound bike was enough that within a couple of months tandem drum brake hubs were the hottest item at Marin County bike shops.

Since Gary and I were roommates, I was among the first to follow his lead in converting my bike. By the time the first Repack races took place, most of the Fairfax and San Anselmo riders had switched from coaster brakes to derailleur gears and drum rear brakes made for tandems, and drum front brakes. These had the advantage of providing better braking and a different handling balance from coaster brakes, plus you didn't have to let off the brakes to set up for a turn because you could backpedal. The disadvantage was that these brakes faded too, and the grip required to operate them while steering and hanging on paralyzed your hands. We used the biggest motorcycle levers to get enough leverage.

Front brakes were not as easy to find. You could get steel drum front brake hubs from Sturmey-Archer, or you could use an old Arnold-Schwinn drum front hub if you could find it. Most commonly you found a wrecked Schwinn 20-inch bike from the popular Krate series, sold under names such as Apple Krate or Lemon Peeler. These bikes are super collectible now, but there were over a million sold between 1968 and 1974 when the design was banned by the CPSC, so they were easier to come by in the '70s than vintage parts from the '30s. A Krate had an aluminum drum front brake, which was all you wanted, and you threw the rest of the bike away. They were drilled for 28 spokes, so you added four more holes on either flange to lace your 36-spoke wheel.

As we took to the hills on fat tires between 1974 and 1976, we found ourselves racing on the downhills. It seemed that whenever we started off the top of whatever hill we had arrived on, every rider wanted to be the first to the bottom. Whenever more than a couple of riders wanted to use the same road, it got pretty crowded, and the informal competition heated up as the more aggressive riders didn't mind risking other riders' lives.

A few arguments about aggressive riding techniques led to the idea of having a timed downhill race, in order to settle once and for all time which of a half-dozen riders was the fastest, without having to contend with other riders in the way. Repack was the choice for a course because it was close to Fairfax, and it had a gnarly drop of 1300 feet in less than two miles. There might have been a hundred dirt roads in Marin County suitable for downhill racing, but Repack had location, location and location.

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