ABOUT US
While we're most widely known here at Competitive Cyclist for our passion for road cycling, our dirty little secret is that for every hour we log in a paceline, we spend an hour doing singletrack acrobatics on a trail far, far away from anything resembling cell phone coverage. Whether it's cracking open a lukewarm mid-ride Budweiser on a night ride, or cracking 9 hours for the golden belt buckle at Leadville, our off-road adventures have been as rich as our paved ones, and they've served to remind us that we have a deep bond to our customers for one simple reason: Roadies or off-roadies, they're no different from us. We all suffer from terminal wanderlust, a condition that takes form in an incurable craving to ride.
Mountain biking is a gear-intensive sport, and that's where we come in. We sell the very finest mountain framesets, bikes, wheelsets, and suspension available. Our mission is to be your oasis amidst the flea-market environment you find all too often in the world of on-line bike retail. The brands we sell -- Ibis, Intense, Santa Cruz, Turner, Ventana, Yeti, Mavic, Shimano, Industry Nine, SRAM, Manitou, Marzocchi, Fox Racing, Rock Shox, Ergon, Magura, Chris King, Easton, Cane Creek, and Formula to name a handful -- are the mountain bike industry elite. Our website is built to mirror the elegance and technological sophistication of the products they manufacture. You'll see that our prices are plenty low. But pricing aside, you'll quickly see that what elevates us above our competition is our ability and willingness to communicate with our customers -- our fellow cyclists, in our mind. Whether it's a technical or practical matter -- "What's the difference between an XTR and an XT rear derailleur?" "What's the status of the order I placed last Tuesday?" -- no other site does more to convey the vital information every serious cyclist desires.
We designed the Internet's original bike componentry calculator. We call it the Kit Calculator, and it's an interactive database system that allows you to compare and compile detailed price and weight information for any of the bikes we sell. You can explore your various component options all the way down to spoke gauge and nipple color. Revise your selections as often as you'd like, and once you've finalized your choices, you can submit your bike build specifications directly to us.
Our Fit Calculator is the most advanced interactive bike fitting system you'll find on the web. Other sites rely on decade-old formulas to provide you with a thumbnail sketch of your ideal frame size. When we made the decision to develop the Fit Calculator, it was specifically an effort to address the limitations of boilerplate solutions. We traveled to New York on several occasions to attend Serotta Bike Fit Certification seminars, we logged countless hours fitting people on our Fit Cycle, we analyzed systems such as the Fit Kit inside and out, and we worked with the cycling consultants at the Australian Institute of Sport. We expanded the scope of biomechanical variables taken into account by time-honored sizing methods, allowing us to achieve a new level accuracy for an automated system. Best of all, the fitting information we provide is mountain bike specific. You won't have to struggle with translating road bike fit data information into a form useful for your mountain bike -- we provide you with data specifically relevant to mountain bike fit.
More than anything else, we hope to become your resource as you shop for a mountain bike. We don't have order-taking meatheads answering the phone. Every member of our staff has a grasp of technical detail that's, well, awesome. And we know that the most effective way to share this knowledge is as unpretentiously as possible. We take much pleasure in demystifying jargon. Call us with a technical question, and we'll talk your ear off until we're sure that we're being clear and well-understood. Send us an e-mail and you can expect a reply within hours, not days. You can be assured that we'll build your bike with incredible care -- we receive feedback time and time again lauding us for our ability to make new bikes sing. Beyond this, we'll pack your purchase professionally, we'll ship it promptly, and we'll provide you a tracking number. When it's all said and done, our central purpose is to give you world-class service in an effort to give you total satisfaction with every purchase.
