Leadville 100 is back this weekend and the iconic U.S. high-altitude marathon mountain bike race is, as ever, inspiring some interesting gear choices.
The 100 mile XC marathon, like many marathons, forces racers to choose between efficiency in high speed sections and safety (of gear and body) on more technical parts of the course. Leadville, though, is one of the more extreme courses in its terrain differences. A long stretch of paved roads connecting singletrack and very rough doubletrack forces riders to either sacrifice all-out speed on the road or to sacrifice descending speed – and safety – on the more natural sections of track.
This year, two of the front runners are opting for the drop-bar monster bike approach. One is pre-race favourite, multi-time winner and current record-holder Keegan Swenson. The other is Dylan Johnson of the Felt UN1TD team.
What’s old is new
While these monster bikes always attract attention, its not a new approach. Every few years someone decides it’ll be faster, attempts to take the record (like Swenson this year), or just gets bored and wants to see if it’d actually be faster to run drop-bars with Leadville’s long stretches of tarmac.
Travis Brown famously ran a drop-bar Trek way back in 2009. Cory Wallace went full-gravel with a Kona Libre with a suspension fork in 2021.
Outside of Colorado, Geoff Kabush won the similarly speedy Iceman Cometh XCM on an Open U.P./Yeti in in 2018. Oh, and some guy named John Tomac pioneered the drop-bar mountain bike way back in the 90s.
Keegan Swenson’s Santa Cruz Highball
Last year, Keegan Swenson took a staggering 15 minutes off his own Leadville 100 course record, lowering the benchmark time for 170km of Colorado pedalling to 5:43:31. With Swenson riding in air as rarefied as it it is thin, the Santa Cruz racer is getting creative in his attempt to shave – or slice – even more time off the record.
For 2024, Swenson is running a Santa Cruz Highball CC hardtail mountain bike. The lower half of the Highball looks reasonably normal, with a 100mm RockShox SID SL Ultimate fork, Level Ultimate four-piston brakes, XX SL Transmission drivetrain, Reserve 28 rims on DT Swiss 180 hubs and Maxxis’ super-fast Aspen ST 170 2.4″ tires.
Raise your gaze and things get weird. Drop bars on a short, severely negative-angle stem support SRAM Red hoods and levers. While SRAM recently opened up gravel to 13-speed with it’s Red XPLR group, Swenson is running 12-speed SRAM XX…
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