Why Wolf Bikes Came to Be
My name is Wolf Skafte-Zauss, the founder and I have been a bike rider for as long as I can remember, at now 66 that is a while!
About 20 years ago or thereabouts my son an I decided to enter the Canberra 70.3 Ironman (1.9km swim, 90km bike ride and 21km run). We gave ourselves nearly 9 months training to get ready for it. Alex, my son is a good swimmer, reasonable bike rider and poor runner, whereby I’m a lousy swimmer, actually I couldn’t swim a 25m pool length without reverting to breaststroke, pretty good cyclist and good runner. We both completed the 70.3 in 2004 in around 6 hours.
Since this time I have been hooked on tris and during the season I compete in a triathlon every month, however usually in the sprint distance now (750m swim, 20km ride and 5km run), I know pretty easy going.
Bike Training
Since I consider the open road to be a dangerous place to be for cycling I do most of my riding on the mountain bike (MTB) right here in the Dungog Common. We are extremely lucky to have such fantastic facilities right at our door step, in actual fact we go for a ride, with our dogs every Friday morning.
And the the other standard ride is a gravel bike ride on Sunday mornings unless it’s the off-season where I go for a long run in the Common because I like to participate in half marathons during the triathlon off-season.
So this leads me to the bikes I need:
- a Triathlon bike for tri racing
- a MTB to ride in the Dungog Common
- a Gravel bike for our gravel rides
- and last bu not least a road bike to participate in some road rides, such as the Newcastle to Dungog Ride.
The 80 / 20 Rule
Needing a lot of bikes and spending a lot of money on race event traveling means that my budget for bicycles is limited but I want to be competitive in any race or group I’m riding with (this is within my age group of course).
For this reason I have been buying and riding second hand bikes for most of my cycling career, I have fallen of the wagon once or twice and bought a new bike as well, however all of my top end bikes are and have been second hand ones.
This is where the 80/20 rule comes in! When you buy a really good bike that is now about 10 years old you’ll get 80% of the performance of the same bike bought new right now for closer to 20% of the price tag!
What we do at Wolf Bikes
We buy the best value performance bikes for Triathlon, MTB, Gravel and occasionally Road, give them a service and provide them for sale to you and we sell these to you with a 12 months warranty, as if you were buying a new bike! Or even better, as a member of Wolf Bikes, you can make a bike sourcing request with us and we’ll source that great value bike for you.
And of course we do all the things a bike shop does, like bicycle servicing and repairing. Find out more on our Bike Service page here.