Adam's First Fit Parlee Gt-Zero

There are ideas that sit in the back of your mind for years, waiting for exactly the right bike to bring them to life. For Adam, Regroup’s owner, a loose pink CeramicSpeed OSPW had been doing precisely that — too specific to put on just anything, too good to leave in a drawer. Then Parlee released the Z-Zero GT, and the game was afoot.

If you’ve spent any time at Regroup, you’ll know that Adam’s love for American-made bicycles runs deep (he also has a thing for Italian bikes – that’s another story). With so few carbon frames still being produced on US soil, it’s a list that’s getting shorter, not longer. Parlee, handbuilding bikes forty-five minutes north of Boston since 2000, is as pure an expression of that tradition as you’ll find anywhere. So when the Z-Zero GT landed — all-new for 2025, with fully internal routing, a lowered bottom bracket for improved stability, and a carbon layup that Parlee has been refining for a quarter of a century — it was the obvious home for a build Adam had been thinking about for a long time.

The brief to Parlee was clear: start with white at the front, then let the frame transition into bare, nude carbon toward the rear, a stylistic shift designed to put Parlee’s extraordinary layup work on full display rather than hiding it under paint. Parlee matched the pink from the OSPW across the logos and a few carefully placed stripes to pull the whole thing together. The result is a bike that’s cohesive without being too proud about it, and quietly spectacular in the right light.

But the real story of this build isn’t so much the color, but the fit that brought the bike to road.

After a bike fitting session with Regroup FIT’s Barry Anderson in the fall, this hint-of-pink Parlee became Adam’s first road build fully aligned to Barry’s recommendations from the ground up. The most significant change was the crank length, which doesn’t on the surface, seem like a big detail. However, following a saddle mapping session, it became clear that on 165mm cranks, Adam’s pelvis was out of whack by 33 degrees. Moving to 160mm cranks brought that figure down to just two. The knock-on effects — on back comfort, on neck tension, on how long you can stay in the saddle — are, by Adam’s own account, transformational. The handlebar came in from 42mm to 40mm at Barry’s direction too, dialing in the shoulder position and completing the picture.