You Can't Take It With You When You Take It With You

I’m not a Luddite nor am I a "retro-grouch" because I believe things like modern medicine and index shifting are genuinely good things. That said I think we, as mountain bikers, have lost our way.  While riding a single speed right now is about as fashionable as wearing a cravat I see it as a way of countering the technical arms race that has become the modern mountain bike.

Last weekend I dusted off my mid-eighties mountain bike and had one of the best rides I’ve had in a while. The bike itself is mishmash of both new and old parts and new and old technology. I will spare you all the details but I will say riding a bike mountain bike with drop bars and a single friction shifter gives me a new level of respect for people like Steve, and Charlie, and Jaquie and any one else I missed, who rode similar set ups.

Small rock gardens became intimidating obstacle courses, ruts that could easily be absorbed shocks or some of the ultra fat tire bikes took on an added depth with my somewhat narrow 26” tires and a rigid fork.

These challenges have been somewhat obliterated by modern designs and along the way I think we’ve lost our soul. My twenty-five year old bike is astonishingly simple to work on and will probably outlive me but I honestly can’t say the same thing about any of the newer ten thousand dollar wonder bikes.

It’s just not technically sophisticated high dollar bikes that are killing mountain biking it’s also the industry specific periodicals, portable digital movie cameras, GPS units, and “extreme sport” spectator driven events such as Red Bull Rampage.

We’ve become voyeurs and gear fetishists, we’ve become isolated form the elements we first sought to explore. I suggest a moratorium on purchasing any cycling magazine, they are dying an agonizing death any way so let’s just put them out of their misery. And what about GPS units and portable digital movie cameras? Fuck ‘em. All the time you’ve spent learning how to program one of those silly things you could have devoted to actually learning how to read a map and I believe trail riding videos are the pornography of cycling world – they look like cycling but are devoid of any real contact.

We should take a page from surfing, and simplify with what you take with you because in the end you can’t take it with you.