Happy 40th Mountain Bikes

I’ll admit it.

I haven’t been tremendously motivated to write for a while.

The current election bums me out and fortunately for everyone involved I’m not going to write about it.

This last weekend I went to a bike shop just to see what was new. I found some performance oriented baggy shorts I liked but for $80 they didn’t come with a chamois.

What.

The.

Holy.

Hell.

The clerk said, “Well, you could use them as casual shorts but there are some chamois options”.

“Option” is a good word for it because the chamois was an additional $40 or so.

As you may very well deduce by now but I chose the “no thanks” option and opted not to buy the shorts.

The 40th anniversary of the first Repack race has come and gone there has been a host of articles and celebrations to commemorate that event.

Looking at the photos of the first Repack race most of the contestants were wearing regular clothing and by large most of these folks looked more like lumberjacks than superheroes.

Obviously we can’t roll back the clock to the halcyon days of yore but we can take inspiration from the folks that were involved with modern mountain biking’s early days.

Wear what is comfortable. I’ve been using button front shirts for years. You can get cotton dress shirts for garage sales and second hand stores for fuck all money.

Shorts are another matter. I know for a fact that button fly denim pants are terrible to ride in. One time I leaned too far forward and pinched my wang between two buttons while riding my bike.

That said, a set of Dickies work plenty fine if you wear them over a set of those old nasty ass JT Dalmatian shorts you still have kicking around since the ‘90’s.

I’m sorry but I can’t help you with the prices of new bikes. They’ve gone up a tremendous amount since the early 2000’s and the upper end of what people are willing to shell out for a new ride seems to be nowhere in sight.

Right now any chucklefuck with some seed money can contact a bike factory in the Far East, set up an e-commerce website, and start selling bikes customer direct.

But sales figures haven’t been great for the bike industry for a while so maybe what is needed for people to snap back to their senses is to have a bunch of companies simply go out of business.

Mountain bikes came out of time where there was ebb in bike sales and when people started to cobble together the early clunkers creative this started to happen.

I no longer have any more romantic visions about mountain biking. I’ve seen how the sausage is made.

I just hope that once all the dust settles that every one can come to their senses and work for a sane, sustainable industry that can concentrate on reasonable growth projections rather than one that makes technical changes that only result in nominal gains in performance and renders previous year’s changes completely obsolete.

Maybe I am a romantic after all.