Are the mountain bikers finally gone? Can we talk about them again? Great.
I’ve been riding–and even racing–mountain bikes on trails for decades now, and yet for some reason when mountain bikers come on my blog they bro-splain to me that I’m not a mountain biker. This is odd, especially when you consider that I’ve also been riding–and even racing–road bikes for decades now, and making glib and sarcastic statements about other people who do too, just like I do about mountain bikers, and yet nobody has ever come on here and accused me of not being a roadie. This alone would seem to be proof that for all the accusations of snobbery that have been heaped upon them over the years, so-called “roadies” are simply better people. Ergo ispo facto any air of superiority a roadie may exude is therefore perfectly justified.
Anyway, apart from the online comportment of its practitioners, the most annoying thing about mountain biking is the bikes. Not only are they silly and bouncy, but there are simply too many of them:
Pathetic. They don’t even have downcountry on there! And if you’re wondering what a “downcountry” bike is, the answer is that I don’t know and I don’t care.
I will concede that the mountain bikers do have a point, since if being able to parse the 10 different types of mountain bikes (not including downcountry bikes) is what makes you a mountain biker than I am definitely not a mountain biker. I DO NOT CARE ABOUT THESE DIFFERENT TYPES OF MOUNTAIN BIKES. Every so often on the Desert Hipster website they get some guy on there who writes 6,000 words on some Craftmatic adjustable bed on wheels and how it’s subtly different from some other Craftmatic adjustable bed on wheels that belongs in a totally different category because it has 10mm less travel, and by the third sentence my eyes glaze over and I start reading something more engaging instead, like Ikea instructions. Give me a simple bike that works on trails and is also good for riding to the trails and that’s all the mountain bike I really want or need. (Though I’m not above throwing a 30 year-old dual suspension bike in THE CAR THAT I OWN now and again.)
I suppose this is why I rode singlespeed mountain bikes pretty much exclusively for many years. (Even though they are admittedly terrible for the “riding to the trails” part.) There was a time when I did make a token effort to pay attention to this stuff, but then I started riding a singlespeed and I checked out completely. However, as I grinded away on my singlespeed, I was vaguely aware that the type of mountain bike I had been riding was increasingly viewed as sort of a specialty machine, or an “XC bike,” to distinguish it from the increasingly motocross-like bikes that were coming into fashion with the drive-to-the-ride set, like freeride bikes. (Whatever happened to those, anyway? I assume they just broke that up into like sixteen new categories?) Indeed, after awhile it seemed like the XC bike had gone so deeply out of fashion that you only saw them in UCI races–though now they’re coming back, at least according to one publication:
Further to yesterday’s discourse on normality, I guess we now have to explain what normal, non-watermelon-humping mountain biking is:
Cross-country mountain biking places a greater emphasis on speed and distance, rather than steep and technical descents. Many XC courses and trails feature undulating terrain, a mix of technical climbs and descents, steep corners, and flatter sections that require cardiovascular fitness and endurance. Unlike downhill mountain biking, which is primarily characterized by jumps, steep sections, rock and root gardens, and other features that require more complex technical descending abilities, XC combines a diverse range of trail features and conditions.
But of course they only like XC bikes because they’re becoming more like watermelon-humping bikes:
As cross-country courses become more aggressive, World Cup pros opt for 4-piston brakes, 2.4” tires, and full-sized dropper posts. This progression in the sport demands more from the bikes and components. Due to this demand, XC is slowly becoming more aligned with trail riding, and I think it’s fantastic.
So if you want what an XC bike used to be (which was essentially a normal mountain bike for normal mountain biking) you have to get a gravel bike dear god just kill me now:
See, you have to go “farther and faster” on unpaved surfaces, right? What was perfectly adequate just a few years ago is now considered “underbiking.” (DEAR LOB I HATE THAT TERM.) That means at the very least you need dual suspension.
Maybe next they should put flat bars on it for better control on technical terrain, then they’ll really be onto something. The could call it a “mountain bike.” And the cycle shall begin anew. It’s the big bang and the big crunch, over and over and over again.
Not that road bikes are any different these days. We’ve got at least four different kinds:
Sorry, make that six:
Wait, sorry, it’s eight:
You know, you could easily knock out all those categories with just three bikes:
And even that’s being generous.
Is it any surprise I find myself looking wistfully into the past? When I was at the Marin Museum of Bicycling recently, Grant Petersen loaded me up with some vintage periodicals:
These days it seems you’re beset by watermelon-humpers from all sides, so it’s refreshing to transport yourself to a time when bunnyhopping was considered “advanced technique,” ads touted “peace in the wilds” and “the supreme satisfaction of self achievement” instead of motors, and debates raged over toe clips vs. bear traps, or right-front vs. left-front braking:
When I did the cylocrossing I used to set my bikes up with right-front braking, but not for any of the reasons below:
Rather, I did so because I was told by someone very wise that when you dismount the bike from the left, if you need to modulate your speed you naturally do so with the left-hand brake lever, and you don’t want that activating the front brake because if you do that and the bike’s unweighted it’s easy for the rear wheel to pop up.
I was never nearly competitive enough for this to prove necessary in practice (when you’ve already been lapped does it really matter?), but I set my bikes up that way anyway because that’s how you were supposed to do it, and the benefit is that today I really don’t have much trouble switching between bikes with right-front braking and left-front braking because they both seem fairly normal to me.
I could also bunny-hop respectably in my BMX days, too–though I doubt I could have cleared a sawhorse.
