You know the story. Father bear’s bed was too hard, mother bear too soft and baby bear just right. It’s a bloody terrible fable for two reasons; 1- there’s no qualitative metrics for exactly what you mean by ‘soft‘* and 2-at some point in your near future some smartarse will rally this in their non sequitur rebuttal of your N+1 position.
Second one first ever heard this ‘why do you need so many bikes, that’s like saying you need five different cars?‘**. Because dick-spot, for us flirting with the line between a hobby and a mental illness, these are not simple transport, they are gateway drugs to a utopian portal your dusty, rusty Halfords special cannot access.
Sounds snobby? Rather a reversal of the societal norm where only impoverished individuals transport themselves by bicycle because car ownership is beyond their means. Cycling is losing, piloting two tons of marketing’s pinnacle is more than just a win. You even get to squash the losers.
Until about 1980 anyway. Then bikes became cool again. And profitable. And worth evolving. Into lots of different niches for which a different tool was very much required. Even if that tool was the man getting his wallet out. The crushing irony was twenty years later, the very same people performed a ‘did that just really fucking happen?‘ U-Turn spawning the ‘quiver killer‘***
You have to admire the chutzpah and while you’re at it marvel at the built in obsolescence demanding the ‘QK‘ must be changed every year. Hey it might look exactly the same, but now it’s a BETTER colour.
What the hell has this got to do with bears I hear you ask. Glad you did, it’s pretty simple really. Since April this year, I’ve been almost exclusively riding my on-trend, appropriately slack and low ‘gnarpoon‘**** and it’s been as fantastic as one would expect, after chucking a shit-load of cash at something hoping it’d make up for your many inadequacies.
Then, in what can only be described as a moment of temporary insanity, I invested in the world’s most expensive cardboard box cunningly disguised as a poo coloured hardtail. Rode that a couple of times and that was brilliant as well. So – to test all bears – earlier this week, the previous object of my metallic affection – the eager Pyga – was hauled off the wall and thrown at the trails.
You may be unsurprised to hear that was bloody great as well. Harvesting the raw data from my digital ego repository, it would seem the difference between these very different approaches to two wheels hung from a few tubes wasn’t quite as much as I expected. One trail, three times: 1:28, 1:31, 1:32.
I think we can probably identify the common denominator here. Sure the Aeris was brilliant in the Peaks last weekend in a way the Trek hardtail wouldn’t have been. And the Pyga yomped through the forest dispatching big distances under bigger wheels. Yet shifting turns in fast singletrack demonstrates how the simple kinematics of a sorted hardtail easily makes it the quickest.
The numbers tell you everything and nothing at all. Creeping into the shedofdreams, I’m nowhere near as confident as the golden one to pick the right bear. 90{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of the time the differences are perceptible to me but imperceptible in terms of making progress.
I’d almost convinced myself the super slack Aeris wasn’t much good in the super-tight and switchback-y local woods above Ross. Until we skived off today and – at my request – massively backed off the pace so I could remember what entering a corner not hard on the brakes might feel like.
Then the bike felt fantastic. The big bear was doing just fine thanks very much. The little bear might have been faster, the middle bear generally has been but you cannot correlate speed with fun. I rode a gap jump much avoided because it wasn’t approached mostly out of control, cleared a table top with technique not desperate pedalling, dropped slowly into two steep gulleys safely because chasing those faster people wasn’t top of my agenda.
When you ride as much as I do, boredom is always a shadow threat. Even when the trails are dry, the sun is warm and you’re riding with your friends. Just this justifies having a shed-full of different bikes. They’re all brilliant. Riding mountain bikes is always brilliant. Having mates to share it with is – of course – endlessly brilliant.
You, however, will be resolutely average. It’s not about the bike and it’s absolutely about the bike. It certainly isn’t about the numbers. But if it was somehow my slow-is-the-new-slow was somehow two seconds quicker than every previous effort.
I didn’t care. Goldilocks had it wrong. Nothing is ever perfect. But – if you stop obsessing about what perfect might be – it can be very, very good indeed.
* I appreciate this may be a specific position, but when you’ve attempted to mediate between learned academics – on the point of punching each other – debating the precise semantic definition of ‘course‘, this stuff feels quite important.
** This is the straw man argument. I don’t have the space to explain my hatred of it here but once you recognise it, the ONLY proportional response is – for the sake of all those around you – to instantly kill the perpetrator with fire.
*** I assume a significant quantity of coke and hookers were involved: ‘hear me out Jeremy, we’ll tell ’em and sell ’em the idea that all their bikes are shit now and they can have this new one shiny thing. Make it red. They’ll go for it. They’re idiots’ Snort……
**** Once this post is complete. I’ll take myself outside to be shot for the use of that word. It’d be a kindness.