Competition and Monopoly

 Capitalism always trends toward monopoly. Competition only seeks to increase market share. Once market domination is achieved, the "winners" become very hard to dislodge. In general consumer markets, the appearance of many companies often masks the fact that most of them are owned by a larger corporation that says it operates them independently, but still uses its mass to control pricing to its own advantage. 

Competition still appears to exist in the bike industry, because bikes are parity products, and there's never been enough money in them to attract major corporate consolidators. The competition is an illusion, because bikes for each purpose use parts from the same menu of suppliers, which is itself pretty small. Some might be slightly better made or better equipped within a price range, but you still have several relatively balanced companies milking the dying market at pretty equal rates. It isn't really competition as such, because they're just divvying up the customers over cosmetic details or accidents of proximity. Trek or Specialized? Who cares? Which shop is closest and maybe offering a little promo?

Competition did exist in the 1990s, and it was brutal. The losers were the riders and the many small shops, as well as small builders who had to find the right size to survive. Some sold out to a bigger player, notably Bontrager, Gary Fisher, and Klein. None of those are sold under their own name anymore, if at all. 

It took a while for the collapse of small shops to spread. It lasted into the 2020 pandemic. It was a steady rolling wave, as technological complication made the service side more and more expensive for retailers already struggling with the tightened margins that came out of the cutthroat warfare of the 1990s. Riders suffered because all of that technology has made what passes for a quality bike much more expensive and made mid- and low-price bikes trashy knockoffs of the expensive ones.

In the mid 1990s, Specialized went through The Great Cheapening, during which they seriously downgraded the spec on the Hardrock series, and even the Rockhoppers. These two models had been great buys from the end of the 1980s, building a name for Specialized quality and durability. They started gutting the Hardrock as early as 1991 or '92, largely due to the cheesy quality of Shimano's low-end Rapidfire shifters. The frames were still decent chromoly, but gone were the replaceable chainrings and solidly built derailleurs. Those were disappearing from the whole industry as the manufacturers scrambled to make bigger profits off of the influx of inexperienced buyers that they cynically assumed would never figure it out anyway.

The real Great Cheapening hit with the adoption of aluminum as the frame material of choice. The reputations of the model categories were well established, so customers would come in with an existing good opinion of the bike they'd generally already decided that they wanted. It was around this time that I started avoiding the sales floor more and more, because I couldn't do anything to stop the general rot in the industry. We needed to sell what we had, but I couldn't stand in front of it with a big smile and say it was a great buy. You could still make a case for some of the bikes on the basis of the serviceable features they still had, like replaceable chainrings and halfway decent derailleurs at price points that still didn't scare off buyers. Specialized snapped out of it when Raleigh re-entered the market with absolutely sweetheart spec at all price points and bought a lot of friends in a short time. Specialized went back to providing solid spec (within the choices available), leaving Cannondale as the perennial high-priced bike with embarrassing components.

Cannondale's excuse was that you should be happy to pay for their excellent US-made aluminum frame, the costs of which prevented them from dressing their bikes with the same level of parts you'd get from those "offshore" bikes. Cannondale subsequently changed hands a couple of times, nearly went under, and are now just another "offshore" brand.

As for consolidation, Trek and Specialized are now trying to control huge swaths, but they're hampered by the ubiquity and disrespect of bikes in the developed world. There are a lot of bikes out there, and only a tiny minority of riders who will pay for the good stuff. Among those, there are good little technolemmings who will queue up for the industry's latest marvel, but also grouches like me, who will own a simple bike for decades and do our best to duplicate it pretty exactly if we ever want to supplement or replace it. The industry could make money off of us if they were willing to keep selling the stuff that appeals to us, but the industry chose to emulate drugs and electronics instead. They foster addiction to passing highs and offer replacements frequently to anyone who can still afford to play.

Then there are e-bikes. While the major bike companies are trying to claim market share, the electric bike has too many variations that serve their users well, but are almost nothing like a conventional bicycle except for the coincidental use of pedals. They are much more like the true mopeds of old: a motor vehicle using bike parts to sidestep regulation. The category includes some very bulky vehicles that do useful jobs. Meanwhile, the traditional bike industry can offer the sexy e-road, e-mountain, and e-gravel bikes that just add a little zing to existing bike categories without inviting competition from a newer e-bike specialist with no heritage in that area or interest in farming that minuscule market.

Before long, e-bike competition will settle on a few strong players, like the car business. Cars are another parity product in which the major differences end up mostly being who has produced the most glaring manufacturing defects in a given model year. The stage from genuine evolutionary improvement to flashy gimmicks takes place sooner and sooner in this electronic age. On the other hand, small companies may hang in there just because everything comes out of enormous factories in Asia, even the frames that are painted and labeled to match whatever brand ordered the batch. This will always come at a cost to the consumer. That unbelievably affordable e-bike might have no-name brakes you can't get pads for, or proprietary parts that you can't replace because the company either dissolved after it sold through the first load of crap or changed the spec and don't stock the old version. It's annoying enough when it happens with a bolt or something that a good mechanic can devise a substitute for, but I've also encountered it with control units and wiring harnesses that are more difficult, if not impossible, to fake.

I guess when it comes to consumer goods you have to choose your poison: a small company that will jerk you around because it doesn't have the finances to establish a rock-solid customer service department, or a large corporation that feels it's big enough to ignore the faint whining sounds of aggrieved customers. Look at how long it took Shimano to acknowledge their latest iteration of exploding cranks. Classic example of arrogant, monopolistic corporate behavior.

The rantings of an irrelevant old man

 My frank appraisal of the backroom bike operation in town caused considerable angst in the upper management, who fears malicious reprisals of some sort. He grew up in this town. He has long experience with the kind of vindictiveness and long-held grudges that shape so much small-town life. I moved so constantly and lived in communities of such different sizes that I got used to being anonymous and quickly forgotten. I relate to ideas much better than I relate to people. I tried to assure him that the people involved in the subculture in question quit caring what I think shortly after the fat bike flap of several years ago. They've comfortably written me off as a decrepit old fart who is no use to them in any capacity. Why should they feel the slightest distress? I'm irrelevant.

Mountain biking went from a way to expand bikeable territory to a way to limit it when the machines evolved to the point where they function best on contrived courses, many of which are very expensively built. A highly advanced trail network was being built in town last fall, thanks to a deep-pocketed donor who expected to benefit directly from it. Construction ceased with the onset of winter, and other issues. I don't know if there are plans to resume. Other than that, trail support groups have joined the long lineup of nonprofits constantly fundraising to do what we used to do for free. We just happened to do it on the existing unpaved roads and trails that were already out there. Some of those fell under the protection of snowmobile clubs, to which a fair-minded rider might contribute with money and labor, but other lines sprawling over miles of countryside were old Class 6 roads and logging roads. These included public rights-of-way and private corridors that the landowner left open to public access. The more adventurous and skilled rode on hiking trails of varying degrees of difficulty.

The bootleg trail movement in these parts started with pockets of activity in the White Mountain National Forest and other tracts where the builders felt they could get away with it. Some of these evolved into legitimate cooperative ventures with the Forest Service or whatever entity was in charge of the land in question. And specialized trail builders and administrators began the laborious process of putting together a road system for the off-road rider. Even on existing trails, the needs of the wheeled are quite specific, and differ widely depending on whether the rider is headed uphill or down.

The riding that we did for free is not the riding that is favored today. Today's riders need those trails and need those bikes and need to pay whatever it costs to have both. We used to say of our recreational athletic habits that they're "cheaper than drugs." I'm not so sure anymore.

It's significant that the hot shop for technical mountain bike service is also a hot shop for technical downhill ski service. Mountain biking and downhill skiing are both heavily dependent on areas specifically built for them. Downhill ski lift ticket prices have gotten pretty staggering. I don't know how much it costs to ride a mountain bike at a pay-to-play venue, but the costs of buying and maintaining a mountain bike have certainly dug into users' wallets. And you need to be able to transport yourself and your large bicycle to the playgrounds you want to visit.

Original recipe mountain biking was for the masses. Mountain biking today is for the financially superior. Sure, you'll find devotees who build simple lives around it...for a while. But they might have to finance their habit by working in the industry in some way. It becomes more and more insular. The working-class hangers-on may have to be mechanics skilled in the style of machine that the majority favors, or trail builders, or become instructors, like the golf pros, tennis instructors, personal trainers, yacht captains and crews, personal chefs, personal assistants and other support staff in the service economy.

The Competition

 Two local beer joints are run by mountain bikers. Both of them have toyed with the idea of starting a shop to cater to their specialty here, but only one of them has actually done anything.

The backroom shop started as a service facility, but recent social media posts indicate that the proprietors might be selling new bikes on a limited basis.

I absolutely love this. They will find out the difference between beer customers and gear customers. If somebody drinks until they puke, they don't come asking for a refund or warranty. "Hey, that last beer was only in my stomach for about ten minutes! You should at least comp me my next one!" However, a person with a history of fraudulent warranty claims on bike frames is still a rider in town. Maybe it will never be a problem. Maybe they'll stonewall anyone who tries it. They're in a good position to take a hard line, because they're just playing store. They won't live and die by their reputation. They'll play at this as long as it's fun, and then quit. Maybe that's how all specialty bike shops should be, since the equipment is ephemeral, and there are lots of ways to quit riding.

The hobbyist shop or the cutting edge techno hangout may turn the bike shop business into something like the restaurant business. A shop will start up with no clear long-term plan, just serving its specialties until their quality slips or the economics catch up with them or they just get tired of it. It'll be the hot place for a few years at best, and then vanish. Another one will already be taking its place.

When we first heard about their operation, it was based on sending the technical repairs to a guy up north a ways, who does earn his living as a bike mechanic, doing a lot of boutique work for the disposable income crowd. The shop puts technology front and center and passes no judgment on expense and complexity, and the relentless march of obsolescence. He's staked out the technological territory.

There are two ways to ride out a period of technological ferment: Replace your bike frequently, or pull way back to solid simplicity for a few decades to see where it all goes. It depends on your goals for riding. I'd decided more than two decades ago that mountain biking was a nice hike spoiled. But someone into the modern style of mountain biking will be enslaved to the technology, because you definitely can't ride that way on the kind of old, simple bikes I own, any more than you could be competitive in road racing with a vintage steel bike with friction shifting.

I can think of a lot of ways that the backroom bike shop could operate, but with no reliable intel from the inside, I will probably never know. For instance, they could piggyback on a real shop's wholesale supply orders to get parts. But then do they take a markup, or bro deal their friends, undercutting every legitimate shop in the area? Or do they make their customers dig up the parts, and only supply the labor and whatever know-how they have, as well as the work space?

The great part is, I don't need to know. All I have to do is deal with whatever comes through my door on a given day, and keep my own simple fleet running for as long as I have the energy to ride it. What happens next door stays next door...except for what gets trumpeted on social media, but you know that's always buffed up to look great, regardless of what's really going on. Time will tell. It always does.

Trash talk

The 1990s were ugly. The sudden influx of cash from the mountain bike boom led to a surge in incompetence and dishonesty. People would drive many miles to check out different bike shops, in search of a little lower price or a particular brand that the magazines or their friends told them was the only one to buy. Shops a hundred miles apart -- or more -- would badmouth each other’s work.

The bike business attracts competitive people. I showered plenty of napalm on other shops’ bad workmanship. The apparent easy money in the mountain bike market led to a surge in "bike shops" and increased bike sales through more generalized outdoor sports stores. Between the unprepared merchants and mechanics, and the bike industry's own rush to dump poorly designed and barely tested products into a market loaded with consumers unable to judge the merits of the so-called new improvements, there was plenty to criticize.

With the fragmentation of the bike market, all that seemed to have subsided. Overall participation dropped, and the riders who continued to ride fell into multiple categories, none of them dominant. Addicted bike collectors with sufficient funds and time might ride in several categories, but those riders are a minority. Special interest riders seek the shops that specialize in their interest, or patronize large shops that can afford to have stock in each category, and staff to cover the range of complexities. You hope so, anyway. A lot of it is just absorbing and regurgitating industry propaganda, as it was in the darkest years of the mountain bike boom. There was no time to study it all in depth, as it blasted out of the firehose. The term "retro-geezer" was coined at that time, to describe cranks like me, who critiqued the avalanche of temperamental junk that creates six problems to solve one.

The parallel lines of complicated machinery ridden hard by novice enthusiasts is ushering in a little resurgence of trash talk. Our shop is in a town with a year-round population under 7,000. Of those, only a small handful will use anything non-motorized for recreation or transportation. This is America, and normal people drive. We draw from surrounding towns, but they have even smaller populations. This makes it impossible for us to stock in depth in any category except the most basic recreational path bikes, and even that market seems to have gone a little soft this year. When one of our customers does business voluntarily or involuntarily with another shop, they sometimes share that other shop's scathing assessments of our work and knowledge. And I silently critique every bike that comes through my work station from some other mechanic's hands. I just don't bother to share my observations with the customers. I share them profanely and profusely with my fellow mechanics, on days when there are any, but that's as far as it goes.

Trash talk was a symptom of the hyper-competitive bike market of the 1990s. Now it is a symptom of the competitiveness born of famine. But competitiveness itself is a symptom of the belief that there's something to win. Part of what has driven fragmentation is habitat loss. Bikes are looking for places to thrive, or at least survive. It's Darwinian speciation, as the basic pedal-powered ancestor adapts to specific niches: varying levels of technical trail; gravel roads; sedate paths; roads; BMX tracks; freestyle parks. Shops don't shape customer interest. Customer interest shapes shops. We fight a constant battle to remain competent and relevant.

The latest and greatest!

Bike componentry development reminds me of the joke about the two guys running away from a bear. One guy stops to put on his running shoes. The other guy says, "Why bother? You can't outrun a bear." The other guy says, "I only have to outrun you."

No matter how much money you spend on ultra-fancy bikes and parts, you'll never really be fast. You'll only -- maybe -- be faster than the other pathetic dorks working outrageously hard to go about as fast as a prudent driver in a residential neighborhood.

The peloton didn't smell like a laundromat

Only rarely do I encounter another rider on my commute, especially in the evening. It's an awkward time of day and an unattractive route for riders who can put together any loop they want for their day's training objective. When I do encounter someone from the racing crowd, it's usually cordial but brief.

"How's it goin?'

"Good."

Racer zooms away.

Once in a while, a friendlier one will pull his pace back and hang for a while, until they realize how late they'll get home or how far below their target heart rate they will fall if they plod along with me for too long. I'm on a linear run, while they're on a loop. So off they trot. But one thing has stood out: they all smell like fresh, chemically-perfumed laundry products.

I did most of my racing in the wool era. Lycra shorts and "skin suits" were just coming in, but in mass start races and on training rides you saw mostly riders wearing knitted fabrics that had to be hand washed and hung to dry. If the peloton smelled like anything other than sweat, it was Woolite, and whatever people had smeared on the vicious shark skin of a newly-dried chamois to turn it back into something you might want in contact with your testicles for a few hours.

I haven't been on a group road ride in well over a decade. I did do a charity ride a couple of years in that time, but the group was small and very dispersed, and there was a sea breeze for much of the time. I also don't use scented laundry products, so my own garb has very little odor until I apply a fresh batch of sweat and road grime.

On Friday, I was trudging along, entertaining myself with a stream of consciousness soliloquy, when I heard the smooth grind of a bike drive train behind me, and a voice announcing politely, "on your left." It was a rider I know.

"How you doin'?" he asked

"Just ploddin' along," I said. I'm careful with racers and performance roadies to avoid throwing down any gauntlets. Not that they're necessarily super sensitive to a challenge, but I don't want to look like that sad old bastard on a touring bike who thinks he can show the racers a thing or two. I want to establish right away what they can expect riding near me: a steady pace, probably considerably slower than they will enjoy, and no illusions.

We were on the very last little rise to the height of land on Route 28 northbound. The lead rider, and the younger man drafting him, passed me as quickly as I expected they would. They didn't whoosh past, opening a huge gap and buffeting me with turbulence, but they didn't linger, either. That was fine with me. Really. I settled back into my thoughts as I reached the crest.

Down the slope, I saw them, still riding a nice tight formation. The gap was more than a hundred yards. It was probably well over a hundred yards. I shifted to my usual gear for the descent and accelerated as I usually do. It's basically two miles down hill from there, and essentially down hill all the rest of the way to my house. I'm headed for the barn, so I don't waste time, even on my heavy bike, and carrying the weight of years.

The gap diminished. This was interesting, I thought to myself. I knew that in previous years the lead rider had been going out with one local ride group famous for killing the wounded and eating the dead. I really didn't expect him to be idling. The two riders seemed to be in pretty tall gears, and were pedaling at a respectably high cadence. They were on fancy road bikes.

Whatever the shortcomings of a fully-loaded Surly Cross Check as a climbing bike, it plummets nicely under the influence of gravity. I utilize all that the forces of nature offer me to make my trip faster and easier. On that long descent, there are places I pedal and places I tuck, little grade variations I seek, and rough, speed-robbing strips that I avoid. If there's a tailwind, I'm surfing it. I've ridden the route hundreds of times. I'd left work late that day, and was eager to get home. At a high but maintainable cruising speed, I was up with them in a couple of minutes. Awkward.

"I tried to get left in the dust," I said to the young rider. He grinned. I stayed in the back, but that's where I really started to notice the smell of laundry products. It's not really pleasant, regardless of what the advertising tells you. All I had to look forward to was more of the same, or possibly a fart or two from one or both of them.

They weren't coasting, but I was actually holding back from my usual pace to avoid making a move around them. I didn't want to look like an old geezer beating myself up to pass the racers, but they were -- surprisingly -- costing me time.

One feature I aim for on one of the steeper bits is a weird hump in the pavement, that always reappears not long after any road work. It never forms a sharp peak. When I ride over it, it always launches me into a higher speed bracket. It's worth a gear, at least. And the speed carries well down into the next section, where the grade levels out a bit. I call it The Speed Bump. They didn't use it, and I coudn't get to it. Even without it, I had to make an effort to avoid making a move on the outside.

The lead rider was doing all the pulling, which is silly. The two of them should have been trading leads, and with three of us we could have had a little pace line. Instead, the lead rider yawed somewhat, but never made a definitive move to pull off, and I wasn't going to blow myself up to get to the front. Where the shoulder widened, I winged out a bit to the left, both to use the wind to check my speed and to get out of the cloud of fabric softener swirling in the slipstream.

On the last drop before the road levels out approaching Route 171, I always tuck tight until I get to the bottom and resume pedaling in top gear. Depending on how fresh I feel, I'll start shifting to lower gears right way, or within a few seconds. In any case, bombing down in a tuck is faster than pedaling.

The racers pedaled. They pedaled and pedaled. I had to use the brakes to keep from running up on them. What the heck, I figured. I'll pull left and tuck, and see what happens.

In a tuck, coasting, I accelerated past the pedaling pair, toiling manfully.

"Guys, I'm not even pedaling," I said. "Tuck! Tuuck!"

I pulled clear ahead. Where the road leveled, I followed my usual shifting pattern. I expected them to come ripping through any second.

They never did. I passed through the intersection with 171, grunted up the little rise to the next level bit, and glanced back. They were gone.

Most of the performance riders in town have no use for my technical advice. Most of them don't even shop at our store anymore. These guys don't, although they used to, back before the turn of the  century. It's all friendly enough. If I didn't work in a bike shop I would probably seldom go into one.

Funny thing about modern technology: when I was telling another local rider about the encounter as a funny story, he told me that those guys posted a 20 mile per hour average for the ride on Strava.

I always forget about Strava. Even having just been reminded, I'll forget again soon. I'm not sure what sort of technology you need to own to get your stats uploaded and verified by satellites, but it's not important enough to me to find out. I do know that a 20 mph average would probably kill me. If the climb had been longer, those guys would have opened a gap I couldn't cross, and that would have been totally fine. But maybe they would have averaged 22 mph if they'd worked the descent a little better. Never underestimate the power of an experienced commuter on his way home for a shower and some food.

Riding in the wrong direction

First off, congratulations are due to Alice Lethbridge on breaking Beryl Burton's 1967 record for longest distance cycled in 12 hours. A 12-hour ride is a serious physical challenge.

On a social media comment thread, I took some serious jabs for pointing out that the carbon fiber spaceship Lethbridge rode is a far cry from Beryl's 1967 rig. Some riders got what I meant, but the modernists called me an "armchair cyclist" and a "bellend." While I do love British insults, the modernists and the worshippers of competitive achievement miss my point, as usual.

Maybe the problem is the way records themselves are recorded. We get a name, a date, and a distance or time. The format itself implies equivalence in all other factors. If that were true, then the entire aero bike segment of the industry is a giant scam. If it's not a scam, then the bike needs to be featured prominently as a huge contributing factor. Yes, it diminishes the athlete. Athletes accept diminishment all the time for the sake of technologies that will make a grueling task slightly easier. One would expect -- all athletes being equal -- that improved technology would make records fall at regular intervals. But Beryl's record stood for 50 years.

This:

 

Photo credit: Road cc.

took 50 years to beat this:

There have been plenty of intermediate steps in aerodynamic evolution. No rider in all that time managed to exceed the performance of the phenomenal Beryl Burton. That leads to another point: If records are the province of phenomenal people, what do they really mean for the rest of us? They indicate a high point attainable by the right person with the right training, and they give us something to say gee whiz about. But athletes will perform on whatever is available. I bet if you compared the relative prices of Beryl's bike and Alice's, Alice's would still be more expensive, even allowing for inflation. How does that trickle down to the majority of riders?

In automobiles, evolution led to vehicles that are lighter, faster, more fuel efficient (sometimes), flimsier, harder to work on, and basically disposable. Early cars were made to stand up to the abuse of the roads they had to use. Later, the makers still stuck to the old standard under which people built things to last. Only decades of consideration led to planned obsolescence and relentless marketing. I guess it makes sense, when an industrialist has invested in a factory to produce millions of units. You want to keep that line rolling.

Automobiles are very rewarding to the average consumer. You sit in a comfy seat. You control a powerful engine. You can have climate control, an entertainment center, and arrive at your destination smelling about as good as you did when you left home. We've been trained to expend thousands of dollars on our rolling couches, and designed a whole system of plumbing through which to flush ourselves at the best speed attainable by our mechanical conveyances. That speed is influenced by the number of other conveyances in a given pipeline, not just by terrain and weather.

Bicycle designers have taken up the idea that the bodywork should obscure everything else, because air drag is the ultimate enemy. Even in bikes not designed solely to race against the clock, as much as possible gets stuffed inside. Most riders don't do their own work. I've asked before, and still not answered, whether most riders who seem hard core and fully committed only do it for the ephemeral lifetimes of one or two of these modern crustaceans.

Conspicuous consumption is one of the great shames of industrial society. There's a serious parallel to income inequality in a recreational bike that costs thousands of dollars versus a sturdy, durable ride that can still offer a bit of sporty handling, but also carry a couple of panniers full of groceries.

This summer has brought me the whole range of the modern bike experience: chasing air bubbles out of hydraulic lines, seating tubeless tires, snaking cables through the unseen labyrinth of internal routing, and performing exorcism on some electronic shifters. Meanwhile, I hear the same thing all the time about actual riding in the real world: it's scary, it's hard, and a few hundred dollars seems like a lot of money to a lot of people.

The answer is not just swan-necked, step-through cruiser bikes and crushed stone paths. And it certainly isn't "categories." I have built myself several different bikes for different applications, but they all started from basic platforms. Got a chunky one for the roughest surfaces I considerable reasonable to ride. Built a fixed gear for wet and cold weather. Got a road bike for unencumbered sporty rides. Got a go-anywhere commuter/light touring rig. All steel, all simple, all readily maintainable. That's a lot of options, and I bet that all of them together cost less than one top-end bike in road, mountain, or time trial categories.

Speed at all costs

A triathlete friend of mine is making her final campaign at full Iron Man  distance, in November.

Endurance athletics serve a therapeutic purpose for her. She has also worked as a professional trainer and event organizer, because she wants to share the benefits that her obsession has brought her.

For this last big race, she asked me whether she should invest in a state of the art time trial bike. But the budget she set would not get her a bike at the quality level of her venerable Serotta.

The arms race behind the bike race goes unacknowledged.

A lineup of TT bikes featured on road.cc illustrates the most evolved wind-cheating machines to enable a well-trained rider to go slightly less pathetically slowly compared to any vehicle people are actually impressed with. An absolute nightmare to work on, these ultra-sophisticated machines will set you back thousands of dollars -- in some cases upwards of $10,000 -- to get the full wind tunnel tested package of aerodynamic benefits. And you will still get dropped by a rusted-out Nissan that burns a quart of oil in 50 miles and costs a third as much. Much less than a third if you bought a really expensive bike. Or some twit with an e-bike will come tooling past you, vaping.

When Greg Lemond unleashed the aero on Laurent Fignon in 1989, it made aero bikes socially acceptable. It launched the movement to quit making bikes that looked like they were made by meticulous artisans and more like something engineered by the military-industrial complex.

At first, aero enhancements consisted of streamlined helmets and removable aero handlebars. Bike frames still had round tubes! And lugs! Rider position made a huge difference, established by the clip-on aero bar.

Soon, of course, bars were specifically designed and bikes were specially constructed to adopt each aerodynamic enhancement allowed by the governing authorities. This was also the age of the triathlon, where very little cycling tradition weighed down the innovators, and a free-spending population of willing test pilots purchased the latest implements to gain whatever advantage they could.

In any arms race, whoever develops a weapon first enjoys a clear advantage. Once everyone has the widget, that becomes the new level playing field, forcing further advancements to gain a new technological edge. At the same time, the old ways have been obliterated. When the competition is unlimited and existential, the rising tide of technology represents advancement for the whole species. This is also true in non-military contexts. Take transportation, for instance. Ships evolved sails. Sailing ships evolved through various shapes, swifter or more efficient for their given task, until powered vessels set a new standard in speed and maneuverability. On roads, the bicycle initiated the age of mass-produced personal transportation, but the automobile and its variants soon eclipsed pedal power.

Since we're only racing against each other on our bikes, we could set the standard anywhere we want. Does it really make a difference if average time trial times are a minute or two faster now than they were 20 years ago? It doesn't make the event any more exciting to watch, just more expensive to conduct. When everyone has only the slickest bike they can afford, the margin of victory could be in the wallet, not in the training, skill, and determination of the athletes. Or, if everyone has equally slick bikes, the equipment disappears from the equation. Everyone could be on Raleigh Choppers, or vintage Schwinn Paramounts.

The time trial position is not comfortable. The bikes are not versatile. Some are more aerodynamic than others, in ways that may be hard to tell by looks or price tag. And, as I said, they're absolute nightmares to work on. Humans have their urge to excel. There are worse things to blow money on than the pursuit of a few seconds over 40 kilometers. But if all the expense is just to be equal, the problem is artificially induced.

Economies run on induced problems. And maybe the aero bike of today will lead to the pedal-powered personal aircraft of tomorrow. I doubt if even that would spawn an industry strong enough to shape whole political systems and the course of nations, the way internal combustion has.

For now, my friend has to make the best of the equipment she has, with a snazzier back wheel and a new aero helmet, because she lacks the coin to place a much heftier bet on a bike that will turn heads in the transition area. The spacelanders

 she'll be sharing the course with present an intimidating army. The ones that live up to their advertising will actually confer an advantage upon their well-funded (or tapped out) riders. How much of an advantage is hard to say. And is it worth it? That's even harder to say. Ten grand for the ephemeral satisfaction of standing on a podium that will be gone forever, ten minutes after the award ceremony? Or maybe just to achieve a personal best time, down in the anonymous wad of barely differentiated finishers? Look! Here comes that vaping guy on the e-bike again.

How competition helped us in the 1990s

Wolfeboro has been in a bicycling recession since the early part of the 21st Century. Cycling numbers appear stable, but definitely well below their height through the 1990s and the first part of the road bike wave that rose up around the turn of the century.

These days, we only manage to feel overwhelmingly busy by having only a couple of people on the schedule on most days. But with that short roster, if anyone goes away, the others have to put in more time to make sure we have minimal coverage on every day we're open.

Boom times don't last. The bustle of the 1990s seemed like it would never end, but it was based on temporary conditions. The surge in the bike business coincided with popular interest in small-town New England. In Wolfeboro, an existing summer home tradition brought multiple generations of prosperous families, while proximity to jobs in southern New Hampshire and nearby Massachusetts brought super-commuters who wanted to situate their families in idyllic small towns while they did the heroic highway haul to bring home the paycheck. To service all this, contractors and land pimps gathered like flies on a big corpse. Good times!

The spike in year-round population meant the schools had to expand. That meant more building, more maintenance, more buses, more bus drivers, more teachers, more administrators. More kids meant more toys. And the 1980s had already seriously promoted the idea of adults playing outside, with slogans like "he who dies with the most toys wins."

It was a great time to be selling the toy everyone wanted. But we know how that goes.

The competition between bike shops in this pre-Internet age could be vicious. The business values of the 1980s met the influx of cash to produce things like Zane's in Connecticut, and a corrosive climate of slander as shops battled to gain market share. In Wolfe City, with a year-round population of about 7,000 people, three shops tried to operate year-round.

We were there first. We're the last one left.

While we bemoaned the loss of sales revenue, and the sleazy gossip people told us they heard about us in the other shops, our repair business kept us alive. Those other shops couldn't seem to find a good mechanic, no matter how many rocks they turned over, offering minimum wage and an employee discount on all the shiny trinkets. But that wasn't the only way competition helped us. It also kept us from having to grow large enough to feed the voracious market all by ourselves.

When things went down, it was like that pinhole puncture you can't quite feel at first. Then things get squishy. Then, after several miles, you definitely feel the bump of the valve stem. But, unlike a puncture, we couldn't just put a new tube in and wail it up to full pressure again. To push the metaphor a bit further, we could only do as well as our frame pump would allow. You know what I mean: you will probably never get it up to race pressure again, and it will take hours of tedious labor even to get close.

If we had become the giant powerhouse of a regional shop, we would have to feed that beast now on the scraps that come to us. Mountain biking has become a destination resort activity, not a daily dose of fun. Road bikers are fed a steady diet of newer and more complicated parts by an industry that hopes their customers become addicted to buying things and discarding them. The industry categorizes riders and tries to feed them tailored products, rather than capitalizing on the kind of rational anarchy that thrived through the 1970s and '80s, and that held on through the 1990s while the "innovators" of mountain biking repeatedly shot themselves in the foot.

Shop staff in the age of Big Bicycle are expected to wear the company shirt and spout the company line. Expertise means being expert in the company's products and the proper care, feeding and euthanasia thereof, on a steady schedule of obsolescence.

Our little outpost on the banks of the Big Lake will never be that shop. We don't have the year-round revenue stream to make us big enough to look attractive to Big Bicycle's bean counters. We have to rely on our ingenuity to be able to deal with whatever comes through our doors, including nothing at all. We have to pay full freight, get the crappiest terms, and deal with our handful of customers who still believe in the old idea that you could buy a nice bike and enjoy it for years. And by that they mean decades.

Our mechanics take a perverse pride in figuring out how to fix what the industry wants us to throw away. It is born of necessity. We can't always just order a new part, even if one is still made. Especially during summer visitor season, we get thrown these challenges with short deadlines. They're more fun than the routine, boring bullshit that makes up the bulk of our repair income. We can't always win, but we always try.

A life of sport vs. the sport of life

As money gets tighter for more and more people -- as more and more people keep making more and more and more people -- consumer civilization will not last much longer. There's no way a bloated population can find enough things to do that earn enough money to buy enough things so that the majority of them can enjoy the kind of lifestyle that leads to obesity and the diseases of idleness.

A society where exertion is optional develops sports as ways to entice some people to get out of their recliners for a while and build up a healthy sweat. Recreational athletes go for personal records and measure themselves against their fellow competitors. Some of them spend more money than I make in a year on their gear and trips and entry fees.

Sport is seductive. It is such an accepted element of civilized life that one can dip into it without questioning its value. Obviously, exercise is good. Pick an activity or a set of activities, buy the gear and perform the requisite exercises. As an added bonus, some activities seem to have less environmental impact than others.

Humans seem to decide a lot of things on the basis of lesser harm rather than greater good. "Could be worse! I could drive a bigger SUV." "Could be worse. I could be towing a trailer full of ATVs instead of a trailer full of mountain bikes." All true as far as it goes, but it just delays the reckoning. It does not avoid it.

The mobility afforded by the automobile opened up the the countryside to travelers like nothing before. It became so normal that no one could imagine life any other way. The same mobility that allows someone to drive a 2000-pound tank half a mile to a grocery store for a quart of milk and a loaf of bread also opens up the 100-mile super commute from a distant suburb to a commercial center. But this normalization of speed and cruising radius makes people forget how to live where they live.

I admit I have been part of the problem. Even though my self-propelled recreational activities have all been part of my working life, only a few of them have practical applications. Bicycling and walking head the list. Then, because of my rural environment and seasonal snow cover, cross-country skis figure in the mix because I use them to gather useful items from the winter forest. Take away the snow, I walk. And I still feel it's acceptable to propel yourself on land or water just to groove on the surroundings. No motor, a natural pace. Sometimes these jaunts can have an added purpose, like trying to find a bobcat den or a heron rookery as part of a wildlife survey.

Over the years in the gear business I have made money on peak baggers and braggarts and high-strung athletes whose personal demons prod them to set their bodies on fire with fatigue, over and over in search of some sort of purification. They could change their minds and go outside at a more measured pace and still benefit from my services. I don't need anyone to be a tech-worshipping gear addict. And the tightly-wound types who need constant validation move on sooner or later because I have trouble keeping up the pace, shoveling emotional coal under their never-resting boiler.

Competitive athletes live from finite event to finite event. Competition is an arms race, requiring constant investment. It's a luxury. The sport of life, on the other hand, requires far less investment in equipment and you're on the course all the time. The entry fee is already covered. You're here. It's your choice how much you slave away to participate in the Machine Age. Some is good. Too much will definitely take you down.

Sabotage

Strong and skillful athletes who lack mechanical knowledge risk losing their investment in time, effort and money when they are unable to diagnose and repair what may be only minor problems with their equipment. If they reach a high enough level a support staff will be provided. But the rest of them have to depend on luck and the benevolence of strangers.

I do work for one triathlete who is a great person and a fierce competitor, but not well-versed in the mechanical side of things. As long as transportation is as simple as putting the bike on a rack and driving to the race site, preparing the bike is fairly simple. But she just went to St. Croix, which involved air transport. The bike had to be put in a travel case, which required some disassembly. It was a serious test of my shifter noodle arrangement for the cable housings going into the head tube cable stops.

My friend texted me the morning before the race to say she was not able to get her lowest gear. The problem could have been any number of things as a result of the removal and replacement of the handlebars and the resulting disruption of the cables, even though they were not disconnected from the derailleurs. Or it could have been an issue with the change from daily wheels to race day wheels, although we had tried to iron that out. If anything was going to go from ironed to wrinkled it was bound to happen when she was thousands of miles away on some island, right?

The last message she sent me said that she had found tech support and gotten the gears satisfactorily adjusted. That was still the day before the race. Then I heard nothing.

The fact that she didn't contact me right away after the race indicated she did not have triumphant news. When she did finally call, she told me that for some weird reason she had been unable to shift into the big chainring during the race itself, even though the bike seemed to be working fine the afternoon before.  I told her to get it to me immediately.

My nightmare was that somehow my unorthodox cable arrangement had not been as brilliant as it had looked to me and that its collapse had kept her from being able to shift into the big meat once she got to the top of the nasty climb that had made her focus on the lowest gear.

When I finally got a look at the bike the cables were oddly tangled at the head tube, but that turned out to be an illusion because the housings had been pulled, tucked and gathered in all the bike's travels in a way that was easily smoothed back into its intended configuration. But when I pulled the front shifter it would not move at all.

I looked for kinks or places the cable could be snagged. There were none. I tried to move the front derailleur cage by hand. It would not move at all. When I disconnected the cable the cage still would not move. It wasn't jammed on the chainring, as would happen if it had slipped down the seat tube. It was correctly aligned and not bent.

Someone had screwed the limit screws all the way in, blocking out the big ring. This cannot happen by accident. She would not have done it in a misguided attempt to fix the shifting. It had to have been done while the bike was racked in the first transition area.

When I told her she had been sabotaged she said, "Oh, yeah. That stuff happens all the time. Some of these people are really serious about this."

I did a web search on it. In the first page of results I found a forum thread about all the bad practical jokes and sleazy tricks triathletes had experienced at the hands of their fellow competitors. I didn't bother to look further. The information I found confirmed that it's a fairly common phenomenon. Apparently, competition  brings out the worst in a few people. The things they do to each other's equipment in transition areas must seem really clever to them. Basically, whoever did this to my friend stole the money she spent on air fare, accommodations and entry fees and robbed her of the irreplaceable time she put into training. They must be very proud.

Personally I avoid competitive events for a host of reasons, but I won't discourage people who feel they still want to try them. I like to do things in my own time, at my own pace, without a lot of other people's personalty problems involved. When someone's sleazery can totally nullify all your best efforts, whether it's by hooking you into a parking meter in a crit or slashing your tires or having teammates block you when you have no allies of your own you have to ask what the whole event is worth in time and aggravation. I really enjoy my utilitarian cycling and aimless rambles, going fast when the mood strikes and enjoying the scenery the rest of the time. But I'm a classic underachiever. The fact that I might underachieve for six hours in the saddle and rack up a hundred miles in the process doesn't alter the utterly frivolous basis of the endeavor.

I'm a big advocate of that kind of frivolity. I keep hoping a large number of people will suddenly notice the small number of us who are out there having fun not hurting anybody, and think it looks like something they want to do, too. Any number can play.

Some people have a lot of trouble absorbing mechanical concepts. They have other strengths to share. My friend might never be able to get herself out of a jam. There are a lot of little variables, so no one can memorize each separate solution. And I don't think the ability to analyze a mechanical problem can be taught to any- and everyone. It seems to elude some people forever. As I said, they have other strengths.

I'll go to races as tech support if anyone wants to pay my way.