On Wednesday I arrived to begin my work week and found a road bike clamped in the work stand. With the persistent lack of snow, its owner had decided to begin riding outdoors. His timing wasn't very good. Late Wednesday night, snow began. It changed to sleet and freezing mist not long after sunrise. This transitioned to more significant icing after nightfall on Thursday. But he's ready if winter falters again.
Winter has mostly faltered this year. It has managed to dish up a tasting menu of wintry tidbits, including some skating and ice boating, but not a lot of any one winter pleasure. The snow last year, though below average, was dense and durable. The cold, though not bitter, was persistent enough to put together longer stretches of wild skating, and keep the ski trails just holding on. For your cross-training outdoor athletes of any level it provided a seasonally-appropriate selection much of the time. This year has been much more frustrating.
I used to switch readily to riding when I was already doing more consistent training of all kinds. Since I am the absolute worst at indoor exercise, I hardly did any, but I could always find something to do outside. However, as I've gotten older, I really notice how cycling alone does not provide complete enough exercise. It actually hurts you if all you do is pedal. It neglects too many other muscle groups and does nothing for bone density, flexibility, and core strength. A false start on riding season just makes me repeat saddle toughening multiple times before the real season sets in.
Road riding has one massive advantage: convenience. There's a road right at the end of your driveway. If you happen to live where there's a trail -- bike, hike, ski, or what have you -- right outside your door, that's great. But most of us don't have that. Okay, I do, but I know that it's not the norm in most places. But a road rider on any form of the machine can walk out, hop on, and pedal away. My winter choice is the fixed gear, but you have to develop a taste for that. The guy who brought his road bike in this week has a fixed-gear that I built for him, but he doesn't automatically think to go that way. He used to compete in triathlon at a high level, so his introduction to cycling was on sophisticated, multi-geared machines. He seemed to enjoy the fixie when we rode together a time or two, but it didn't win him over.
When riding season actually gets close I will start the routines of riding and supporting exercises. But riding has always fit my schedule best when I use it to commute to work, so that it eats less time out of the rest of my day. The supporting exercises are fairly minimal. When I can get on top of my seasonal depression, I do them even when I'm not riding. But if I can ski regularly it takes care of everything I need until early spring.
Cross-country skiing is the ultimate one-stop shopping for general fitness. It goes beyond the obvious cardiovascular benefits. Classical skiing especially works the limbs through a nice, full range of motion, while the core is exercised symmetrically in support of the stride. Skating is less satisfactory, but still better than anything else outside of a planned and varied program in a gym, using specific exercises to isolate muscle groups and boring the shit out of you until you quit. But you can't get up and go on your skis if the trails are brown, or if thin cover leaves subsurface obstacles that could dump you on your face.
Just trudging around on cross-country skis provides a muted level of the muscular benefits, but less of the cardiovascular aspect, unless you really go out and bulldoze on your heavier boards. You will get your heart rate up, but I find it hard to persist at that level when I'm not making much headway through the landscape. Also, groomed trails get chewed down to nothing when they're not refreshed with new snow at regular intervals, so your trudging is likely to be done off-trail. Mature hardwood forests offer many passable spaces. But it's now more of a hike than a swooping flight in pursuit of a sleek physique.
Even the trudging had started to suffer from the lack of a consistent surface. On a recent bushwhack up the mountain behind my house, I rediscovered the sensation of actually walking, when the steeper slopes turned out to have melted off. It was downright pleasant. The snow that fell Wednesday night won't improve the skiing enough up there, and it will make the walking harder. But that's New England. It might freshen up the smoothest of the groomable Nordic trails for a low-grade version of the high-grade experience. And I might even get a shot at it before it turns into some other weird, half-frozen thing.
Friday, February 07, 2020
Sunday, February 02, 2020
When things go boom
When I stumbled back into the bike business in 1989, the shop was selling a mix of road and mountain bikes. There was a citizen road racing series around New Hampshire and nearby Maine. Mountain bikes were a strong and rapidly rising category. Local riders seemed to be open to both. The last fade of the 1970s bike boom was dwindling away, while the roar of the onrushing mountain bike boom was winding up like a big jet on the runway.
By the early mid 1990s, the citizen road series was basically defunct. Customers would take ridiculously low trade-ins for the road bikes they were dumping. Mountain bike sales amounted to a feeding frenzy. Not everyone dumped their road bike. Some of them just gathered dust in basements, garages, and sheds until their time might come again.
The shift away from mountain biking locally followed a similar pattern approaching the turn of the century. Our local mountain biking ride group had shrunk to about three people. One of our former riders finally sheepishly admitted that he had been riding on the road.
"I just got tired of cleaning my bike all the time," he said. He liked riding on the road, and was afraid that we would harass him because we were all dedicated mountain bikers. We assured him that we loved road riding, and started a weekly road ride. One rider did try to keep the weekly mountain ride going for a couple of seasons, but it ultimately petered out. It recurred in irregular flickers, like a loose wire sparking, until the last year or so, when a mountain bike resurgence of sorts attracted a fairly regular group again.
From the end of the 1990s until the second decade of this century, the mix of bikes on the floor shifted almost completely to road bikes. A sale of a high end mountain bike became rare. But sales volume also fell, year after year. We were having a little road bike boom, as the nation experienced a similar blip. The average price per bike went up, because there was -- and is -- no real low end in road bikes. The real low end still belonged to wide, knobby tires.
Mountain biking didn't die, of course. It has never come back to its former commercial glory, but its devotees will never abandon it.
Bike sales figures overall have been steadily declining from the high marks of the late mountain bike boom. Categorization offers lots of choices, but deprives the industry of high volume in any category. This means that they can't offer as much price range and variety to customers. The number of units sold is down, while the average price goes up.
Electric bikes spark a lot of consumer interest, but their lowest unit price is at or near four figures, and it goes up quickly from there. Worldwide they are viewed as a strong growth category because so many of them are suitable as a car replacement.
When average price goes up it automatically erects a barrier. There will always be a market for used bikes, but the used bike shopper is limited to bikes that someone else already was willing to buy new. And in most places you can't just walk into the used bike store and browse the racks. There's always eBay and Craigslist, but many of us aren't comfortable with that style of commerce. Hunters and gatherers are different from traders. All three qualities might occur in an individual, but it's not a given.
In a bike boom, people buy machines that they have only considered superficially. They're met by bike enthusiasts who have been thinking about little else for years. Some of those enthusiasts are lifers. They got into it young and never left. Others are well-informed, but just passing through. They'll outgrow it and move on to either real adult motor vehicles or completely different interests. Among the incoming wave in any boom, some will get hooked and stick around. Others will become well-informed during their era, but lose interest by the time their first bike wears out. Or maybe their second.
When booms occur now they're more like pops, or premonitory rumbles that go nowhere. There are too many choices, and most of them cost too much. Among the local fat bikers, for instance, perhaps as many as half of them bought their bikes used from someone else who had forked out the coin for it new. This appears to be somewhat less true for three-season mountain bikes. The road category is virtually dead again.
All riders agree that the roads are not much fun to ride anymore. Even in the 1970s it could be intimidating. Now there are about 100 million more drivers on the roads, in actual trucks, or vehicles built on a truck chassis. People are more distracted, more irritable, and generally more hopeless. The lure of separated bike infrastructure of all kinds is strong. But you won't do much riding if you insist on riding only where it's "safe." The answer to that is, "Okay, I won't ride."
The bike industry is not cycling. What's good for the bike business in any given year may be a bad sign for biking overall. The bike industry is perfectly satisfied if you buy a bike, hang it up and never use it. They do like to see actual participation, because it means that people are wearing things out and breaking them, but just from a bean counter perspective, sales are all that matter. Use drives sales, but sales don't drive use. So when new bike sales drop it only means that people aren't buying new bikes right then. You have to dig deeper to find out why. That opens up a whole world of variables. It sounds expensive and open-ended. In the meantime, a bike economist can only look at category sales and extrapolate consumer interest based on who is opening the wallet for what.
Actual census data would be hard to collect. You would have to send a big team to observe every conceivable cycling venue to count users by type. Almost no one cares anyway.
Individual riders might wonder who their allies are, and where they are. For instance, around here I doubt if there are a dozen dedicated bike commuters, especially over longer distances and open roads like the route I run in commuting season. I didn't choose the route, I simply adopted it as the shortest distance between me and a paycheck where I happened to be employed. For many reasons, I would have been better off to buy a house in a different town, closer to where I work. But most of life is improvised. All this simply means that improvements in riding conditions in one area do almost nothing to make riding better in another area, except perhaps to raise public awareness overall.
Anyone in the middle of their bubble will believe that they're in the middle of a boom. People in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont probably feel like the world is being overrun with off-road riders, because their area is being overrun with off-road riders. But by creating a magnet for a certain user group, the popular area draws riders from far, far away. Those riders may travel through long stretches of country where their kind is little known, and not missed.
Certain categories of enthusiast have to be very enthusiastic indeed to keep up with the related expenses of participation. Cycling is at its most affordable when you can throw a leg over the machine outside your own domicile and start pedaling right from there. I kept waiting through all the long years for more people to catch on to the many benefits of that kind of riding, but it seems to have the least appeal. As a result, conditions have deteriorated because too few people have demanded that they improve.
Our accumulated bad decisions will soon force change upon us. The big question now is whether our species is basically terminally ill -- and therefore might as well just focus on pleasure in our swift decline, or whether we are treatable if we accept a stricter regimen than several generations have so far been willing to adopt. In other words, is it worth bothering to try to create that better world?
By the early mid 1990s, the citizen road series was basically defunct. Customers would take ridiculously low trade-ins for the road bikes they were dumping. Mountain bike sales amounted to a feeding frenzy. Not everyone dumped their road bike. Some of them just gathered dust in basements, garages, and sheds until their time might come again.
The shift away from mountain biking locally followed a similar pattern approaching the turn of the century. Our local mountain biking ride group had shrunk to about three people. One of our former riders finally sheepishly admitted that he had been riding on the road.
"I just got tired of cleaning my bike all the time," he said. He liked riding on the road, and was afraid that we would harass him because we were all dedicated mountain bikers. We assured him that we loved road riding, and started a weekly road ride. One rider did try to keep the weekly mountain ride going for a couple of seasons, but it ultimately petered out. It recurred in irregular flickers, like a loose wire sparking, until the last year or so, when a mountain bike resurgence of sorts attracted a fairly regular group again.
From the end of the 1990s until the second decade of this century, the mix of bikes on the floor shifted almost completely to road bikes. A sale of a high end mountain bike became rare. But sales volume also fell, year after year. We were having a little road bike boom, as the nation experienced a similar blip. The average price per bike went up, because there was -- and is -- no real low end in road bikes. The real low end still belonged to wide, knobby tires.
Mountain biking didn't die, of course. It has never come back to its former commercial glory, but its devotees will never abandon it.
Bike sales figures overall have been steadily declining from the high marks of the late mountain bike boom. Categorization offers lots of choices, but deprives the industry of high volume in any category. This means that they can't offer as much price range and variety to customers. The number of units sold is down, while the average price goes up.
Electric bikes spark a lot of consumer interest, but their lowest unit price is at or near four figures, and it goes up quickly from there. Worldwide they are viewed as a strong growth category because so many of them are suitable as a car replacement.
When average price goes up it automatically erects a barrier. There will always be a market for used bikes, but the used bike shopper is limited to bikes that someone else already was willing to buy new. And in most places you can't just walk into the used bike store and browse the racks. There's always eBay and Craigslist, but many of us aren't comfortable with that style of commerce. Hunters and gatherers are different from traders. All three qualities might occur in an individual, but it's not a given.
In a bike boom, people buy machines that they have only considered superficially. They're met by bike enthusiasts who have been thinking about little else for years. Some of those enthusiasts are lifers. They got into it young and never left. Others are well-informed, but just passing through. They'll outgrow it and move on to either real adult motor vehicles or completely different interests. Among the incoming wave in any boom, some will get hooked and stick around. Others will become well-informed during their era, but lose interest by the time their first bike wears out. Or maybe their second.
When booms occur now they're more like pops, or premonitory rumbles that go nowhere. There are too many choices, and most of them cost too much. Among the local fat bikers, for instance, perhaps as many as half of them bought their bikes used from someone else who had forked out the coin for it new. This appears to be somewhat less true for three-season mountain bikes. The road category is virtually dead again.
All riders agree that the roads are not much fun to ride anymore. Even in the 1970s it could be intimidating. Now there are about 100 million more drivers on the roads, in actual trucks, or vehicles built on a truck chassis. People are more distracted, more irritable, and generally more hopeless. The lure of separated bike infrastructure of all kinds is strong. But you won't do much riding if you insist on riding only where it's "safe." The answer to that is, "Okay, I won't ride."
The bike industry is not cycling. What's good for the bike business in any given year may be a bad sign for biking overall. The bike industry is perfectly satisfied if you buy a bike, hang it up and never use it. They do like to see actual participation, because it means that people are wearing things out and breaking them, but just from a bean counter perspective, sales are all that matter. Use drives sales, but sales don't drive use. So when new bike sales drop it only means that people aren't buying new bikes right then. You have to dig deeper to find out why. That opens up a whole world of variables. It sounds expensive and open-ended. In the meantime, a bike economist can only look at category sales and extrapolate consumer interest based on who is opening the wallet for what.
Actual census data would be hard to collect. You would have to send a big team to observe every conceivable cycling venue to count users by type. Almost no one cares anyway.
Individual riders might wonder who their allies are, and where they are. For instance, around here I doubt if there are a dozen dedicated bike commuters, especially over longer distances and open roads like the route I run in commuting season. I didn't choose the route, I simply adopted it as the shortest distance between me and a paycheck where I happened to be employed. For many reasons, I would have been better off to buy a house in a different town, closer to where I work. But most of life is improvised. All this simply means that improvements in riding conditions in one area do almost nothing to make riding better in another area, except perhaps to raise public awareness overall.
Anyone in the middle of their bubble will believe that they're in the middle of a boom. People in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont probably feel like the world is being overrun with off-road riders, because their area is being overrun with off-road riders. But by creating a magnet for a certain user group, the popular area draws riders from far, far away. Those riders may travel through long stretches of country where their kind is little known, and not missed.
Certain categories of enthusiast have to be very enthusiastic indeed to keep up with the related expenses of participation. Cycling is at its most affordable when you can throw a leg over the machine outside your own domicile and start pedaling right from there. I kept waiting through all the long years for more people to catch on to the many benefits of that kind of riding, but it seems to have the least appeal. As a result, conditions have deteriorated because too few people have demanded that they improve.
Our accumulated bad decisions will soon force change upon us. The big question now is whether our species is basically terminally ill -- and therefore might as well just focus on pleasure in our swift decline, or whether we are treatable if we accept a stricter regimen than several generations have so far been willing to adopt. In other words, is it worth bothering to try to create that better world?
Friday, January 31, 2020
To see ourselves as others see us
Hard to believe that anyone in the technical mountain biking community bothers to read any of my rants, but apparently some do. Hey there.
Things written or said for rhetorical effect will focus on specific aspects that support the central thesis. It’s the basis for editorials, legal arguments, and marketing. The benefits of a drug are repeated loudly and clearly in the commercial, while the side effects are recited in a hasty blurb in a low tone.
Things written or said for rhetorical effect will focus on specific aspects that support the central thesis. It’s the basis for editorials, legal arguments, and marketing. The benefits of a drug are repeated loudly and clearly in the commercial, while the side effects are recited in a hasty blurb in a low tone.
When I say things that are true, bluntly summing up actual events, it might compose a picture that looked different from someone else’s angle. This is the unsettling effect of seeing ourselves as others see us. That doesn’t mean that everyone sees you that way, only that the dots can connect to create that image. But I went too far, and I apologize.
As an unsociable person, I lack the instinctive understanding of the needs and desires of sociable people. In every activity to which I was exposed growing up, advancement in the activity itself was primary. The social aspects were secondary. It was an unrealistic point of view. For a few hard chargers, achievement is a primary goal and benefit. But among normal people, the social side is much more crucial. It explains a lot about where I’ve landed, and the rough and desolate landscape in which my life will end.
As an unsociable person, I lack the instinctive understanding of the needs and desires of sociable people. In every activity to which I was exposed growing up, advancement in the activity itself was primary. The social aspects were secondary. It was an unrealistic point of view. For a few hard chargers, achievement is a primary goal and benefit. But among normal people, the social side is much more crucial. It explains a lot about where I’ve landed, and the rough and desolate landscape in which my life will end.
In the case of off-road biking in any season, I’m not alone in my laments but I’m certainly in the minority. Around here I’m definitely alone in criticizing the avalanche of expensive and complicated equipment burying small shops and cutting the tech support cord for riders trying to get a long service life out of their stuff. I don’t see that it generates much public support or sympathetic interest for cycling in general. But I suppose that nothing can do that. We might as well each ride in our chosen style and let the world burn if it's going to.
As stated in the post before this one, cycling is being gentrified. Its greater value as a tool of social evolution is falling victim to its short-term attractiveness to an industry bent on exploiting it as a consumerist bait station. The technofascist element has its hooks into every category. It has the most to work with off-road, followed by high end road and its offspring, “gravel biking.” But the collateral damage shows up in the reprehensible quality of middle and low end componentry as seen on a lot of path bikes, hybrids, and entry level mountain bikes from companies that should be ashamed to have their logo on something like that. Like an asteroid on a converging trajectory, nothing can stop it. Actually, more like the deferred consequences of environmental destruction, it would take too many people to understand and agree all at once. We would prefer an asteroid, that we could maybe blow up with one quick nuke and go back to enjoying ourselves.
Monday, January 27, 2020
The Victim of a Badass Image
Mountain bikers have had to deal with trail closures and public censure since their segment of riding became immensely popular in the 1980s. With its roots in "clunker" bikes that were often built by crafty roadies looking for some alternative fun, it began with a sense of humor and a touch of bravado. But by the late 1990s it was taking itself seriously. Bravado evolved into foolhardiness. You had to be increasingly crazy to achieve respect.
The evolution was gradual. It began with bigger and bigger risks, and intensified with converging streams of influence that had little or no road riding background. Where early offenders were mostly just too high spirited, mountain biking specialists developed their own brand of self righteousness that's just as offensive as the shiny Lycra snobbishness they abhor in roadies.
As big air and moto-style courses came to dominate the public image of mountain biking, the image of the rider changed with it. Fitness became secondary to skill. Skill became synonymous with the ballistics of managing your machine and body on a gravity-fed plunge through a field of obstacles.
Google fed me this blog post by Josh Cupit, from 2018, titled, "What happened to mountain biking?" Knowing nothing about the author, I went to see whether his observations echoed mine. Instead I found that they represented quite succinctly the ferocious attitude that has purposely made mountain biking less inclusive and more vain about its bloodthirstiness and masochism. For instance:
"The core of mountain biking, for me, has always been the challenge and the danger. If I wanted to insulate myself from any hazard or pitfall, I could take up road biking, or gravel riding, or jogging. Or golf. Mountain biking is an escape from the mundane and unyielding predictability that life offers. It’s the only place I can feel a sense of danger, and that’s what I love about it. And it’s not synthetic danger, or theoretical danger; I experience the thrill to the fullest because I’ve experienced every conceivable ramification of my own failure to control my bike."
The fact that he cites road biking as devoid of danger is laughable considering how many mountain bikers I've talked to who are phobic about traffic. But paradoxical assertions are a common affliction among humans. You know: "The food's lousy here, and you can't get seconds."
The kid was born in 1994, and started mountain biking in 2006, so he missed all of mountain biking's early evolution and its attempt to be a unifying and attractive activity for cycling in general, not a fortified enclave of trail warriors seeking honorable wounds. Every young generation finds its good old days in the years in which the previous generation has already seen everything going to hell in a handbasket. He went from good old days to handbasket by the time he was 24. It's so cute that he considered 12 kilometers a long trail. In 1994, the group I rode with regularly knocked off 12 -17 miles of trail on a ride after work. And most of us were old codgers in our 30s.
I could dismantle the lad's essay point by point, but there is no point. Anyone who follows the link and reads it will interpret it through their own sympathies. Only a handful of people will probably ever know if he grows up and what he grows up into. Instead of just bitching about the fact that his idea of the sport has fallen victim to the disposable income of people he considers athletically and philosophically inferior, he should be bitching about an economic system that considers that kind of disposable income normal and desirable.
The current problems with trail closure on the Kingdom Trails system in Vermont are a direct outgrowth of the badass attitude that leads some riders to be offensive punks. Take away their trails and all they have is craft beer and an attitude. These are the kind of rider who hurls obscenities at slower riders on a recreation path when someone asks them to slow down and pass more discreetly.
The fact that mountain biking has become resource intensive and highly dependent on control of land access means that a few assholes can ruin it for everybody. A few assholes can ruin any activity, but certain activities expose their assholes more than others. Assholes riding on the road create a bad image for all pedaling road users. Anywhere large numbers of people interact, abrasive people will leave their mark. But mountain biking made more of an effort than any other branch of bike riding to cultivate a badass image. It now reaps the consequences.
Competitive people tend to be more self-absorbed and offensive than the average person. Complaints abound around roadie venues where young racers exhibit what they consider to be a European sophisticated casualness about changing clothes next to the car, and public urination. Cycling brings out competitiveness in a lot of people, and stimulates it in anyone already inclined that way. "I'm not a racer, but I can get up (or down) this hill faster than you." The elation of small victories accumulates into an unconscious sense of superiority. Arrogance follows. To quote young Mr. Cupit again:
The evolution was gradual. It began with bigger and bigger risks, and intensified with converging streams of influence that had little or no road riding background. Where early offenders were mostly just too high spirited, mountain biking specialists developed their own brand of self righteousness that's just as offensive as the shiny Lycra snobbishness they abhor in roadies.
As big air and moto-style courses came to dominate the public image of mountain biking, the image of the rider changed with it. Fitness became secondary to skill. Skill became synonymous with the ballistics of managing your machine and body on a gravity-fed plunge through a field of obstacles.
Google fed me this blog post by Josh Cupit, from 2018, titled, "What happened to mountain biking?" Knowing nothing about the author, I went to see whether his observations echoed mine. Instead I found that they represented quite succinctly the ferocious attitude that has purposely made mountain biking less inclusive and more vain about its bloodthirstiness and masochism. For instance:
"The core of mountain biking, for me, has always been the challenge and the danger. If I wanted to insulate myself from any hazard or pitfall, I could take up road biking, or gravel riding, or jogging. Or golf. Mountain biking is an escape from the mundane and unyielding predictability that life offers. It’s the only place I can feel a sense of danger, and that’s what I love about it. And it’s not synthetic danger, or theoretical danger; I experience the thrill to the fullest because I’ve experienced every conceivable ramification of my own failure to control my bike."
The fact that he cites road biking as devoid of danger is laughable considering how many mountain bikers I've talked to who are phobic about traffic. But paradoxical assertions are a common affliction among humans. You know: "The food's lousy here, and you can't get seconds."
The kid was born in 1994, and started mountain biking in 2006, so he missed all of mountain biking's early evolution and its attempt to be a unifying and attractive activity for cycling in general, not a fortified enclave of trail warriors seeking honorable wounds. Every young generation finds its good old days in the years in which the previous generation has already seen everything going to hell in a handbasket. He went from good old days to handbasket by the time he was 24. It's so cute that he considered 12 kilometers a long trail. In 1994, the group I rode with regularly knocked off 12 -17 miles of trail on a ride after work. And most of us were old codgers in our 30s.
I could dismantle the lad's essay point by point, but there is no point. Anyone who follows the link and reads it will interpret it through their own sympathies. Only a handful of people will probably ever know if he grows up and what he grows up into. Instead of just bitching about the fact that his idea of the sport has fallen victim to the disposable income of people he considers athletically and philosophically inferior, he should be bitching about an economic system that considers that kind of disposable income normal and desirable.
The current problems with trail closure on the Kingdom Trails system in Vermont are a direct outgrowth of the badass attitude that leads some riders to be offensive punks. Take away their trails and all they have is craft beer and an attitude. These are the kind of rider who hurls obscenities at slower riders on a recreation path when someone asks them to slow down and pass more discreetly.
The fact that mountain biking has become resource intensive and highly dependent on control of land access means that a few assholes can ruin it for everybody. A few assholes can ruin any activity, but certain activities expose their assholes more than others. Assholes riding on the road create a bad image for all pedaling road users. Anywhere large numbers of people interact, abrasive people will leave their mark. But mountain biking made more of an effort than any other branch of bike riding to cultivate a badass image. It now reaps the consequences.
Competitive people tend to be more self-absorbed and offensive than the average person. Complaints abound around roadie venues where young racers exhibit what they consider to be a European sophisticated casualness about changing clothes next to the car, and public urination. Cycling brings out competitiveness in a lot of people, and stimulates it in anyone already inclined that way. "I'm not a racer, but I can get up (or down) this hill faster than you." The elation of small victories accumulates into an unconscious sense of superiority. Arrogance follows. To quote young Mr. Cupit again:
"This is why I’m so disappointed in the current state of mountain biking. Having worked in bike shops for years, I’ve heard the company lines about inclusiveness, and how “more riders is good for the sport.” But it’s not. It’s a clever marketing line to sell expensive carbon bikes to people whose doctors only recently informed them that golfing isn’t a sufficient form of cardio.
So I’m not the slightest bit sorry that I don’t want to give up my source of adventure so that Phil the golfer and his buddy Pete (who nearly ran a 10k that one time) can feel sort of adventurous for the three rides they go on before realizing that they’d much rather be at home watching the game. I don’t accept that the trails I bled into as a kid should be sanitized so that people can feel safe while participating in a sport that, by all rights, should be anything but.
Unfortunately, it’s not up to me. Forces larger and more powerful than I am have steamrolled my local trails to the point that I can (and have) ridden them on a ‘cross bike with slick tires and a 53/39 crankset. I passed a businessman on a carbon Santa Cruz down one of the descents, and nothing about the experience was the slightest bit exciting. My local trails are dead."
Unfortunately, it’s not up to me. Forces larger and more powerful than I am have steamrolled my local trails to the point that I can (and have) ridden them on a ‘cross bike with slick tires and a 53/39 crankset. I passed a businessman on a carbon Santa Cruz down one of the descents, and nothing about the experience was the slightest bit exciting. My local trails are dead."
This lament proves my point that most mountain biking is inspired by fear of the road more than a desire for the challenges of the trail. Cupit laments the gentrification of his neighborhood without recognizing it as such. The genuine badass wants his personal battlefield to keep its deadly potential, while the larger forces of social and economic evolution demand that the frontier be tamed and settled. You can't stop the spread of settlement. You can only try to direct the style in which it is done. This is why humans have to learn to get along on this planet or annihilate each other in an orgy of violent refusal to do so. So far, we have been encouragingly unwilling to go to that extreme. But we have to find things for the badasses to do, so that they'll leave the rest of us alone, and feel sufficiently cleansed to behave themselves between adrenaline fixes.
Sunday, January 26, 2020
Do we need spike mats?
Between ignorance and arrogance, fat bikes present a growing challenge to trail system managers everywhere.
Singletracks published an article on the closures of major parts of the Kingdom Trails and included this significant paragraph:
"To make matters worse, the organization has already spotted fat bike tracks poaching into the closed trails that are marked with signage, so it doesn’t look like mountain bikers will stop shooting themselves in the foot anytime soon."
Yesterday, on Wolfeboro's Sewall Woods trails -- closed to biking in the winter -- a ski renter reported seeing a fat biker with a dog. The fat biking "community" had recently gone to considerable effort to get trails opened to them on town land, but Sewall Woods is not town land and was never included in the negotiation. To make matters worse, yesterday was decidedly soft and sloppy, so the shared use trail was closed to biking anyway.
A member of the mountain bike trail group dropped in last week. Because he has been driving the Wolfeboro Singletrack Alliance's new grooming machine, he shared his observations on how time consuming and difficult grooming is, and how frustrating it can be to see people stomp it up and abuse it afterwards. He also showed us on a map where he and others want to put in a network of new trails on the town land, to improve the prospects for fat bikers.
"It's only about four miles of trail," he said. "But you don't have to ride very far on a fat bike to be tired out."
You don't have to ride very far on a fat bike to be tired out. So much for its heritage as an expedition bike. Your mileage may vary, of course, but the sport category of fat biker seems to be throwing down a couple of grand a pop on a bike that they'll ride a couple of miles at a time, between visits to the brew pub.
Money in the economy is money in the economy. It's not like they're engaging in child prostitution and opioid dealing. The proprietors of the beer joints act as a conduit for funds to the rest of us. Considering the amount of liquid involved, and the insistence with which it leaves the body, it would appear to accelerate the "trickle down" aspect to a point at which it sort of works. Now all we need are pay toilets to monetize the entire process. But then you just end up with yellow snow and every sheltered alcove smelling like piss as the outlaws simply evade your trap. We just can't win here.
Fat bikers go on the list with walkers -- with and without their dogs -- occasional errant snowmobilers and ATVers, and kids who build forts and campfires, as chronic and incurable irritants to ski trail managers. Our only consolation is that they tire quickly. Let's just hope they don't start tag-teaming.
Singletracks published an article on the closures of major parts of the Kingdom Trails and included this significant paragraph:
"To make matters worse, the organization has already spotted fat bike tracks poaching into the closed trails that are marked with signage, so it doesn’t look like mountain bikers will stop shooting themselves in the foot anytime soon."
Yesterday, on Wolfeboro's Sewall Woods trails -- closed to biking in the winter -- a ski renter reported seeing a fat biker with a dog. The fat biking "community" had recently gone to considerable effort to get trails opened to them on town land, but Sewall Woods is not town land and was never included in the negotiation. To make matters worse, yesterday was decidedly soft and sloppy, so the shared use trail was closed to biking anyway.
A member of the mountain bike trail group dropped in last week. Because he has been driving the Wolfeboro Singletrack Alliance's new grooming machine, he shared his observations on how time consuming and difficult grooming is, and how frustrating it can be to see people stomp it up and abuse it afterwards. He also showed us on a map where he and others want to put in a network of new trails on the town land, to improve the prospects for fat bikers.
"It's only about four miles of trail," he said. "But you don't have to ride very far on a fat bike to be tired out."
You don't have to ride very far on a fat bike to be tired out. So much for its heritage as an expedition bike. Your mileage may vary, of course, but the sport category of fat biker seems to be throwing down a couple of grand a pop on a bike that they'll ride a couple of miles at a time, between visits to the brew pub.
Money in the economy is money in the economy. It's not like they're engaging in child prostitution and opioid dealing. The proprietors of the beer joints act as a conduit for funds to the rest of us. Considering the amount of liquid involved, and the insistence with which it leaves the body, it would appear to accelerate the "trickle down" aspect to a point at which it sort of works. Now all we need are pay toilets to monetize the entire process. But then you just end up with yellow snow and every sheltered alcove smelling like piss as the outlaws simply evade your trap. We just can't win here.
Fat bikers go on the list with walkers -- with and without their dogs -- occasional errant snowmobilers and ATVers, and kids who build forts and campfires, as chronic and incurable irritants to ski trail managers. Our only consolation is that they tire quickly. Let's just hope they don't start tag-teaming.
Sunday, January 12, 2020
Disposable Income
Watching a recorded video of the Wolfeboro, NH, selectmen's meeting from Wednesday, Jan. 8, several things struck me about the public comments regarding the shared use policy drawn up to accommodate fat bike riders in the winter.
Several skiers made excellent points about the negative impact that bike riders will have on the ski experience. I made the point before about the irreducible width of 31-inch handlebars. There's also the emotional impact of having to share trails with people working way too hard to go way too slowly, getting incomplete exercise while adding sizable flotsam in the form of their oversized bikes.
A couple of people in support of the bikes made the comparison -- almost entirely incorrectly -- between fat bikes on Nordic trails and snowboarders on downhill ski areas.
First off, alpine skiers and snowboarders are both gravity-dependent sliders on snow. Throw fat bikes onto a downhill ski area and then you have a comparison. By the way, alpine skiers were none too fond of Telemark skiers either. The rhythm of free-heel skiing, within the limits of the gear of the time, made our paths a bit more meandering than your locked-down, fully-mechanized alpine skier would follow. We didn't gouge things up the way the one-plankers did, but we still got in the way of modern progress. Telemarkers cured the problem by turning their gear into what was essentially alpine skis and boots. Snowboarders cured their problem by simply being too numerous to ignore. Needing the money, the downhill areas caved in and sold out. The snowboarders do have a negative effect on the snow surface, but downhill areas are such a mosh pit anyway that lift riders have learned not to care. It's just a theme park.
Proponents of the fat bike revolution tell the cross country skiers that they will be fine just as alpine skiers were fine. It's a nice way of saying that your time is up and you have to watch yourself being replaced by this new thing that is really different from your thing, that requires all the concessions from the skiers, until skiing finally dies out. This is the wave of the future. Resistance is useless.
It's a bit like deciding whether to go ahead and welcome the Panzer battalions or let the invaders machine gun and shell a bunch of you first.
At least two commenters referred to Wolfeboro as becoming a mountain bike and fat bike Mecca. They contend that this is the only thing that will attract "a younger demographic with more disposable income" to the area.
Actually, some jobs would be a really good start. People came here in the 1980s in droves and hordes because land rape was going full bore, and anyone even pretending to be a builder was basically printing money. But many of the people who moved here became super commuters, driving hours at each end of a work day to get to their jobs in Massachusetts and the southernmost parts of New Hampshire. You have to be young to pull off a schedule like that. Other jobs proliferated in the school system, to service the kids that accompanied the influx, which drove taxes up sharply. Peripheral trades, notably landscaping and property care, also saw a boom. Year-round residents use fewer of those services than the second home crowd does.
People quit mountain biking around here around the turn of the century. A few continued. Others have resumed it as various midlife experiences impel them that way. But disposable income had become much more of a requirement.
In the 1980s and '90s, you didn't need a huge amount of money to ride mountain bikes. A mountain bike used to be something you could use to go somewhere. Now it's something you go somewhere to use. You can drop a thousand bucks just on a car rack to carry your fleet of behemoths to your chosen venue. Or you can fake something up, if you're handy with tools. But you'll need more than a thousand dollars per bike per category to get a bike that's reasonably well made and sort of durable. Two thousand a bike is a safer estimate. When everyone was mountain biking in the late 20th Century, it wasn't about the money, it was about the fun: accessible fun that anyone could join. Mountain biking is definitely no longer that.
The people who are riding now, or have returned to riding, are earning comfortable salaries at various things that pay comfortable salaries. They can afford to sit and chat for hours in a place that charges $6 for a single glass of beer. In a way, it's always been true, that the well-off only have to wait a little while for poor upstarts to fall away. Being really good at riding your bike does not provide a pathway to secure long-term income. So the well-funded hobbyist reigns supreme at the recreational side of riding.
The unanswered economic question is whether there are enough well-funded hobbyists to offset the costs of trying to pander to them.
The bike addicts can't level the same charge at cross-country skiers. A crazy top-end ski set might run you more than a grand, but you can do quite well for less. Then it's just a matter of stick time. Go out every day you possibly can, for 30 minutes or an hour, and you can put a serious hurt on posers with expensive gear and no training. Or, if you're not afflicted with competitiveness, you can just enjoy the benefits of the world's most complete exercise and let the neurotics chase each other around.
I guarantee that the median income of our old mountain bike group was half of what it is for the current group, even adjusting for inflation. No one says "whoever dies with the most toys wins" anymore, but they certainly exemplify it.
Here's the thing about a young crowd with disposable income: they get older. You look at the cross-country ski trails, you see people of all ages. Yes, a lot of the them are pretty darn old. But whole families can take it up and keep doing it with fairly minimal investment for decades. How many people in their 60s and up will be spending what's left of their disposable income on mountain biking? And who will replace each wave of the young and affluent as they age out?
As consumer society and car culture flame out in their final frenzy, all forms of human powered transportation face deadly competition on the public right of way. Human powered transportation and recreation would have provided tremendous lifestyle benefits for those of us with lesser means, if we had acknowledged as a species how limited our means actually are. But we're still drunk with the excesses of more than a century of expanding resource exploitation, reinforced and amplified by our collective fantasy life played out on screens large and small. What is the true cost of that disposable income?
Several skiers made excellent points about the negative impact that bike riders will have on the ski experience. I made the point before about the irreducible width of 31-inch handlebars. There's also the emotional impact of having to share trails with people working way too hard to go way too slowly, getting incomplete exercise while adding sizable flotsam in the form of their oversized bikes.
A couple of people in support of the bikes made the comparison -- almost entirely incorrectly -- between fat bikes on Nordic trails and snowboarders on downhill ski areas.
First off, alpine skiers and snowboarders are both gravity-dependent sliders on snow. Throw fat bikes onto a downhill ski area and then you have a comparison. By the way, alpine skiers were none too fond of Telemark skiers either. The rhythm of free-heel skiing, within the limits of the gear of the time, made our paths a bit more meandering than your locked-down, fully-mechanized alpine skier would follow. We didn't gouge things up the way the one-plankers did, but we still got in the way of modern progress. Telemarkers cured the problem by turning their gear into what was essentially alpine skis and boots. Snowboarders cured their problem by simply being too numerous to ignore. Needing the money, the downhill areas caved in and sold out. The snowboarders do have a negative effect on the snow surface, but downhill areas are such a mosh pit anyway that lift riders have learned not to care. It's just a theme park.
Proponents of the fat bike revolution tell the cross country skiers that they will be fine just as alpine skiers were fine. It's a nice way of saying that your time is up and you have to watch yourself being replaced by this new thing that is really different from your thing, that requires all the concessions from the skiers, until skiing finally dies out. This is the wave of the future. Resistance is useless.
It's a bit like deciding whether to go ahead and welcome the Panzer battalions or let the invaders machine gun and shell a bunch of you first.
At least two commenters referred to Wolfeboro as becoming a mountain bike and fat bike Mecca. They contend that this is the only thing that will attract "a younger demographic with more disposable income" to the area.
Actually, some jobs would be a really good start. People came here in the 1980s in droves and hordes because land rape was going full bore, and anyone even pretending to be a builder was basically printing money. But many of the people who moved here became super commuters, driving hours at each end of a work day to get to their jobs in Massachusetts and the southernmost parts of New Hampshire. You have to be young to pull off a schedule like that. Other jobs proliferated in the school system, to service the kids that accompanied the influx, which drove taxes up sharply. Peripheral trades, notably landscaping and property care, also saw a boom. Year-round residents use fewer of those services than the second home crowd does.
People quit mountain biking around here around the turn of the century. A few continued. Others have resumed it as various midlife experiences impel them that way. But disposable income had become much more of a requirement.
In the 1980s and '90s, you didn't need a huge amount of money to ride mountain bikes. A mountain bike used to be something you could use to go somewhere. Now it's something you go somewhere to use. You can drop a thousand bucks just on a car rack to carry your fleet of behemoths to your chosen venue. Or you can fake something up, if you're handy with tools. But you'll need more than a thousand dollars per bike per category to get a bike that's reasonably well made and sort of durable. Two thousand a bike is a safer estimate. When everyone was mountain biking in the late 20th Century, it wasn't about the money, it was about the fun: accessible fun that anyone could join. Mountain biking is definitely no longer that.
The unanswered economic question is whether there are enough well-funded hobbyists to offset the costs of trying to pander to them.
The bike addicts can't level the same charge at cross-country skiers. A crazy top-end ski set might run you more than a grand, but you can do quite well for less. Then it's just a matter of stick time. Go out every day you possibly can, for 30 minutes or an hour, and you can put a serious hurt on posers with expensive gear and no training. Or, if you're not afflicted with competitiveness, you can just enjoy the benefits of the world's most complete exercise and let the neurotics chase each other around.
I guarantee that the median income of our old mountain bike group was half of what it is for the current group, even adjusting for inflation. No one says "whoever dies with the most toys wins" anymore, but they certainly exemplify it.
Here's the thing about a young crowd with disposable income: they get older. You look at the cross-country ski trails, you see people of all ages. Yes, a lot of the them are pretty darn old. But whole families can take it up and keep doing it with fairly minimal investment for decades. How many people in their 60s and up will be spending what's left of their disposable income on mountain biking? And who will replace each wave of the young and affluent as they age out?
As consumer society and car culture flame out in their final frenzy, all forms of human powered transportation face deadly competition on the public right of way. Human powered transportation and recreation would have provided tremendous lifestyle benefits for those of us with lesser means, if we had acknowledged as a species how limited our means actually are. But we're still drunk with the excesses of more than a century of expanding resource exploitation, reinforced and amplified by our collective fantasy life played out on screens large and small. What is the true cost of that disposable income?
Friday, December 20, 2019
Holiday treats
Here's another one that could go as appropriately in my ski blog as in this one.
The turn of the year brings holidays typically associated with food and festive beverages. But the combination of weather, darkness, and the needs of my employer usually reduce my physical activity to its lowest point in the year.
I'll freely admit that one reason I chose human-powered travel so many years ago was so I could be a little undisciplined about what I ate. Humans were meant to move themselves around. We have invented various devices to carry us, but that fosters a mental addiction that leads to physical decline. Forcing myself to ride a bike to get from place to place inserted a naturally recurring period of exercise, augmented by additional exercise to travel anywhere off of my routine paths. Motorized transportation has its place, but a life built around minimizing it as much as possible helps the body get the regular use it needs. It also makes tasty treats taste better. It's fuel! It's fun! It's both! Oh hey, I ate a little too much. Sorry, everybody. I just have to ride farther. Or walk farther.
There is a form of bulimia in which the purge phase is excessive exercise, so that's another spectrum we can find ourselves on. But just because one end of the spectrum is a dangerous condition doesn't mean that the middle is bad. I would bet that most of us -- myself included -- slide more readily toward the sedentary end than the gaunt and haunted figure stomping on a treadmill at 3 a.m. And I do not make light of that person's plight. These days, I eat too much and I gain weight, because it's harder to justify the time spent playing outside. What do I need my health and fitness for? I should be trying to die, to make way for the younger generation to flourish in the space I vacate.
Life is habit forming. I don't want to live any longer than I'm enjoying it, but I don't want to cash out before I've had the last possible fun. How do you know when that is? You kinda want to hang around until it's obvious, since you can't unkill yourself. Besides, I can still be helpful to people who might need to learn something I can teach them.
Pretty heavy musings on a buche de noel, eh? But I used to be able to burn off baked goods within minutes after I ate them. Now I promise to try to burn them off some time in June. If all goes well I will be laying down base miles to get ready for bike commuting by early April, but the winters have been such physiological quicksand that the first month and a half is just damage control.
On the plus side, I'm not a very imaginative cook or sophisticated eater, so I revert to a fairly boring diet based on my attempts at nutritious food. Even so, I enter each new bike season with deep fear and doubt, which deepens my appreciation when I regain strength. Always in the mist of the future I can see the thickening shape of the serpent that will one day trap my limbs and squeeze my lungs as I fight vainly to rise one more time.
I love to start the day with a nice cup of coffee and some kind of baked goods. The coffee pot alone is sometimes the only thing that gets me out of bed, but throw in some pie, or home-made cinnamon rolls, or a whole bunch of other things the cellist is good at making, and every night is like Christmas Eve. And, since she's home so little now, I have to get it while I can.
This year I have front-loaded the queue of baked treats by making the cellist a Boston cream pie for her birthday cake. That's what got me started thinking about the Solstice baked-goods binge. The recipes I used for the pastry cream and ganache were not printed out, they were scribbled on scrap paper, so I -- inexperienced in the kitchen -- couldn't visualize the amounts. I'll be carrying pastry cream and ganache for lunch tomorrow...and probably the next day.
The turn of the year brings holidays typically associated with food and festive beverages. But the combination of weather, darkness, and the needs of my employer usually reduce my physical activity to its lowest point in the year.
I'll freely admit that one reason I chose human-powered travel so many years ago was so I could be a little undisciplined about what I ate. Humans were meant to move themselves around. We have invented various devices to carry us, but that fosters a mental addiction that leads to physical decline. Forcing myself to ride a bike to get from place to place inserted a naturally recurring period of exercise, augmented by additional exercise to travel anywhere off of my routine paths. Motorized transportation has its place, but a life built around minimizing it as much as possible helps the body get the regular use it needs. It also makes tasty treats taste better. It's fuel! It's fun! It's both! Oh hey, I ate a little too much. Sorry, everybody. I just have to ride farther. Or walk farther.
There is a form of bulimia in which the purge phase is excessive exercise, so that's another spectrum we can find ourselves on. But just because one end of the spectrum is a dangerous condition doesn't mean that the middle is bad. I would bet that most of us -- myself included -- slide more readily toward the sedentary end than the gaunt and haunted figure stomping on a treadmill at 3 a.m. And I do not make light of that person's plight. These days, I eat too much and I gain weight, because it's harder to justify the time spent playing outside. What do I need my health and fitness for? I should be trying to die, to make way for the younger generation to flourish in the space I vacate.
Life is habit forming. I don't want to live any longer than I'm enjoying it, but I don't want to cash out before I've had the last possible fun. How do you know when that is? You kinda want to hang around until it's obvious, since you can't unkill yourself. Besides, I can still be helpful to people who might need to learn something I can teach them.
Pretty heavy musings on a buche de noel, eh? But I used to be able to burn off baked goods within minutes after I ate them. Now I promise to try to burn them off some time in June. If all goes well I will be laying down base miles to get ready for bike commuting by early April, but the winters have been such physiological quicksand that the first month and a half is just damage control.
On the plus side, I'm not a very imaginative cook or sophisticated eater, so I revert to a fairly boring diet based on my attempts at nutritious food. Even so, I enter each new bike season with deep fear and doubt, which deepens my appreciation when I regain strength. Always in the mist of the future I can see the thickening shape of the serpent that will one day trap my limbs and squeeze my lungs as I fight vainly to rise one more time.
I love to start the day with a nice cup of coffee and some kind of baked goods. The coffee pot alone is sometimes the only thing that gets me out of bed, but throw in some pie, or home-made cinnamon rolls, or a whole bunch of other things the cellist is good at making, and every night is like Christmas Eve. And, since she's home so little now, I have to get it while I can.
This year I have front-loaded the queue of baked treats by making the cellist a Boston cream pie for her birthday cake. That's what got me started thinking about the Solstice baked-goods binge. The recipes I used for the pastry cream and ganache were not printed out, they were scribbled on scrap paper, so I -- inexperienced in the kitchen -- couldn't visualize the amounts. I'll be carrying pastry cream and ganache for lunch tomorrow...and probably the next day.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)