Ride non-binary bikes
Whenever I meet a new person at work, and we get to talking about our lives and hobbies, I usually tell them I’m a keen cyclist. The default response when you tell someone this is usually “Oh, do you mountain bike? Or ride on the road?”. At this point I’ll have to say “er, well, neither. Both. I do something in-between.”
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to identify as a road cyclist or a mountain biker. Usually I say “I’m a bikepacker” or “I do adventure cycling” if people need clarification — and then say that the choice of road or mountain routes really depends on the day, and if there’s something interesting out there to get to.
In the world of mountain biking, trails are absolutely defined by capitalism. As bikes got bigger, with more suspension, decent brakes, and better roll-over, trails had to get bigger and more difficult to satisfy experienced riders.
Mountain bikes became so over-built, that they are downright unpleasant to ride on roads, so your average mountain biker drives their bike to the trails in their car (or worse: their double-cab ute). When they’re there, they might catch a shuttle to the top of the hill as well.
And let’s not get into electric mountain bikes — love them as an assistive technology, great for commuting and for helping more folks get outdoors, but it’s increasingly the norm that uphill single-track trails becoming like motorways due to able-bodied e-MTB’ers trying to get to the summit.
Road cycling has a similar issue with technology, though less pronounced, as suspension isn’t involved. Instead, the focus is on being as impossibly light and aerodynamic as possible. Sure — “just get fitter, improve the rider not the bike”, but in a modern capitalist society one of two things is true:
- You’ll need to start working less to get faster, because time is a factor
- You can buy the impossibly light bike to get faster
Cycling and gear creep
“What’s wrong with going fast?!” the modern cyclist cries. Don’t I deserve this? Going fast is fun.
I agree. Going fast is fun. But going fast is also relative.
Across the world, speed limits are different in different countries. In some countries on open roads, it’s 80 km/h across the board, in other countries, it’s 100km/h. Do the people in the slower countries going 80km/h think ‘damn, wish I was going 100 right now’? Probably not.
When people in a cycling community get better gear, the overton window shifts to make faster the new normal. This makes other people feel like they should also get better gear, because as much as going fast feels good, going slower than everyone else feels worse. I’ve always referred to this concept as “gear creep”.
Gear creep is a problem, because it pushes people out of the community who refuse to adhere to the new status quo, whether that’s for financial or ethical reasons. It makes the barrier to entry for new riders higher and higher — overly privileging people who have the means to own high-spec gear.
Road cycling and mountain biking are where gear creep is the biggest problem, because gear trickles-down from elite sports to the consumer level, and new products are aggressively marketed to the road-or-mtb consumer.
The nature of having a commodity that is directly linked to elite sports performance means that everything slowly pushes towards the “one right way” to do things — the best brakes, the best tyres, the best frames, all of that is funnelled into a pay-to-win machine.
Often, to the point that people don’t realise that you don’t need the best gear to enjoy cycling.
This is no more evident than on the various New Zealand bikepacking Facebook groups where at least once-a-week a cashed up newbie pops in to ask ‘What are the best tyres to do the Tour Aotearoa on?’ and inevitably receive a hundred different answers, because bikepacking, with its’ varied terrain, is impossible to optimise for in the way that road and mountain is (yes, I’ve had to put all of those groups on mute for my own sanity).
The bicycle binary is like the gender binary
Genders operate in a very similar way under capitalism. There are expected ways to be ‘good at’ your assigned gender at birth, and our transness threatens the capitalist mindset of gender because it refuses to be good at it.
Modern non-binary and transgender theory argues for liberation, not assimilation. We refuse to be ‘good at’ either category, instead forging our own.
Sometimes I wonder if this is why I have a love of non-binary bicycles as well.
You see, you can’t really optimise a bicycle that refuses to be optimised. But you can enjoy it (like riding a fixed gear bike off-road, or riding a bike with little wheels to go bikepacking).
I find it a particularly liberating type of joy to ride a bicycle where the rules of performance don’t apply to me. I’m not competing with anyone else when I take my tracklocross bike on an easy trail, except for myself and a few other like-minded kooks. When other people see me, they can’t pass a judgement on whether I’m doing good or bad, they’re usually just confused (see also: why under-biking is fun).
And best of all, it’s hard to be miserable about the inevitable capitalist creep towards new tech when you drop out of the system entirely.
Resisting new bicycle binaries
Of course, non-binary bicycles occasionally get popular and become their own category. Think the boom-and-bust of the city fixed gear scene, the rise of gravel, and the runaway success of the Kennett Brothers’ bikepacking routes.
This is not inherently a bad thing, but once the capitalist eye is on a new trend, it’s likely to be co-opted into new products. For example, so many crappy fixed gears designed to sell to people who don’t know what to look for when buying a bike, and function mostly to put people off cycling, rather than get them interested in it.
Or perhaps disgustingly lightweight performance gravel bikes, so that gravel can be co-opted into the same gear creep scheme as road cycling, and therefore help bike companies leverage more money from cashed-up bike boomers.
The best way to spot bicycle binaries is to see if it is pushing a category. How do we know that capitalism is taking hold of gravel? Well, the big corporate bicycle retailers are adding it to their website navigation.
But is buying a performance gravel bike really fun, if you don’t race? Is being faster than your friends fun, or are you just going to make your friends suffer to keep up with a pay-to-win bike, then realise that dropping $10k on a super bike didn’t really make you happy?
(actually, the greatest hit of dopamine is when you’re faster than someone riding a $10k bike in a race and your bike cost $600)
In conclusion
The best form of cycling joy is when you refuse to assimilate.
Ride some easy trails on a bike that isn’t a mountain bike.
Go in a bike race with a bike that isn’t carbon.
Commute to work on a bike that’s fun, not fast.
Smash the bicycle binary.
