I think perhaps the only issue with Uncle Dave’s musings is perspective. He’s obviously a bloke who’s world is mountain biking, he writes about it for a website dedicated to it where, no doubt, they are constantly being cajoled and persuaded to look favourably at yet another bit of “innovation” from what has become a significant niche within cycling… But MTBing, especially the glossy, high price point, lifestyle marketed version, isn’t all cycling, or even all that representative of cycling…

I think what the piece tells us more than anything, by looking at the author, is that you can be on the kool aid so long, you start to forget there’s a world outside of it, he’s perhaps noticing the unsustainable aspects of the subset of the cycling world he’s involved in and perhaps starting to examine the difference between ‘want’ and ‘need’…
But these are not groundbreaking revelations…

If your balanced and happy you don’t buy a new reverb for every bike you own, own thousands of pounds of multiple bikes yet live in a rented property.

I feel the judgement of Hora bearing down on me, it’s only the road bike that doesn’t have a dropper and due to various things that have happened during my life I’ve accepted that I won’t own a house unless I inherit it or win the lottery. Perhaps I’m not balanced and happy, perhaps most people aren’t. But I enjoy riding my bikes, it’s a great part of my life and probably a better investment overall than the obsession with buying bigger houses and knowing exactly how much your house made for you this month (when in reality it only has a sale value when you find somebody willing to buy it)

Luckily I’m still riding my 1995 GT which I no longer have to pedal along it just floats on my own smug sense of awesomeness.

The perfect response 😉

Living in the same city as the author I can see where he’s coming from. There’s no shortage of people who just have to have the ‘latest greatest’ and have the money to buy it. Combine that with a lack of imagination and you end up with a load of generic plastic enduro bikes all set up with the same components. It’s like being at school where a 13 year old is under loads of pressure to fit in and buy that triangular shaped Head bag (showing my age here….). But these people are 35 and work in IT 😉

Maybe things have changed but when I lived in the UK, mountain biking wasn’t so sheep based. There’d be your normal full sus bikes, rigid singlespeeds, hardtails and some tit on a fixie coming out for group rides.

Found a new local track during the winter. Ends eight minutes ride from the front door. Been waiting for it to dry out for two months – oh, the anticipation….rode it for the first time yesterday on my nine year old 26″ hardtail. It was ace.

The linked article would be fine as a personal blog entry, but I hope he’s not getting paid to write that stuff.

I blame STW, perfectly happy (well apart from being shaken to bits across sun baked mud) on my Trek 950 for about 15 years, then I found this place & a whole new world of bike ownership opened up to me, oddly enough an increasing bicycle collection coincided with reducing my motorbike collection from 3 to 1 which I found to be a really positive move, however I seem to be able to ditch girlfriends with far less angst than getting shot of bicycles, mind you I guess N +1 girlfriends isn’t really the done thing.