Yet another week has gone by, and your trusty editorial team has been scribbling away (metaphorically speaking) to bring you all the latest what’s what in the world of the mountain bike. But it’s Sunday – and to stave off the long, dark teatime of the soul that appears around 4pm, here’s a roundup of the best and the brightest that we’ve seen this week:
Nature’s noises
Barney’s link of the week: Sun[day]
Not a piece of news, really. Just some chap who’s been out with the spade, and made a film of it. Notable for the lovely composition, the fact that he’s clearly an extremely handy, beautifully unshowy rider, and for the completely natural soundtrack. No screaming rock or pounding techno here; just natural loamy awesomeness. Fantastic.
Q/R Furore
Mark’s link of the week – The small matter of replacing your QR sir
Forgive me for using the same quote twice in one month but, ‘Well, that escalated quickly”. We get recall stories on a pretty regular basis. Shit happens and sometimes that’s a product recall. As official ‘meeja’ it’s part of our duty really to pass these things along. Normally they are dull enough and affect just a tiny proportion of the millions of cyclists out there but not this one. Not only did this one pretty much affect millions of bike riders around the world but it seemed that affected directly or not, everyone had a pretty much a polarised view on the whole affair. It’s rare that a story that essentially boils down to a company upgrading for free a component for free results in such strength of feeling from the public at large, but the issue around the suitability of the QR skewers mixed with disc brakes certainly whips up a bit of frenzy. In this case that frenzy resulted in our biggest online story in our entire publishing history. Read our story by following the link but then go and have a look at our Facebook post about it here if you really want to see how strong the reaction to this issue can be.
“Trust is a very powerful thing, but it should never circumvent your own reality.”
Jenn’s link of the week: It’ll be good for you
Andy Kirkpatrick is a climber and writer, and a father of two. He wrote this column about climbing with his kids and instilling in them the values he thinks they will need as they (with some inevitability) go on to become climbers themselves.
Without exception, his points translate to mountain biking: both for parents of kids learning to ride bikes, and to adults making the transition from trail centre to backcountry mountain biking too (think the Lakes, the Highlands, even the Peak District – anywhere that ‘rescue’ is more than a few hundred metres down a fire road and ‘weather’ means more than the choice between waterproof shorts or fluoro baggies).
Just substitute bike-related terms for the climbing terms and you’ve got a primer for the ‘head skills’ that offset the skill-distorting effects of capable bikes, enticing trails and peer pressure (so it’s also a handy checklist for making sure your attempts at enduro racing don’t end in A&E…).
