Mountain biking is a massively broad activity. Back roads and back flips. No bike does it all well.
First of all, some clarification. What do we mean by “underbiked” and “overbiked”? Aside from a few variables I’d say it’s about a judgement of a bike’s suspension travel and its weight.
An audio version of this article is available to logged in users so they can put our goods in their ears.To be “underbiked” is to be on a short travel sub-14kg bike and attempting to navigate significantly rough and/or steep terrain.
To be “overbiked” is to be a long travel over-16kg bike whilst pootling around smooth and/or shallow terrain.
Because this is cycling, everything is tainted with a tincture of sadomasochism. We admire riders who are underbiked. We mock riders who are overbiked. We prefer riders who put restrictions on themselves as opposed to riders who prefer to enable themselves. Cyclists are weird.
Furthermore, the use of the prefixes “under-” and “over-” implies some sort of baseline. Some sort of norm. I guess this is where the fabled “trail bike” is supposed to exist. I know we’re all supposed to love a good do-it-all trail bike but in my opinion, trails bikes are exactly what’s wrong with mountain biking…
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True certainly.
I’ve ridden a road bike on 25c tyres around a pretty tame Red/Blue trail centre, as I was passing and bored of the road.
Asides a few punctures, it was fine. I bet if I did that a few times it’d fail in an amusingly catastrophic way tho.
Clearly that’s the far end of underbiked but you could hammer an Enduro bike around it relentlessly without failure or punctures.
What are the definitions of under and over biked?
Isn’t that the point, that there aren’t any, it’s subjective?
My point’s that I have a rigid 29er that is both light and involving but also genuinely bombproof and reliable, so I’d say ‘robust’ is a separate attribute here. ‘Capable’ is about how an enduro bike can roll down a rough trail in more control than my rigid bike. But .. pedantic semantics.
I ride a 27.5in Giant Anthem with 130mm up from and 110mm on the back, and a 130mm OnOne-Ti-456 so feel a bit overbiked for the general XC riding I do around the W.Berks/Hampshire/Wiltshire borders, although both are comfy enough and not too heavy.
On the road I’m underbiked ridning a 26in singlespeed Kona mtb frame with 1.5in road tyres, rigid carbon forks and Mary Bars. About time I bought or built up a proper singlespeed road bike really.
Never mind over biked, more like over thunk – just get out and ride 🙂 All bikes innit
Doesn’t matter now anyway. It’s all about being over or under Torqed and range anxiety.
not that it ever mattered 👍
I just know that my FlareMAX – 125mm at the rear and a 140mm Manitou Mattoc Pro up front – is lovely to ride in a warm, involving, capable but visceral sort of way. I have two sets of wheels, a heavier trail one with a Forekaster up front and a Rock Razor in the back and a lighter set with a Wolfpack Cross, lighter Rock Razor combo. For my usual riding, mostly Peak District, it feels pretty much perfect, can get overfaced on really big, chunky stuff, but mostly has ‘enough’ without losing ‘zip’ and ‘thing’, remember ‘thing’?
My experience of more travel is, for me, less fun / more detachment, but obviously that’s subjective. If pushed I’d say I instinctively prefer to be underbiked, possibly because when I started riding bikes back about a million years ago, everyone was always underbiked and the more capable and faster a bike gets, the harder and faster you end up crashing.
Weirdly, the most ‘overbiked’ I’d ever felt / been was on a Trek Full Stache in the Peak. Huge tyres, big wheels, quite a lot of travel. It was simultaneously incredibly capable on typical Peak rockeries, but oddly ethereal, like floating just above the surface on an invisible carpet of pink candy floss. A bit like looking out of the window of a plane at your local trails, but having absolutely zero contact with them.
Do I care? Only in so far as I’d rather enjoy riding my bike and have enough trail feel to kid myself that I’m actually doing something rather than just being a passenger with some control over the direction of flight. YMMV etc.