The Beauty and the Beast of Compartmentalisation

Call yourself a mountain biker? We’re sorry, but that’s not good enough any more, according to the legendary Steve Worland in Issue 88 for the big column…

I recently read a post on Facebook from a bike industry acquaintance asking the question: “Do cross-country mountain bikers actually exist any more?” In response, I commented: “I don’t know of any other kind” – and I wasn’t just trying to be clever. Cross-country riding is what almost all of us do, even if we’re riding down hills in armoured pullovers, fluoro-bile shorts and leg paddage. If we’re not on a road, a pavement or a BMX track, then we’re riding cross-country.

Actually most of my road rides are cross-country too, in that I choose to go on the smallest and least traffic-addled roads I can find meandering between the hedges, hills and valleys of Somerset. As far as I’m concerned, a road that’s so little used by motorised traffic that it has a grassy strip up the centre, is as much trail as road. But I’ll stifle my pedantic impulses because I know exactly where he was coming from with the cross-country question. Cyclists, whether on blacktop, on dirt or on a mix of the two, have evolved into loads of different breeds, with particular bike types and particular imagery stereotypically linked to each breed. Personally, I’m still proud to be seen as ‘XC’, or possibly even just as someone who likes riding a bike, but there aren’t many manufacturers left who simply list cross-country as one of their mountain bike categories. It’s Trail, or Enduro, or Gravity, or All-Mountain – even Cannondale’s ‘Over-Mountain’.

It appears that, from a marketing point of view, categorising bikes or riders as cross-country makes them less exciting. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. The cross-country categorised bikes from Specialized, Santa Cruz and Trek stand proud in their ranges, stigmatised only by their low weight and limited suspension travel. Yes, there are riders who are so caught up in their latent potential for stunt riding that they regard such attributes as stigma.

However, even if you accept that we’re all cross-country riders, there’s no way of avoiding the fact that a lot of us conform to breed stereotypes. I know a fair few local riders who think of mountain biking as a radical activity that involves driving to trail centres in a vehicle chosen almost purely on its practicality for that purpose. They film hours of their ride and post two-minute edits on social media, ideally showing some sort of crash to show how dangerous their lives are. It’s probably no coincidence that some of those riders also think nothing has happened unless it’s on social media. Trail centres, like social media and filmed two-minute snippets of rides, and the vehicles used to carry the bikes, have turned almost everything about mountain bikes into a product: a product to be consumed in timeframes, rather than simply experienced.

It’s all to do with compartmentalisation. Psychological compartmentalisation is a state in which an integrated part of our life becomes separated from the rest of our personality and functions independently. It will sometimes be referred to as dissociation. I’ve heard it called a ‘neurosis of our time’, the ‘psychological refuge of the privileged and the spoiled’, the ‘malady of a society with endless choices’. In its simplest form, it’s our way of escaping the fact that we spend a large part of our lives learning how to deal with the crossover activities that go together to make up the overall experience of life. Dealing with them all at the same time can be complex, so we compartmentalise into work time, play time, family time, couples time, private time etc. If you’re reading this you probably have ‘mountain bike time’ as one of those compartments.

Some of us will simply accommodate mountain biking, known more simply as ‘riding a bike’ (see, we’ve already sub-compartmentalised) as part of what we do, possibly even as a way of getting somewhere or filling a gap in the day by escaping home, or work, and thinking about something else while you blat around in the woods for an hour. But to some, mountain biking has become a ritual that feels incomplete unless it involves loading the bike onto or into the vehicle, putting on or packing up the specialist clothes of whatever colour and style suits the riding image you have of yourself, picking up a few like-minded mates and travelling to a place set up specially to cater for you.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with any of this. But are you aware of how much you’ve ritualised your mountain biking? Fortunately most of us are very capable of gently taking the piss out of ourselves, laughing at the latest video that in turn takes the piss out of the latest sub-genre of compartmentalisation – the enduro rider. Yes, for the benefit of those who’ve been living under a bush for a while, there is now an ‘enduro rider’, apparently isolated from other types of riders. This isolation will allow focus and precision in the cultivation of enduro style. The human mind, and in particular the masculine mind, is scary in its ability to totally isolate thoughts or ideas from other thoughts or ideas, and even from the rest of consciousness. Enduro style is the end result.

If you get the chance, read the words of André Gorz on ‘The Social Ideology of the Motor Car’. It’s not all about compartmentalisation, but it’s worth reading anyway and I’ve always been fond of his summary paragraph: “…never make transportation an issue in itself. Always connect it to the problem of the city, of the social division of labour, and to the way this compartmentalises the many dimensions of life. One place for work, another for living, a third for shopping, a fourth for learning, a fifth for entertainment. The way our space is arranged carries on the disintegration of people that begins with the division of labour in the factory. It cuts a person into slices, it cuts our time, our life, into separate slices so that in each one you are a passive consumer at the mercy of the merchants, so that it never occurs to you that work, culture, communication, pleasure, satisfaction of needs, and personal life can and should be one and the same thing: a unified life, sustained by the social fabric of the community.”

Well, on reflection I think compartmentalisation may well be a good thing, or at least a double-edged sword. The illogical alternative would be that enduro riders would spend their whole family, pub, or otherwise normal life dressed in logo-enhanced sky-blue uniforms, overkill goggles and protective padding. Long live XC – even in its many sub-compartments.