Words: Chipps
Does anyone ever aspire to be average? Surely, statistically, most of us must be average at most things? Look around, though, and all talk is about the fastest, the biggest, the raddest, with occasional glances towards the terrible for balance.
You’ll never really hear about the exploits of the average majority because that’s just, well, too normal. Surely, the bigger and more prevalent that something like mountain biking becomes, the more of us fall into the ‘not great, but not terrible either’ middle ground because, as the sport has matured, the best have become better and more specialised. But that’s not our impression of things as viewers.
Instead, what fills our screens and magazines and feeds is the constant over-achieving of the talented and the lucky – often ‘balanced’ by a helping of ‘fail’ videos where everything goes wrong. Taken as a whole, this mix of heroes and zeroes gives us an idea that what we’re seeing is average mountain biking.
Those extremes, for better or worse, are what fills the printed and digital media, but I’d like to celebrate, for a moment, the average and the normal. All around the country, people are getting together (or setting off alone) and doing rides of medium duration, on mid-level bikes, at a moderate speed – and at the end of the day, nothing dramatic happens. All day long bikes work as expected, the terrain is neither boggy extremes or wind-whipped dust – and once the ride is over, there’s a perfectly acceptable pint and packet of cheese and onion crisps in a beer garden. Everything doesn’t have to be mega hucks, gnarly schralps and exploding drum risers. And, because the mean of zero and ten is five, you can also say that the mean of five, five, five, five, five and five is also five.
And that’s fantastic for us average riders. Just for an average ride to happen, so many great things have to come together at once. Bikes, however plain and workmanlike, are marvels of technology. When was the last time you were astounded at the strength and complexity of a wheel? At the technology that goes into keeping air in your tyres, or in shifting a single gear when you press a lever at the other end of the bike? Even an average bike is amazing.
Then there’s you, the pilot of this bonkers machine. You turn pies into pedalling, which is turned into motion via the chain and gears. Your brain and body make a series of micro-adjustments informed by your sense of balance that turn into tiny muscle movements that constantly adjust the bars to both keep you upright and keep you going where you want.
Even the averagest of average mountain bike terrain is something to be marvelled at. The fact that we can ride up and over kerbs and roots, rail round corners with just a handful of rubber knobbles keeping us upright and descend down trails that are hard to even walk down is something we rarely take time to appreciate.
And then there’s the fact that, without the median, there can never be the upper extremes. If everyone was fantastic no one would be the best, because we’d all be the best. Without places 4 to 200 at a Sunday cross-country race, you wouldn’t have a podium. In fact, you wouldn’t have a race at all, given that those also-rans pay for the event to take place in the first place. Just running races for winners is something only Red Bull can afford.
So, get up, pull yourself up to your full, average height, and give yourself a round of applause. Average riders rejoice! Now is your time! Get out there and ride!
Just make sure that you don’t get too inspired and get suddenly good or anything, as you’ll no longer be average anymore and some of us will have to actually get worse at riding in order to keep the global balance of average in line…
