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Do mountain bikes have soul? Does it need to be earned? Does it need to be retro? Or steel? Chipps delves into a topic with some strong opinions.
Not IMO no, but the part about bikes and riding 'defining me' is 100% true.. a MTBer is who/what i am.... but the actual bike i'm sitting on, meh, as long as it rides nicely, i'm happy 🙂
Flann O'Brien, in The Third Policeman suggests that as you ride a bike more you exchange molecules with the the bike so that you become more like the bike and the bike becomes more like you.
I therefore normally keep my bikes until they fail in a catastrophic way. A new bike needs lots of thinking about.
I enjoyed this article in the mag. Frustratingly I stopped my sub not that long ago (sorry!) as I don't just really feel like I'm a mountain biker or anything particular in cycling these days, I just love riding a few bikes that I have in various ways and wasn't picking bike mags up. This was one of those subjects that applies to bikes in general and gets away from all the tech and new kit distraction.
Does my bike have 'Quality'? etc.
Dunno, but I would say prob not half the latest issue being a paid Morzine/Saracen etc promotion
Mike F speaking sense there to me. I'm not really into fetishizing the bicycle - bikes with souls strays into this territory, not for me. 'Soulful' bikes also very popular with the more brand-conscious, consumer-minded MTBer ime.
Prefer the Warholian splendour of a giant anthem over anything from builders who claim their bikes are imbued with soul or character.
There wasn’t room for my 2p on this, but I did write it, so here you go:
I’m not sure I’d use the word soul, somehow that feels a bit fusty. It has connotations of organised religion and dusty church floors. Souls are the remnants of dead things. Mountain biking is alive and well, fresh and free. It has essence, not soul. Zip and zing, an openness to the unexpected, and an ability to take it in your stride (or pedal stroke). For me, mountain biking is about places, people, and fun. It can live and evolve, while staying true to an essence of fun and curiosity. You don’t know exactly what the trail ahead holds, or what will happen when you get there, but that’s OK - it’s part of the fun.
Reducing everything to absolutely predictable numbers and results is not mountain biking. Putting bikes and riders in carefully defined boxes and outfits is not mountain biking. The essence of mountain biking is in not knowing what comes next, but always looking forward to whatever it may be. It’s about enjoying others’ interpretation of fun on two wheels, learning new things, and moving forward. That’s not to say we eschew the past - it is there to appreciate and learn from, and perhaps to remind us that fun was had before the tech got fancy.
It’s not about the bike, it’s a state of mind. An attitude that has you wondering what’s over there, and can I get to it on two wheels? Who is that up ahead, and where are they going? Are you coming with me?
An interesting pointless question - although it seems to be several questions in one, does biking (as an activity/ clan) have soul, does a bike have soul etc. My first thought would be well no, that's a bit silly. But with music you can see/ hear a musician just playing all the right notes in the right way, and yet what they're lacking still lacks... something. Passion, whatever, the magic.
And with bikes, I've only ever ridden hardtails, but they definitely fall into camps of those that have the right dimensions and ride fine but never really do much more (GT, custom Setavento), and those that somehow have an intangible magic that makes them just feel "right" (Kona, Cotic Soda). It's more than the measurements, it's something else - probably material choice or whatever. But that's the immeasurable piece, what you might call soul.
As for MTBing more generally, I guess you could apply 'soul' to that moment, where you're just absolutely in the moment, eyes scanning ahead, bike moving around underneath you, as you flick from berm to berm or off-camber bend to rooty nibble and it all just comes together without really actively "thinking" about it too much. It's magic
As for MTBing more generally, I guess you could apply 'soul' to that moment, where you're just absolutely in the moment, eyes scanning ahead, bike moving around underneath you, as you flick from berm to berm or off-camber bend to rooty nibble and it all just comes together without really actively "thinking" about it too much. It's magic
For me that is what I call flow.
For a bike to have soul, I feel like that it has to be an intangible aspect that is transferable with the bike. I have a DeKerf which is the only bike I own that I believe has that. The rest are (mostly) great bikes and I have a long and storied history with them but nobody else would see that and in the end they are just bits of metal and plastic.
Been ruminating on this for a few days now and I’m not really sure. I started that bikes don’t have soul(s), but they do have a character and personality that they might impart on the rider, based on how they ride, head down race pace smashing to cruising along, to playful hopping from root to root etc, but then I think they might have a soul from the wisdom/knowledge/experience the designer/builder has put into them, like the ghosts of bikes past. Seeing a couple of very well respected builders fawning over another (more) respected builder’s frame at the weekend showed me a bit of that frame will probably make its way into others just by existing in the new guys heads.
*currently getting my head around shelving an MTB frame I love but deep down know it, at 435mm reach, is far too small for me (at 6’1”) and there are much more suitable options from one of the aforementioned builders…
glass half empty:
it helps if all of the bikes contact points are in the correct position.
first excursion on a 1990 Raleigh pioneer (ladies!), I simply had to rally it!
if only I could find an mtb with a similar geometry.