The bike “industry” has designed mental baggage for us to carry with us on our bike rides. The baggage of lightweight-extreme-beat-up -your -buddy-ism. The baggage that weighs down that latest, lightest, most expensive gear with the fear that, without said gear, other people might look down on us as if we are beginners. Can’t really blame the bike industry though, the big companies need to sell more stuff and tweaking and repackaging last year’s products and giving them rad new names is easier than real innovation, and selling the latest “toys” to the enthusiast is easier than bringing new people into bicycling. Now there is a plethora of smaller companies and frame builders and bloggers focusing more on the practical aspects of cycling and you see the big companies copying them. Which is not necessarily a bad thing except when the copies are cheap imitations that don’t really work that well.
Don't forget to smile!
Their is a tacit, maybe even an unknowing attempt to pigeonhole everybody who is on a bike into some category. There are 4 main ones. Road racer, gnarly mountain biker, fixed gear hipster, and everbody else. The last category includes people going to the bar on cruisers, homeless people on department store bikes, bikes that will live on the rear end of a motor home or in a garage and never be ridden and cyclo tourists.
Ever notice how in every publication or ad for bicycling the road rider is togged out and standing up on the pedals as if sprinting in the Roubaix velodrome and mountain bikers are always out of the saddle on a fast downhill track with the dust flying? In my neck of the woods, everybody seems to have guzzled that Kool-Aid.
Part of the problem (is there a problem, or is it just in my own head?) may be semantics. By calling bicycling a sport and bicycle riders “cyclists” there is some sort of elitism implied. And calling bicycles toys, as many people with very expensive bicycles do, relegates them to special, occasional uses, at least mentally, and it becomes an event and a production to go on a simple bike ride. I like Ant Bike Mike’s tag line “Not sport…transport.” Sums it up nicely methinks. If we think of bicycles as tools…tools for traveling…tools for running errands and getting to work…and tools for exercising and having fun, maybe we will have a lighter load to carry?
