Kids

Volume 5, Issue 2, March 1998

There’s an odd duality that comes with working in the bike media. If you are writing for a relatively high visibility outlet, you find yourself swimming in product and drowning in the breathless hyperbole of all the marketing that comes along with said product. This can have a knock-on desensitizing effect; rendering you numb to the economic and day-to-day performance realities that the buying public faces (riding lots of fancy new shit, never riding anything long enough for it to actually wear out). It can also turn you jaded in short order (being fed an endless high-fat diet of hype only to have so much of the product you are bolting onto your bike perform worse than what it replaced).

This one was written when I was at - or very near - Peak Jadedness. I am much less jaded now, which is fortunate, because I got cut off from the pipeline of free bikes a long time ago. However, it is worth noting that my ability to keep a fleet of personal bikes running continues to be a theme in my life. I still find myself fighting for balance against the opposed tensions of glowing screen deadlines, bikes in need of work, and trails in need of riding. Same as it ever was…

In the course of my life I’d gone from loving the simple act of having wheels in motion beneath me, to being punished and tested by those wheels, to feeling inadequate at not tapping all the way into the limitless potential they offered, to finally feeling like I was being force-fed new and different wheels for no new and different good reason.