Just Ride
Posted 8th March 2007
In this age of obsessive cycle specialisation, Horses for Courses seems to be the cliché du jour. But it doesn’t have to be that way, as a recent morning ride taught me.
When you were a kid, you had one bike that did everything. You didn’t worry about the incongruity of skimming along the road on your BMX or flying off jumps on your 10 speed racer. You just rode your bike. It was fun, free and easy. You didn’t pigeonhole your riding like you do with practically everything when you grow up. How many times have you thought, “I’m going for a road ride today, I’ll wear my roadie kit, ride my road bike and I shall ride exclusively on the tarmac”. Next time, it’s off road, and you get your MTB baggies and your peaked helmet. You’ll worry whether it’s a full suss or a hardtail day, whether its semi slick or full knobbly tyre weather, whether the trails demand the XC bike or the ‘freeride hardtail’ or you’ll back yourself into some other marketing pigeonhole. Then you’ll pack the whole shebang into the car and head off for your exclusively off road experience. Jaded? Never. But it’s sometimes important to stop worrying about kit and just get out and ride. Ride anywhere and everywhere. Good rides always start and finish at your front door. And the best rides always have that random factor somewhere in the middle.
Make that leap of faith, hark back to your childlike cycling self. You don’t need special clothes or a quiver of bikes at your summoning. You don’t need to use the boring ‘or’ word. ‘And’ is word of the day. We live in an age where specialisation is king and where we’re convinced we need a whole array of different gadgets to get by. Truth is, sometimes things are much more interesting when you metaphorically try that bunker shot with a nine iron.
Take my ride the other day. Dropped my son off at school (on the bike of course) and had an hour to myself, sun shining, not a hint of rain. Perfect day for a ride. I ride a singlespeed cyclocross/ hybrid/ tourer thingy (there I go pigeonholing – it’s a bike) with a 72 inch gear – perfect set up for riding around town – practically maintenance free and genuinely fun to ride. Being in not-quite-the-right-gear all the time is always fun and gives you a gentle reminder of just how strong you are – and harks back to those first bikes we all had as kids – they were all singlespeeds too.
I decided to head for the Country Park, only 10 minutes away and haven for city dwellers wanting to get away from the traffic. The bike’s natural habitat is city streets and it did its usual fuss free job of getting me from A to B. However, as I hopped off the road and into the Country Park’s maze of rooty woodland trails, I realised that the singlespeed with touring tyres isn’t exactly weapon of choice on the slippery singletrack. But the kid in me just said, ‘just go with it’ and I did. And pretty soon the penny dropped – I was having way more fun than I normally do riding these local trails riding my hardtail MTB. Everything was just a little bit trickier – those roots required a quick unweighting of the front end to negotiate. The slither of the tyres on muddy corners gives me plenty to think about. The narrow drop bars made steering a matter of finesse and fine control. Even the ‘pretty high for the road’ 72 inch gearing was great fun off road. Where I’d scramble for the thumbshifters on the MTB, I just apply spadefuls of power on the cranks, getting out of the saddle to negotiate small rises and boggy bits of ground. After about an hour of exploring and finding new trails, I head out of the woods and back on the road. No hindrance of knobbly tyres and bobbing suspension fork now I’m back on the tarmac. Just that slightly out of place everywhere, Swiss Army Knife bike, propelling me home.
The same ethos of ‘love the one you’re with’ can apply to any bike. Most bikes can be made to work better in any given situation with a switch of tyres. MTBs can make great all round road bikes with a pair of slicks. Tourers with knobblies can make great cyclo cross bikes. Even road bikes can withstand the odd bridleway shortcut – as I memorably discovered one day on a ride in Cheshire. And no, the narrow rims didn’t buckle and the 23mm tyres didn’t flinch. Point is, it’s easy to underestimate the strength of even the most fragile looking bike or indeed the efficiency of the most burly.
Of course this whole idea is nothing new. Just new to me. Cyclists have been taking their bikes to places they weren’t designed for since cycling began. The Rough Stuff Fellowship delight in hauling touring bikes across Peak District packhorse routes. The Paris Roubaix spring classic takes road racers over Belgian farm tracks that some mountain bikers would baulk at. One could even argue that half the fun of cyclocross racing is riding a bike which, even in its latest incarnation, is not perfectly evolved for riding off-road.
So next time you fancy a bike ride, just get on and ride, turn down that path that you always pass by. Don’t worry, that adaptable machine beneath you can take it.