Girls Gotta Eat Dirt
I was so stoked when I watched this. It’s really exciting to see mountain biking not just portrayed in a really macho, aggressive kind of way. It was playful, like how I’ve always felt about bikes.
I often feel pretty alienated by various aspects of cycling and cycling cultures. There are huge swathes of cycling dominated by an engineer-led discourse where “performance”, speed, and technical considerations silence a broader, more inclusive and expansive cycling culture.
Regularly, my customers apologise to me for not knowing anything about some arcane bit of cycling technical ephemera. They tell me, regretfully, that they’re not doing great big century rides every week, or “racing or anything”, with some sense that this means they’re not real cyclists. It’s really important to me to reassure those people that that kind of cycling knowledge or experience is totally unnecessary to a fulfilling enjoyment of riding bikes. My job, often, is to translate stupid technical details of tube butting, geometry, or component choices into the languages my customers are fluent in: comfortable miles, secure cornering, joyful ease of use, reliability.
Cycling is so much more than some engineer’s discussion of dynamic vehicle stability. Cycling can be so much more than some Bro shredding the trails and hitting big jumps, or some shit-talking blokes dressed in their special clothes as if they’re about to race motocross or enduro or whatever.
Here’s to another kind of cycling culture.