| Lately I’ve found that my favourite thing is to race mountain bikes with no gears. Or one gear depending on your point of view.
Singlespeed racing is a subculture within a subculture (mountain biking) within a subculture (bike racing) within another subculture (endurance sports). Given the suffering involved, it is surprisingly popular throughout the world. Though the singlespeed world championships are held in a different country each year, the “prize” is always the same, a compulsory tattoo (“if you don’t want the tattoo, don’t win”). The winners, male and female, of this year’s race in Scotland are professionals on the World Cup circuit, moonlighting without their gears the week before the proper, internationally sanctioned world championships. While the race for the tattoo is fiercely contested, much silliness transpires. The men’s winner, Adam Craig, sported Dukes of Hazard style denim, a decidedly unwholesome moustache and a mullet haircut. Going into his final lap he crashed heavily while trying to open a beer. The 2005 championship in State College, Pennsylvania was awarded to the winner of a go-kart race between the top twenty finishers in the actual bike race. Locally (for me), last weekend’s Sydney Singlespeed Championship of the Universe (SSCoU) began with the traditional Le Mans style start; a frantic run to our bikes, which had been piled into a precariously balanced work of contemporary sculpture.
The question you might be thinking, but should avoid asking, is why. Why is to be avoided not because it is uninteresting but because it requires zealots to rationalise their passion. Like art or religion, sport requires a suspension of disbelief. A baseball game, coldly analysed, appears an arbitrary and frivolous spectacle of men in stirrup socks chasing a ball, rather than what it actually is, a beautiful human contraption. You gotta believe. The invention of subcultures is a natural response to the need to feel deeply and without irony.
And it’s bloody hard work. Modern mountain bikes have twenty seven gears. By shedding all but one of these you completely change the parameters of the sport. The rhythm of racing a singlespeed is almost antithetical to racing a geared bike. My biggest problem in long races on a normal bike was starting out fast and then gradually taking it easy on the climbs as the hours ticked by, sitting and spinning a low gear to save energy. The singlespeeder becomes intimately conscious of that fickle friend and confidant, momentum. By the top of some hills, you can barely turn the pedals over. It has been said that singlespeeders really have two gears -- riding and walking -- and the latter is generally to be avoided. Where geared riders can shift up to the big chainring in order to accelerate on the flats and downhills, the gearless find themselves spinning the pedals comically, trying to down a sachet of carbohydrate rich goo in preparation for the next hill.
On a singlespeed internet forum a few months ago there was a link to a scientific article on intermittent locomotion. In nature many animals find it efficient to alternate bursts of effort (the grinding uphill) with recovery (the spinning along drinking Gatorade). Think of the squirrel who runs madly all over the garden and then stops, sunning itself on a branch. Or dolphins, who are able to dive to such depths only by alternating periods of swimming and gliding.
Another aspect of singlespeeding’s appeal is uniquely human and not altogether admirable -- the need to feel smug when things go well, and to have a good excuse when things, as they say in this country, go pear shaped. This element engenders a certain tension in the mountain bike community. The geared rider is checkmated. If he gets beaten by a guy (and alas, singlespeeders are almost all blokes) with one gear he looks soft, if he beats the singlespeeder, and not with a baseball bat, then the singlespeeder need only point to the single cog on his bike and shrug. I’ll let geared riders in on a secret -- fact is that unless a course is dead flat or slightly downhill, a situation which wouldn’t really constitute mountain biking, a rider on a singlespeed is at virtually no disadvantage and has no excuses. The singlespeeder does work harder, but that effort is rewarded as long as you keep the pedals turning over (total physical collapse -- the bonk -- is the other available option). At a recent 100km race I finished a lucky 13th overall out of 271 riders. What time I lost on flat dirt roads was easily made up on the course’s many rolling hills. Racers often observe that the fastest lap times in the singlespeed category are not far off the elite field.
Writing about my passion for a general audience has demonstrated that the question of why is unavoidable. But all the reasons I have listed and could list are in the end post-rationalisations that would make even Daniel Libeskind blush. The idea, like religion or ballet or musicals or mime, either appeals or it doesn’t. And boy, if it appeals watch out. Very quickly you’ll find yourself grinding up some endless climb at six in the morning on a Sunday, or, worse, falling for the sport so totally that the purchase of a $10,000 custom titanium singlespeed from the Oregon workshop of master framebuilder Jeff Jones becomes not only justifiable, but as the only known cure for the affliction of bike lust, medically necessary. Thank God he has a ten year waiting list.
My own favourite post-rationalisation is to invoke Thoreau -- “simplify, simplify.” Given the excellent trails in the vicinity of Walden Pond, and Thoreau’s sensibility, I think we can definitively conclude that the man would have been a singlespeeder. When I read the posts on mountain bike forums which meticulously list the parts on a particular bike or contemplated bike, complete with prices and weights in grams, it reminds me of Thoreau’s famous accounting of the materials that went into his cabin at Walden. Both Thoreau and the singlespeeder have chosen to shed certain material comforts without relinquishing the idea that there is indeed pleasure to be found in material things. That gleaming titanium machine, or the journey to race the legendary Ruta de los Conquistadores in Costa Rica, is justifiable. What else are you going to spend the money on? Shoes? Latte? Are you willing to always wonder what it would have been like to blast you local trails on such a steed?
Truthfully I own three bikes, and two of them have gears. While they gather a bit of dust these days, I love them too. If a lightweight, race-worthy singlespeed is beautiful in the manner of a New England village church, my geared bike with four inches of suspension front and rear is maybe more like the Sagrada Familia. What some people find off-putting about Thoreau is that he did not seem to acknowledge that humans are fickle; while for weeks at a time, thrilled by the virtues of the cabin, we might think we have all the answers, the next day we might drop it all for a bit of aimless urban flânerie. Late summer finds Route 2 full of regretful Bostonians at the end of their two weeks in the mountains, thinking that life in the country might not be so bad. Two weeks later how many can remember even considering such a life? Be wary of the singlespeeder who invokes “purity” to justify his passion. Check to see if he has given up his clipless pedals, tubeless wheels, hydraulic disc brakes, heart rate monitor, GPS receiver, electrolyte drinks or carbon fiber handlebar. If he has, take pity and remind him that the logical conclusion of a descent toward purity is running barefoot through the woods. And no one likes walking up hills.
---
Editor’s note:
---
Some links:
2007 singlespeed world championships story:
Rich Dillen, bike messenger and 2006 World singlespeed solo 24 hour racing champion:
Mountain Bike review singlespeed forum:
Jeff Jones, clinically proven cure for bike lust:
|
