No Man's Land

Does loving Lycra and 700c tires make you a Benedict Arnold? Chris Dannen ponders the quesiton.

A few months ago I penned a column about the virtues and vices of spending some of my pedal-time on the pavement with a new road rig. I broached such questions as: am I a traitor to our sport for hopping on a pair of thin tires? Am I going to be won over to complete cycling geekdom by lycra and espresso? Will I ever ride mountain again? And furthermore, does anyone actually give a shit what I think about road riding’s relationship to trail riding?

So here goes: Yes, Yes, Yes and Whatever--hang with me for a minute for the fun of it.

They say that the cornerstone of an addiction is one’s blindness to it. Now when I say “they say,” I mean that’s what I would say if I wrote maxims. But really, this principle sounds sensible enough; we’ve all found ourselves in situations where our reliance on a particular person/activity/substance has crept up on us, only to render itself obvious when one ends up wandering up the side of a highway in Hackensack, New Jersey looking for loose change in the dirt, hoping there will be a public phone up ahead where I can call my bookie and see if he’ll take a deed to my liver as collateral.

Hackensack aside, addictions are the sleeper-cells of habitual behavior, springing on you and asserting their power like bomb-vested bus-goers. I know this because I have seen said power first hand. It reared its head in my bathroom mirror, of all places, when I stepped toward the shower and noticed in my reflection two distinct lines below my shoulders. Tan lines. Cycling jersey tan lines.

So I did a little road mileage-math and as the number started to swell (first soaring past the mean IQ of a typical country music fan, then rising upwards of 90) I realize I haven’t ridden on dirt in quite a while. I haven’t even touched either of my mountain bikes since it was still technically winter. I am becoming a roadie. An asphalt-addicted roadie.

Am I a traitor? Hell yes. I’ve stopped wearing a hydration pack, I’ve traded my mini pump for a CO2 cartridge and I wear the same exact get-up on dirt as I’ve learned to wear on the road. I am that guy that I always hated in high school, the XC melvin who would pay attention to average speed on the trail and ride around every downed log or mudhole. At least I still have sense enough to ride through the mudholes and over the logs, but when I do so, I’m still dressed like a tool.

But now here’s the thing: bike geekhood isn’t especially appealing to me. I still think lycra is dumb, if functional, and an excess of coffee has always given me a headache. But when I see other riders on the trail with their grass-rootsy baggies and sleeveless shirts, I can count on not being invited to join the group. Bike geekdom is just like middle-school geekdom. It’s not predicated on choice; it’s determined by exclusion.

In fourth grade I used to get my ass kicked by a fat Irish kid named Kevin McGewan. Wherever this asshole is today, I hope it’s miserable, dirty, and of dubious decorative taste—but it almost doesn’t matter. Because seeing “real” mountain bikers on the trail lately has come to make me feel a little like I did in fourth grade, the fat Irish bully lumbering toward me to do perpetrate stereotypically bullyish activity, like stealing my milk money or drawing on my face with marker. I have realized that I don’t like the excluded feeling of full-out bike geekdom. I’m going back.

So I’ll start wearing my baggies again and I’ll clean out the various lifeforms that have rooted colonies in my CamelBak reservoir. But I won’t regret my stint in geekdom, because I’ll continue the road riding and I’ll continue to reap the benefits on the trail: the lungs a little bigger, the cadence a little steadier, the LT a little higher. And I’ll keep being ashamed of even knowing what an “LT” is. I figure there has to be a happy medium between mountain biker and road convert, and I intend to find it; occupying this identity-crossed no man’s land is disorienting. In the end, I’d simply like to be able to define just where I am on the great spectrum of cycling. Because if you don’t know where you are on that spectrum, you could end up somewhere you don’t want to be. Like Hackensack, New Jersey.