(Rap Battle:) Mountain Biker vs. Road Biker

As we're approaching our 100th blog post (in fact next post!) I want to tell you that there might be some changes to Ensliga Bergens cykelklubb, and to this blog. We're thinking about expanding into mountain biking. Or rather, I (yours truly) am thinking about it. And since there are numerous subdisciplins to mountain biking, to be specific I'm thinking about taking up cross country. Now, actually I would love to be able to say that I am thinking about taking up downhill, but I'm not. I think that downhill bikes are just awesome. Some of these bikes look mean, in a really cool way. And downhill riding seems absolutely great. For example, check out this awesome video with equally awesome Claudia Clement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxPtq8hSisE

(We didn't take this photo. We borrowed it from Claudia Clement's flickr page. Hope that's OK!)

As I said before I would love to say that I am thinking about taking up downhill riding. But there is that question of economy... I can't afford one of these awesome downhill bikes, and travelling to mountain areas to ride it. If you have that kind of money, that's great for you, but I don't.

So instead I am thinking about cross country. Actually, when I first got into biking I started with a mountain bike. I wrote about this in a previous post. It's not strange. This was in the early 1990's, and mountain biking (no subdisciples back then) was the new black. You could see videos of guys (yeah, mostly guys) riding around in forests and down hills on these steel hardtails with 26" wheels on MTV. Yeah, MTV showed music videos and sometimes clips from new "radical" sports like snowboarding and mountain biking back then. Different times! But anyway I was hooked, rode my mountain bike all around the countryside and started buying mountain biking magazines. Then, my bike was stolen. Thanks to Mum and the insurance I got a new bike. It was a cheap mountain bike-ish bike, kind of heavy and slow. Since this bike wasn't that fun to ride I kind of lost interest. The bike worked and I used it to get to and from school and jobs, it worked (except when I lived in the north of Sweden and the gears froze) and that was it.

Then that bike got stolen too, some years later. But then, like an angel from the sky my friend Christian offered me to buy his old Orange Clockwork mountain bike. Even today, I don't know why. (And neither does he, he has confessed later.)  Compared to today's full suspension carbon bikes with 29" wheels this bike is kind of ancient but it is simply lots of fun. After a couple of years, though, I was curious about road biking and so I started with that. I bought a scruffy old road bike, renovated it and got hooked on that. (Maybe I'm simply hooked on bikes?)

This is what she looked like a couple of years ago, after years of mistreatment, bumps and crashes. Since then I have taken her apart completely and renovated her. But more about that in future posts. And to sum things up here I am thinking about starting riding cross country again. Not seriously competing, not instead of riding road bikes, but as a way to have fun.

So:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx2e9jSSK6E

Ride safe!