Future shock

I confess that I was one of the curmudgeons who lamented the move from nine speed drivetrains to ten speeds.  At the time it seemed an unnecessary step was being made solely for marketing hype. I was equally dumbfounded a few years later when I realized how rare it was that I was sporting caliper brakes on my mountain bike.  It would be redundant to refer to it as a twenty-six inch mountain bike because when I got it all mountain bikes were twenty-six inch. Even today it seems perfectly acceptable to have a sixteen penny nail in my garage heaped with a graveyard of inner tubes that have given up the ghost.

Fast forward to this past weekend on a team ride.  I was riding Bunny, my pink rain bike. Bunny has disc brakes, a thru axle up front and tubeless tires.  As our group swooped downward on a wet downhill I placed my index fingers over the brake levers.  I didn’t need to brake yet but if I had been using rim brakes I would have been “testing” the brakes at this point to see how much bite they had and then adjust my braking based on the performance.   With the discs I don’t need to guess. I brake when I need to slow down.  With rim brakes in wet conditions, that isn’t how it works.

Then I tried to remember, and could not recall, having a flat tire in all of 2017.  Fat biking, Mountain biking, Gravel biking and Road riding all flat free in 2017. Hundreds of hours and thousands of kilometers without changing a tube.  How anyone can still be on the fence about tubeless is beyond me.

Thru axles are making my wheels and frames obsolete.  They seem to have finally standardized and are clearly a superior solution to quick releases. Electronic shifting is ridiculously good and gets cheaper all the time. The gear ratios available now are equally wonderful.  Mortals can climb where only Tour contenders used to go. Twenty-nine inch wheels on mountain bikes are faster and offer superior control compared to their ancient twenty-six inch ancestors.

Innovations, by design, make our current equipment obsolete. This costs money and hence we resist it.  As time goes on we save for the new stuff and at the same time the new stuff comes down in price and at some point those lines intersect and we find ourselves astride a bike that is so technically superior to its predecessor that we wonder why it took so long to get here.

For years all of the innovations made things lighter and faster.  Now the focus is on function, safety and comfort.  When you are in control and comfortable you go faster as well. Oh, and all the stuff is already so light it makes you laugh.

These are good times to be a cyclist.