The Road Bike Is Getting Jealous
I caught myself doing something strange last week. I was heading out for an easy road spin, the kind of ride I’ve done a thousand times, and I stood in the hallway looking at both bikes. And I reached for the mountain bike.
For a road ride.
Knobbly tyres humming on tarmac, riding position of a man who has given up on aerodynamics entirely, and I was grinning like an idiot. Something has shifted, and I’ve been trying to work out what.
It started with a stolen bike
My mountain bike history goes back further than my road history, which surprises people. As a kid I raced on the road, right up until my bike was stolen at the World Championships in Belgium. We’d travelled there, the bike disappeared, and that was that. There was no budget for a replacement. Road racing needed a road bike, and we didn’t have one.
What we could manage was a mountain bike. So I raced MTB instead, not because I chose it but because it was the option left on the table. And it turned out fine. Better than fine. I finished third at the nationals, on the discipline I’d been forced into by a thief in Flanders.
Somewhere along the way I drifted back to the road and stayed there for years. Watts, aero, tan lines with hard edges. The mountain bike became a thing I used to do.
37 degrees changes your priorities
Then summer in Alicante did what summer in Alicante does. When the forecast says 37, the road becomes a negotiation. You leave at 7am or you don’t leave at all, and even then the climbs feel like riding into a hairdryer.
The trails, though. The trails have shade. Pine forest, gullies, singletrack that tucks itself out of the sun for whole stretches at a time. You’re working harder per kilometre but you’re doing it under cover, and there’s usually a moment where you stop at the top of something, look out over the coast, and remember that this is technically the same sport you do on the road but it doesn’t feel like it.
Not better. Different.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to. It’s not that the mountain bike is better than the road bike. It’s that nature hits different out there.
On the road, the landscape is something you move through. It scrolls past like scenery. On the mountain bike, the landscape is the ride. Every rock, every root, every loose switchback is asking you a question, and you answer with your hands and your hips and occasionally with a word Eva would rather I didn’t publish.
The road gives you rhythm. The trail gives you conversation. I need both, I’ve realised. One resets the legs, the other resets the head.
The bike deserves some credit too
I’ll be honest, part of this renaissance is down to the bike finally being sorted. I’ve got it running on Hunts Proven XC race wheels now, and it’s changed the character of the thing. A hardtail lives and dies by its wheels, because there’s no rear suspension to hide behind. Everything the trail says, the wheels translate.
These translate it well. Stiff enough to hold a line through the rough stuff, light enough that the climbs back out of the valleys don’t feel like punishment, and they’ve shrugged off the kind of rocky Alicante terrain that has ended lesser wheelsets. When the equipment gets out of the way, all that’s left is the riding. That’s the highest compliment I can pay a set of wheels.
Third place, twenty years later
I’m not going back to racing MTB. Probably. But there’s something poetic about it. A stolen bike in Belgium pushed a kid onto the trails, and he did alright there. Decades later, a hot Spanish summer is pushing him back, and he’s doing alright there too.
The road bike will forgive me eventually. It’s had a good run. But right now, when I stand in that hallway, I know which one is coming out with me.
If you need me, I’ll be in the shade.