The softening: why XC is better.
I wrote this short essay to try to work out why things like carpeted bike park trails and e-bikes bother me so much. I thought I'd share it here because, let's be honest, cross-country riding is king.
For over a decade, I told myself that one day, when I had the money and skill to deserve it, I'd buy a full-blown enduro bike. To me, an enduro bike promised everything, including a sparkling silver helmet adorned with a scarlet bull. I'd be able to turn tricks at a speed that made spectators wince, even if they were watching it on washed-out, fish-eye POV footage. Back then, I'd watch edit after edit, read all the reviews, and think, "That's who I'll be someday."
Now, I have the skill and the money, and I bought an XC bike.
A hardtail cross-country race bike. This decision left me with a bike that has less travel than a light switch, and somewhere in that decision was a truth I'd been avoiding for a decade. The performance I was chasing could be perceived or earned, and I decided to earn it. The enduro bike promised "harder" riding, but the XC bike demands it, not from the terrain, but from me.
This distinction is everything, and it's a distinction that mountain biking, as a culture, seems determined to abandon.
Look at what we've made. We have flow trails with machine-cut berms and perfectly spaced rollers; every root has been pulled, every awkward rock has been moved, and every element of genuine surprise, struggle, or danger has been designed away with trail-building budgets and a mandate to maximize "flow per foot". E-bikes have flattened climbs into something vaguely aerobic, delivering us to the top fresher than we deserve. Park riding, with its shuttles and chairlifts, has somehow convinced us that it's the same as downhill. A chairlift or a shuttle to the top is missing half the story, and mountain bikers seem to be fine with that. A chairlift to a black diamond is still a chairlift.
So, here's what ties these things all together. Lifts, shuttles, batteries, motors, and paved trails are all an optimization that have traded hardship for ease. They have stripped away the very resistance and rebellion that made mountain biking a sport worth doing in the first place.
Consider the park rider with a full-blown enduro sled - four inches of meticulously engineered suspension, dropper posts, the works - rolling up to a professionally built jump with a perfect take-off and a smooth-as-butter landing. That jump doesn't need suspension. That entire "downhill" run doesn't need suspension. You could ride that entire line on a rigid dirt jumper, and people have been doing exactly that since before "enduro" was a word. The bike isn't made for the terrain. The bike is made for a vibe. A look. A feeling.
The bikes are getting more capable. The trails are getting easier. Nobody is noticing the mismatch, or at least, no one wants to say it out loud.
I get it. I lusted after an enduro bike for 13 years. I understand the appeal of a bike that promises consequence. But consequence isn't the same as effort. An enduro bike was never going to make me suffer the way a punchy, technical climb or a grueling 10-mile tempo ride would. It might make the mountain feel more dramatic, but that feeling is robbed of authenticity.
The suffering that matters in this sport doesn't have a price tag or a minimum travel requirement. The kind of suffering that matters is the kind you generate for yourself: going faster than you did last time or taking the tech head-on rather than going around it, and absorbing the impact with your own body and your skill. This is what cross-country riding preserves. Everything else has been optimized to redundancy. The bike shouldn't do the work for you. The trails shouldn't flatter you. You should go as hard as you can wherever you are. Then, the results are entirely, brutally yours.
Am I being a curmudgeon? Yes. I'll acknowledge that the flow trails look good on video and invite people into the sport who might never have considered it otherwise. I'll admit that E-Bikes open the door to terrain that would otherwise be inaccessible to those with physical limitations. I'll even concede that park riding, at its highest level, is a legitimate sport with incredible athletes. I'll admit all of that.
But I'll finish with this. If we let go of all the resistance, smooth out every trail, motorize every bike, and build features that replace the natural mountain, we won't need mountain bikes at all.
We might as well buy Surrons and ride them on asphalt pump tracks.