You step inside, it’s dark, the music drones over the rumble of voices, taking a look around the bar, you notice an area off-limits reserved for the cool kids, hipsters and trendies. Huddled in a club, dressed to impress, indulging in top-shelf liquor is the Santa Cruz Tallboy. To the right is a confident Norco Optic snacking on poutine, a Pivot 429 shares a bowl of nachos with a Trek Top Fuel, occasionally flicking a corn chip to the Giant Trance 29. The Tallboy obligingly engages in polite conversation with the Yeti SB 100 but turns a shoulder to all onlookers with their petty sharp head angles and grossly short reaches, while a forlorn double chainring aluminium bike peers through the window from outside in the cold and dark night.
Humans like trends, recognising and following them is healthy, it comes from our youth and early adulthood when we’re most socially self-conscious. It’s especially worth taking note when such trends develop a name; in this case, we should all get used to the term ‘underbiking’. We’re not sure where it originated from, but its already stuck and we dig it.
Who else put riser bars on their XC bikes back in the day? Was that underbiking, long before it was cool? Were we trendy without knowing it? Damn, it!
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From Flow Mountain Bike
Chris Southwood and Mick Ross are the co-founders of Flow Mountain Bike. Above all else, we are mountain bikers, passionate about all facets of our sport. We cut our teeth on Sydney’s trails and we’ve followed our obsession all over the world, on all types of bikes. Flow Mountain Bike exists to inspire; through our words, images and videos we want mountain bikers to find the inspiration to ride more, try something new, travel somewhere fresh, or make mountain biking more central to their life. Flow Mountain Bike is here to educate; we want to help mountain bikers make the right decisions by offering the best information, the fairest product testing and the most trusted advice. Flowmountainbike.com is the leading online resource for Australasian mountain bikers of all disciplines. With up-to-date news from Australia, New Zealand and around the world, new product information, race coverage and more, flowmountainbike.com is the ultimate local web resource that mountain bikers can count on.
