There's just something about riding a singlespeed...simple, light, effective. After an extremely brief bought of inexplicable mechanical failures, E-rock, Klaus, and I headed east on Durston tonight with the intention of first shredding some sick road construction gnar. The ultimate destination was Story Hill, which basically consists of a roughly one mile climb up a gravel road followed by what could be an incredibly tasty ribbon of singletrack downhill. Unfortunately it had been denuded by equine traffic while it was still soft from the spring snow melt, I can't imagine anything that can destroy a trail faster than horses.
Regardless...
Bozeman has a pretty great system of trail twisting through the east half of town. Unfortunately, I'm not extremely well versed in navigating these trails, but fortunately E-rock's got everything dialed in the routefinding department, so after navigating construction debris for a bit we were able to latch on to some relatively decent urban dirt track northeast to the Story Hill road. There is really an amazing rhythm to riding off road, even while riding through town, having smooth dirt under your tires is frankly blissful.
But the real point is how incredible it is to ride a singlespeed. DNA and I had a talk at some point about how quiet one's mind is while on a bike. To some degree I think that's why I love riding bikes in general and singlespeed's in particular. One certainly works "harder" on a singlespeed, but at the same time, one's mind is completely silent because shifting doesn't even occur to you. All you have to do is pedal, really hard...and fast.
It's basically everything that made you love to ride a bicycle as a child...
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