Which is fair enough really, it’s already suffered two seasons of work guiding through France, Switzerland and Italy, then getting ridden the rest of the year “just for fun.”
Because obviously riding some of the best trails in the world week in, week out for work couldn't be fun. Obviously.
The bike lives a double life, favourite toy for fun times, playing the mountains even, but also work tool. The boring day in, day out laptop/van/scalpel/powerdrill that you know so exactly how it feels that you don’t even really notice you’re using it until it breaks. Which fortunately doesn’t happen particularly often these days. Has anyone mentioned how amazing modern mountain bikes are?
Everyone has a dream bike, do bikes have a dream owner? Pretty sure I’d not be that owner. On a normal (and yeah, I know how cool and privileged it is to say that this is “normal”) 6 day trip which makes up most of the summer, the bike endures the hours of getting dragged through the mud and dust and rain and sun and rocks and rivers of a day's guiding before getting lent (dropped) against a cafe wall as the riders go inside to toast a fine day on the hill (a day that, obviously, wouldn't be possible without said neglected bike). Later, clients' bikes need cleaned and repaired before we eat, there might be time to splash some chain lube on mine if its lucky, then the bike is chained in a shed or left outside the refuge until the next day. And the next. And.... Then at the end of the week you get a day off to wash gear, eat normal food and not think too much about bikes before you’re out again for another 6 days. I'm probably not hitting those scheduled maintenance points we all read about in the manual.
Which, thanks to the note keeping of logging rides for the continuous professional development as a guide, you get to really see whoosh by. Each day adds more kilometres of across and meters of down to the log book. 5949km of across and 506,430m of down if we’re being precise. Which thanks to excel we can be. That’s 57 Everests, 1011 laps of the Pleney or 1535 Eiffel towers, depending on your favourite tabloid newspaper measuring system.
More important than the numbers, or even the reliability, is it’s just plain dumb fun. There’s been so many hot days in those cold numbers where, honestly, if my bike had existed only for that ride it would have been worth it, never mind the hundreds of other days out. Whether it’s watching the joy on clients faces when they’re shown places and trails they’d only dreamed about, the feeling of progress and achievement when I finally unlock a feature on a trail I’ve been trying for long enough, or that warm fuzz we all get from playing out on bikes with friends, watching the sun go down from somewhere amazing. The bike has been there for all of them.
