Joy and the Art of Single-Speed Mountain Biking

Words and photos by Varun Jyothykumar

For the most part, there’s a logical pursuit among bike manufactures towards creating more capable, more practical, more efficient bikes. But in that evolution, there’s a simplicity lost and a growing disconnect between rider and machine.

Writer, immigrant, explorer, secondary school teacher, runner and occasional bike rider, Varun’s work often describes his attempts to find nature and a sense of belonging through exploring the outdoors. And for him, gears are always optional.

Below, through the medium of his largely impractical single-speed mountain bike, below he explores the beauty in struggling across challenging terrain with a single, and often unsuitable, gear ratio.

This IS a bit silly, really. There is a hill looming ahead ahead of me. It’s not long, but I’m halfway up it and I must be pedalling at the rate of around 15RPM, my arms levering the handlebars left and right in an effort to stay upright and moving. I know as a fact that, as soon as I’m over the top and started picking up speed again, in a matter of moments my legs would be spinning at hamster-wheel levels. Eventually, I would give up pedalling and just coast along. Ever so often, my thumb reaches for the lever to shift gears, but the gears aren’t there.

When cycling, having access to gears that can be changed for different pedalling rates, different terrain, speeds and gradients, is undoubtedly A Good Thing. So then why take that away?

If you spoke to practically anyone who rides a single-speed bicycle, they’d probably answer, ‘Because’. There isn’t really a reason. Probe further, and they might descend into vague hand-waving, grasping at a concept that they understand but just can’t quite elucidate. Single-speeding, like most quasi-religious pursuits, is esoteric.

Yet, riding a bike equipped with only one, fixed combination of gears has occupied the popular imagination pretty much since cycle riding originated. James Starley’s (a Coventrian!) pioneering first bikes were essentially fixies, the pedals and wheels linked as to turn inextricably. The current iterants of fixie culture, bike couriers, track racers and those mourning the loss of Red Hook would argue their relative simplicity and foolproof-ness in the face of hard use. That apart, there is little logic to pushing around bikes with these atrociously difficult gears.

There’s even less logic, then, to riding mountain bikes in changeable conditions, up tricky and usually very, very steep terrain with only gear. These are not easy or practical ways to ride a bike.

SSMTB, they call it. SillySillyMTB, I say. 

Daft. Inconvenient. Compromised. Lacking in purpose, surely. Yet, this year, of all years, my perception of ‘purpose’ is more than a little skewed.

This has, truly, been some heck of a year and it’s not even done with June. In the span of a few months, I lost both my pets, started living by myself again, started (and then kind of didn’t) a new relationship, and now I’m probably buying a house. My job as a secondary school teacher remains tumultuous but at least that’s a constant. Just a few months ago, I got my ankle caught between my own pedal and front wheel and nearly broke it. Because of course that’d happen.

Oh, and wait ‘til you hear about the rest of the world. A big bully has been carpet-bombing innocent families and shooting children in the back, while elsewhere a billionaire did a couple of Sig-Heils in front of the world at a presidential speech. Isn’t that the script to a David Lynch movie?

Surprisingly, I found myself feeling an overwhelming gratefulness for it all. Ruth Allen wrote an article recently linking her lack of news-watching to a growing self-awareness and drive for improvement. A few months ago, inspired by my excellent friend Immy, I made a big step towards this self-improvement  by downloading an app called Opal, which blocks most phone apps for a selected chunk of the day. Somewhere deep inside, this high school cricket player (who batted at no. 7 and bowled fast medium, since you’re asking) got more than a little competitive about it. Under 1 hour of phone use today? HAH! Suck it, Zuckerberg! At least it’s a wholesome competition.

This has, in turn, had a big impact on how I recreate and perceive outdoor recreation. Stripped of the ability to gawp at ultra-racing adventurers on Instagram or track my annual cycling or running mileage on Strava, the fast or far of it all kind of doesn’t matter anymore. It’s fortunate I’m a mid-generation millennial who had a childhood largely free from phones and social media; I’ve still got a cultural reference point to what that felt like. I’ve spent many a childhood hour whacking a tennis ball against a wall, scrambling down Wadi floors in Oman, running along beaches and generally just loafing. I’m a bit older now, but loafing doesn’t seem all that inconceivable. 

So now, I loaf uphill to catch the last of the evening light with a mug of tea and a pastry. I go for a run just because it felt like a good idea at the time. I ride with my mate Kwok every Sunday at a deliciously lazy pace, just so we can chat and get coffee. And I took the gears off my purposeful, ultra-serious, all-terrain ultra-racing off-road bicycle and slotted a single cog instead.

Silly. Daft. Inconvenient. Compromised.

Simple. Elegant. Thoughtful. Just-so.

My new SSMTB may be a bit silly, but it is Very nice. It’s a 2010s-ish Genesis Fortitude I bought from Lewis in Bristol, who had repainted it, and built it with fancy silver Hope hubs and proper Shimano 11-speed gears. After I took the gears off, I fitted my own shiny Thomson seatpost, a venerable Brooks saddle and a couple days ago, some lovely Stooge handlebars that I love the shape of. It looks fun and it feels fun, and fast, and very, very right.

After my ankle injury, I’d ridden fairly carefully and sedately to work and back, but on that particular Friday the light was clear and the trails just on the right side of shiny with the previous week’s rain. I rolled out of work just as the hues of sunset were beginning to fade in. A short stretch on sometimes dry, sometimes saturated gravel, then my favourite Kenilworth Greenway, and a bit of pavement later, I was at the trail-head with a few kilometers of twisting, rooty and loamy forest singletrack between me and home.

I can’t have ridden particularly quickly. My front light had died, and my headtorch kept slipping down my forehead to illuminate my knees. Stretches of muddy trail became a game of will-he wont-he as I tried in vain to ride through them without putting a foot down. I must have looked a right clown as I emerged out the other end, muddied, cold, a bit achy but exhilarated.

This wasn’t a very practical thing to do, nor was it especially purposeful, meaningful, necessary in a broader sense of the word, or even that easy. What was it, then? What’s the opposite of the word ‘purposeful’?

I don’t know, but to paraphrase Ruth Allen again, that word might just be ‘joyous.’