In gear? Reflections on Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group’s Exploring #4: On your Bike session (7-12-23)

“Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to cycle and he will realize fishing is stupid and boring.”

Archbishop Desmond Tutu (n.d., attributed: http://www.spokesmama.com/2013/08/bike-quotes-desmond-tutu-on-cycling.html)

Last week Sheffield Hallam University’s Space & Place Group held the fourth, and final, session in our 2024 series exploring contemporary exploration. Having previously mulled over urban exploration, spelunking and climbing our attention turned to mountain biking.

This session was themed around the pre-launch of ‘Mountain Biking, Culture and Society’ (Routledge, 2024), an edited collection of essays edited by Jim Cherrington to be published on 15 February 2024, details here.

In each of our sessions an interdisciplinary selection of presenters have dissected the motives, methods and means of recreational exploration. The recording for this session is embedded below, and the previous sessions are available here.

When considering how to write-up this final session, I was first thinking of how mountain biking involves an interface – the bike – through which the exploring is experienced. At first glance this seemed like an important distinction, when compared to caving, climbing and urbex. But the distinction doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny – there is plenty of ‘gear’ desired and/or involved in any of these pursuits. The climber’s life depends upon an intimate, and essential, relationship with his climbing apparatus. Likewise the caver needs the very-best torch (ideally more than one). Meanwhile, few urban explorers would feel complete without a high-spec camera with which to capture (and thus express) their adventures. Therefore each exploration practice has its own vital interface through which the exploration becomes possible, and there are studies done (or to be done) on the person-equipment meld that is the contemporary explorer.

But it was in the mountain biking session that gear was (to me) most noticeable. In his introductory talk Jim Cherrington (Sheffield Hallam University) showed us how mountain biking enables people to be, by detailing the variety of identities and mobilities which can be constructed around a diverse set of levels and types of mountain biking engagement. In doing so he pointed intriguingly to the ambivalence of the ‘mountain’ within mountain biking. Thus for some mountain biking is an opportunity to commune with wilderness (i.e. to be experiencing the mountain as ‘wild nature’) whilst for others the mountain is appropriated as a gradient, enabling rapid downhill runs, in which the bike-body meld is tested to the edge of their unity. Meanwhile others bring tools with which to make new (mini) mountains, crafting and tending their humps with care and a sense of community. In short, Jim made a persuasive case for appreciating the multiplicity of practices and meaning-making that exists within any notion of mountain biking as a sub-culture. Jim also pointed to creaturely entwinements, to add alongside the machine-body meld of bike riding. Here, mountain bikers perceive climate change in the form of the increasingly likely presence of ticks clinging to their legs by the end of rides, due to global warming. So, there are often multiple bodies riding with a lone mountain biker!

This environmental sensibility was depended by Claire Nattrass (Leeds Beckett University / York St John University) who introduced us to her performative art methodology for studying the constant ‘bleed’ between riders bodies and the surrounding atmosphere. Centring upon air pollution as a form of ‘slow violence’ to riders (by enlisting laboratory analysis to detail the pollution assailing riders), Claire also showed how – incidentally – those chemical analyses also reveal contaminates emitting from the rider’s body itself, via perspiration and other means. The act of riding then becomes a constant exchange of trace matter within the rider/environment meld, and as the rider and the bike move through the environment they are enmeshed within it.

Jeff Warren (Quest University, Canada), drawing upon his work with colleague John Reid-Hresko, explored the role of ‘authenticity’ as a desired ethos within mountain biking, pointing out how a notion of ‘escaping to find yourself’ permeates mountain biking culture. That quest for authenticity is (in part) expressed through gear: either in having all that is needed to claim an authentic performative identity as a mountain biker, or via an ascetic renunciation of gear, striping things back to some form of purity (the analogy here being with ‘free climbing’) – but of course, to be a mountain biker you can’t renounce the bike itself (although during the event Jim mentione mountain bike unicycles which amount to a partial renunciation of the bike – in rejection of one of the bike’s wheels and the replacement of that with the authenticity of the greater balancing skill required to carry this off). I’m extending Jeff and John’s discussion here, in order to follow my rumination on the gearfulness of exploration.

Jacob Bustad (Towson University, USA) and Oliver Rick (Regis College, USA) presented their cultural analysis of urban mountain biking contests staged by Red Bull in the steep and winding urban passageways of Valparaiso in Chile. We watched GoPro footage of frantic downhill descents by expert riders, seeing how you don’t need a mountain in order to mountain bike, but you need plenty of gear to pull off such feats as these. That gear keeps these riders safe (to some degree) and enables the mediation of their individual experiences into a seemingly shared-experience in which we (the viewer) safe in the comfort of our armchairs (or other viewing positions). Here we can vicariously descend perilous routes at great speed, imbibing the ‘GoPro gaze’ afforded to us, courtesy of the event-sponsorship of an international energy drink manufacturer, co-opting a seemingly ‘DIY urbanism’ into global networks of consumption. Thus, here mountain biking’s gear is connecting us to the whole world.

Picture credit: Tom Reynolds (2018) from Melbourne, Australia – Falls Creek Shoot – March 18 CC BY 2.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Female_mountain_bikers_from_Australia#/media/File:Falls_Creek_Shoot_-_March_18_(26889302708).jpg