The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Yeah, just road biking. I actually have a pretty nice road bike that I got back when I first started endurance sports (Cervelo R3) and I've intermittently put some effort in when I was thinking about multisport or recovering from running. Honestly, I just don't like it as much. I think the biggest reason comes down to having an unshakeable feeling that some idiot's going to hit me with their car while they're staring at a cell phone or something, which keeps me from getting into as comfy of a mental place as I can running. I think the other big thing is that I just haven't invested the hours necessary to be any good. I do like group rides with friends though - way less mental stress than I put on myself riding alone.
So I'm sure you've heard this before, but...
I share an immense anxiety with road biking. At the same time I like going long distances uninterrupted and I like MTB but only as a complement to everything else (high injury risk, no real ability to actual travel).
Gravel biking is yes, largely a conjuration of marketing departments. But bigger tires on a road bike and more aggressive gearing allows me to (in an urban setting) handle sidewalk riding, curb hopping, and off-road detours with an extremely minor cost of spinning out on downhills above 30mph. While I don't have any KOMs I'm still coming in 2nd behind people with $10k road bikes. In my city there are quiet residential routes through a large chunk of it, along with a rich greenway artery, so it works out.
In a rural setting of course the bike really shines as long as things aren't too crunchy. Tires can only doo so much, and a gravel bike with a ton of suspension dongles too clearly exposes the absurdity of even giving a special name to drop bars and wider forks. I prefer keeping my gravel bike to single-day excursions and don't involve going completely off-road.
Finally it's not as related to the sort of competitive PR element you crave, but loading up a mountain bike with bags and humping through the mountains while camping will put hair on your chest. Flat ground with your R3 and grinding up steep dirt with a 50lb hardtail are wildly different animals, but it's also a way to connect with nature and see far more than you would by backpacking.
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