I’ll admit it: I’ve never been much of a mountain bike gearhead. Like Lance, for me it’s not about the bike, and never has been. I think this comes from the fact that I started riding mountain bikes as a high school student with no money to spend on cool bike stuff. I’ve even been known to adapt my riding style to compensate for broken or malfunctioning components just so I don’t have to upgrade – and I’ve been riding the same basic Trek hardtail for the past 7 years.
For alot of people, though, technology and equipment are an integral part of mountain biking. Computer geeks get excited about the latest processors and car guys love big engines so why shouldn’t mountain bikers get excited about indestructable, lightweight components? I totally respect the gram counters, I’m just not one of them (yet).
At this point I need to make a confession: Leah and I built singletracks based on our own mountain biking prejudices. What I mean is we focused all our energy on building great trail information (reviews, ratings, photos, etc.) at the expense of awesome gear coverage. The result of our lack of gear focus is Gramcounter, which frankly, sucks. We used Amazon.com’s selection of mountain bike gear to build our catalog, all the while hoping that would be enough. But it isn’t: It sucks.
So now I am humbly asking for your help: How can we build an awesome mountain bike gear review section for singletracks? What kinds of things do you want to see? Who is already doing a great job? (and please don’t say MTBR or DateWorld (DirtWorld), those sites are both pretty terrible)
I hope you’ll agree our trail coverage is pretty great, and we want to do the same for mountain bike gear. Help a biker out, hollah!
0 Comments