The modern world is addicted to speed. From productivity metrics to Strava leaderboards, speed is fetishised as an index of success, mastery, and worth. Technological acceleration, turbo-capitalism, and digital surveillance collectively reinforce a regime in which slow is synonymous with failure, obsolescence, or at best, quaint nostalgia.
Yet a countercurrent flows beneath this hegemonic narrative: the ethics of slowness. This ethical orientation does not merely advocate for leisure or delay, but reconsiders what it means to move, to act, and to be in the world. Within the cycling world, perhaps nowhere is this revaluation of speed more intriguingly manifest than in the obscure, slightly absurd, and quietly radical practice of tracklocross.
Tracklocross and the Question of Speed
Tracklocross, at first glance, appears as an aberration, a hybrid cycling pursuit that marries fixed gear track bikes, with the off-road, mud-slicked chaos of cyclocross. It is as if someone brought a scalpel to a battlefield. The result is a deliberately awkward, effort-intensive, and technically demanding activity where riders forego gears, brakes, and suspension to test their mettle against natural terrain.
To the uninitiated, this seems like a joke or perhaps an act of masochism. But closer scrutiny reveals that tracklocross is a deeply philosophical act: a micro-resistance to the dogmas of performance, speed, and linear improvement that pervade both mainstream sport and modern life. Today, we will see that tracklocross embodies what we call the ethics of slowness—an ethos rooted not in sloth or regression, but in a principled embrace of inefficiency, absurdity, and friction as ways of making space for autonomy, locality, and playful defiance.
Slowness as Ethical Gesture
Before exploring tracklocross in depth, we must consider slowness itself, not merely as a tempo or mode of action, but as an ethical concept. Slowness has historically been coded negatively in Western modernity: as weakness, backwardness, or failure. From the Industrial Revolution to Silicon Valley, the preferred tempo has always been acceleration: faster machines, quicker decisions, shorter attention spans.
The Slow Movement, initiated in the late 20th century as a response to the harms of globalisation and hyper-productivity, offers a counterpoint. Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food movement (1986) challenged the dominance of fast food by promoting regional cuisines, sustainable farming, and unhurried dining. This ethos quickly proliferated into Slow Cities (Cittàslow), Slow Travel, and even Slow Thinking. Slowness, reinterpreted here, is not lack but resistance—a refusal to obey the market’s demand for haste.
The ethics of slowness, then, is not about inefficiency per se. It is about autonomy, situatedness, and deliberate presence. It is about resisting instrumental rationality and embracing the messy, improvised, and local. These values are strikingly present in tracklocross, which is a sport that, on the face of it, makes no sense.
Tracklocross: The Impractical Made Political
Tracklocross is a portmanteau of track bikes and cyclocross. The fixed gear’s simplicity and rigidity render it uniquely unsuited to such conditions. Unlike cyclocross or mountain bikes, tracklocross setups lack the practical tool, bbrakes, wide gearing or suspension, to manage rough terrain.
What results is a physically and technically demanding ride where riders must use their entire body to navigate terrain: skidding to slow down, dismounting to run up muddy slopes, lifting their bikes over logs. Efficiency is not the point; suffering is.
Deliberate Dysfunction
Why pursue such a self-imposed handicap? The answer lies in the realm of deliberate dysfunction. Like riding a single speed bike in the Alps or skateboarding down handrails, tracklocross subverts the teleology of progress. In a world where bicycles have become marvels of engineering—carbon frames, electronic shifting, disc brakes—tracklocross strips everything back.
This is not a regression for nostalgia’s sake. It is an aesthetic and ethical decision to refuse optimisation. It is, in a very literal way, a slowing down. The ride takes longer. The climb requires dismounting. The descent, without brakes, becomes a negotiation. Each obstacle becomes an occasion for choice rather than reaction. Slowness emerges not only in speed but in rhythm, attention, and experience.
Slowness and the Terrain of Ethics
The ethics of slowness is also an ethics of situatedness. Tracklocross riders must attune themselves to the grain of the land. Without gears or suspension to buffer the terrain, the rider feels every bump, root, and rut. Success is not achieved by conquering nature but by collaborating with it—reading the trail, learning its tendencies, developing intimate local knowledge.
This stands in contrast to the colonial ethos of modern sports technologies, which often seek to dominate or flatten the environment. Gravel bikes with 1x drivetrains, dropper posts, and GPS-enabled mapping systems enable a form of global riding that renders local specificity irrelevant. Tracklocross, by contrast, privileges the here and now. It demands local trails, local fixes, and improvisation. It refuses abstraction in favour of the specific.
Embodied Humility
There is a kind of humility in the slowness of tracklocross. The rider cannot rely on power alone; they must be tacticians, dancers, and cartographers. They must dismount, carry, or even yield. The body becomes an interpreter rather than a conqueror. This humility, born of limitation, has ethical implications. It echoes what eco-philosopher Val Plumwood described as an ethics of mutuality, not mastering nature but learning to live within its demands.
Such slowness is a rebuke to the high-modernist dream of seamless speed. It is not about going slow for its own sake, but about restoring a balance between self and world, means and ends, effort and result.
The Politics of Play
Tracklocross also resists the capitalist colonisation of time. In a culture where even leisure is monetised (through Strava segments, KOMs, or gravel race entry fees), tracklocross offers an uncommodified playfulness. There are few sanctioned events, no governing body, and little in the way of formal recognition. A typical tracklocross “race” might be three friends setting up cones in a field, or a collective hill climb on a muddy bridleway.
This lack of structure is not a deficit; it is a political choice. Slowness here means freedom from metrication. Times are not logged. Ranks are not formalised. You finish when you finish. Or you don’t. The point is not to be the fastest, but to be there, together, struggling and laughing in the mud.
This resonates with Hannah Arendt’s idea of action as plurality, the act of doing something not for instrumental gain but for shared expression. In this light, the ethics of slowness in tracklocross is also an ethics of conviviality—doing something difficult, together, for its own sake.
Resisting the Acceleration of Everything
Philosopher Hartmut Rosa has argued that modernity is characterised by social acceleration, the sense that life moves faster and faster, even if we stand still. Email, traffic, finance, and news cycles all accelerate, demanding our continuous adaptation. The result is not satisfaction, but alienation.
Tracklocross, with its wilful slowness and inefficiency, is a kind of temporal counter-power. It demands lingering, suffering, and improvisation. You cannot outsource your effort to technology. You cannot make the ride faster by spending more. All you can do is ride, fall, carry, and try again. This is slowness as self-liberation.
The Style of Resistance
The aesthetic of tracklocross is notable for its mix of punk minimalism and absurd seriousness. Riders often wear jorts, flannel shirts, or mismatched kits. Bikes are scratched, tyres bald, handlebars taped with electrical tape. There is no premium gear arms race, no carbon fetish. This anti-style is a kind of aesthetic resistance: to road cycling’s polished machismo, to mountain biking’s tech obsession, to gravel’s encroaching commercialisation.
This absurd aesthetic matches the absurdity of the act. Riding fixed up a muddy bridleway is not rational. But perhaps that’s the point. Like Camus’ Sisyphus, the tracklocross rider is absurdly, joyfully condemned to repeat their struggle. The point is not to win, but to roll the boulder, skid down the hill, hike up again, and maybe have a cider in the woods.
The Art of Making Do
Tracklocross is also a celebration of making do. Riders often modify their setups in ingenious ways: zip-tying bottle cages, mismatching BMX and mtb parts to track frames. This ethos of improvisation mirrors the ethics of slowness: working with what one has, resisting consumerist upgrades, embracing the limitations of the available.
In a world of pre-packaged solutions, this bricolage ethic is both aesthetic and moral. It affirms agency within limits. An ethics not of maximal freedom but of creative constraint.
Critiques and Counterarguments
Of course, the ethics of slowness in tracklocross are not immune to critique. One might argue that it is a niche pursuit available only to those with leisure time, physical ability, or cultural capital. There is some truth in this. Tracklocross often emerges in urban subcultures, among those with access to free time and suitable terrains. Moreover, its anti-institutional stance can sometimes slide into hipster exceptionalism, a kind of ironic detachment that undermines its ethical claims.
Others might question whether slowness is inherently ethical. After all, slowness can be imposed (as in bureaucracy), or weaponised (as in voter suppression). But in the context of tracklocross, slowness is chosen, cultivated, and shared. It is not slowness-as-obstacle, but slowness-as-expression.
Conclusion: Towards a Politics of Pedal Tempo
Tracklocross, in all its muddy, brakeless glory, offers us more than a fringe cycling subculture. It offers a philosophy of living otherwise: a way to resist the time-discipline of modern capitalism, to embrace the ethics of friction, and to rediscover the pleasures of slowness. In its awkwardness lies its brilliance: a sport where the terrain is not tamed, speed is not valorised, and suffering is shared.
The ethics of slowness is not a manifesto, but a mood. It is a way of being in time and space that honours difficulty, locality, community, and care. It is a refusal to let the stopwatch dictate value. And in a world that spins faster every day, tracklocross might just be the slow revolution we need.
Fiefdom Tracklocross 
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