Cycling was not always a practice that required evidence. For most of its history, it left behind little more than dust, tired legs, and a vague but persistent sense that the world had briefly made sense. You rode, you returned, and that was enough. The ride did not demand translation into numbers, nor did it ask to be defended by charts, coloured zones, or a post hoc narrative of productivity. It simply happened, and in happening justified itself.
The shift in power
The contemporary cyclist inhabits a very different moral universe. Riding is now expected to speak in data. Distance, speed, cadence, heart rate, power, training load, and threshold values are no longer supplementary descriptions but the primary language through which cycling is understood, evaluated, and remembered. A ride without a file is not merely invisible to others, but increasingly suspect to the rider themselves. Did it count? Was it hard enough? Was it worth the time?
This shift did not occur because cyclists suddenly became obsessed with numbers for their own sake. It emerged from a broader cultural movement in which quantification promises clarity, self-knowledge, and control. Digital platforms such as Strava did not invent this impulse, but they perfected its application to cycling. They transformed the ride into a unit of content, the cyclist into a node in a comparative network, and the landscape into a series of ranked corridors. The result is a practice that is increasingly legible, increasingly optimised, and increasingly detached from the forms of pleasure that once defined it.
The ethical problem here is subtle. Data in itself is not harmful. Measurement can inform training, reveal patterns, and prevent injury. The problem arises when measurement ceases to be a tool and becomes an authority. When the value of a ride is no longer located in sensation, exploration, or mood, but in its numerical performance relative to an abstract benchmark, cycling undergoes a quiet but profound moral reorientation. Experience becomes instrumental. The body becomes a data source. The ride becomes a means rather than an end.
Ethically quantifiable
This moral reorientation is perhaps most visible in the tyranny of the average. Average speed, average power, and average heart rate are treated as stable indicators of effort and worth, despite the fact that cycling itself is anything but stable. Wind shifts, surfaces change, fatigue accumulates unevenly, curiosity intervenes, and attention wanders. These are not errors in the system. They are the system. To smooth them out is not to understand cycling more clearly, but to misunderstand it with greater confidence.
Once the average becomes the judge, certain behaviours are quietly discouraged. Coasting feels lazy even when it is pleasurable. Stopping feels like failure even when it is restorative. Exploration feels inefficient because it does not optimise output. The cyclist learns to manage themselves as a project, constantly adjusting effort to maintain numerical respectability. Even rest must be justified, framed as recovery rather than indulgence. Joy becomes acceptable only when it aligns with performance.
Socially awkward
The social architecture of data platforms intensifies this effect. Segments fragment public space into competitive units and invite riders to perform against an invisible field of others. Roads become informal race tracks, not because anyone has declared a race, but because the leaderboard implies one. The cyclist may claim indifference to rankings, but the structure of attention has already been reshaped. The app teaches what to notice, what to care about, and what to ignore. In doing so, it quietly standardises desire.
This is where alienation enters the picture. Datafied cycling produces a peculiar estrangement. The rider becomes alienated from their own body, trusting numbers over sensation. They become alienated from place, reading roads as segments rather than landscapes. They become alienated from time, judging rides by productivity rather than presence. They become alienated from others, engaging in comparison without connection. The promise of engagement technology resolves itself into a thinning of experience.
Optimisation is often defended as an unquestionable good. Who could object to improvement? Ethics, however, is less concerned with whether optimisation is possible than with what it is for. When cycling is optimised primarily for efficiency, output, and visibility, it begins to resemble work rather than play. The ride is no longer allowed to be useless, and in losing its uselessness, it loses something essential. Not everything that can be optimised should be. Some practices matter precisely because they resist being flattened into metrics.
Enter tracklocross
It is at this point that tracklocross enters the conversation, not as a nostalgic retreat but as a counter-ethic. Tracklocross is superficially easy to describe. It involves fixed gear bicycles ridden off road on dirt, gravel, grass, and whatever surfaces happen to present themselves. Beyond that, it resists neat definition, and that resistance is the point. Tracklocross does not merely offer a different style of riding. It provides a different account of what riding is for.
One of the most significant features of tracklocross is its refusal of legibility. Variable terrain undermines the authority of power data. Fixed gearing destabilises cadence targets. Speeds are often unimpressive by conventional standards, yet the effort is undeniable. Dismounting, slipping, and laughing are not failures but expected elements of the practice. The ride does not resolve into a clean graph, and so the graph loses its claim to authority.
In this environment, sensation returns to the centre. Grip matters more than watts. Momentum matters more than speed. Attention shifts outward toward terrain and inward toward balance. The body is no longer a suspect narrator of experience but its primary source. This re-centring of feel is not anti-intellectual. It is epistemological. It restores knowledge to where it belongs, in lived engagement rather than abstract representation.
Tracklocross also rehabilitates slowness. In a culture where slow is often framed as underperformance or recovery, tracklocross allows slowness to exist without apology. Pace is dictated by terrain, not by an external benchmark. There is no expectation that speed must justify itself. This decoupling of value from velocity is ethically significant. It allows cycling to exist again as a responsive practice rather than a productivity exercise.
Risk, too, is reconfigured. Datafied road cycling often incentivises performative danger. Descents are taken faster than comfort allows. Urban sprints prioritise marginal gains over safety. In tracklocross, risk is relocated. It is slower, more tactile, and more situational. Balance, traction, and judgment matter more than bravado. Risk becomes something to be negotiated rather than displayed. This is not the elimination of danger but its domestication into attentiveness.
The social dimension of tracklocross further distinguishes it from data-driven cycling. Without leaderboards, sociality shifts. Rides are shared rather than ranked. Stories matter more than statistics. Mud on trousers becomes a more compelling narrative than average power. Community forms around presence rather than performance. This is not a rejection of technology but a refusal to allow it to dictate the terms of belonging.
Getting Marxist
Commercial capture struggles in this environment. Tracklocross lacks standardisation, governing bodies, and easily broadcastable formats. It is challenging to monetise a practice that resists clarity and repeatability. This resistance is not accidental. It preserves a space in which cycling can exist without constantly justifying itself to sponsors, algorithms, or audiences.
At the centre of tracklocross sits the fixed gear bicycle, a deceptively simple machine with profound ethical implications. Fixed gearing eliminates abstraction. There is no coasting, no hiding from consequence. Effort is continuous, and feedback is immediate. The relationship between action and outcome is transparent. This transparency fosters responsibility and attention. The bicycle does not optimise for you. It asks you to participate fully.
In this sense, tracklocross stands quietly against the logic of surveillance capitalism. Platforms thrive on repetition, standardisation, and predictability. Tracklocross thrives on variation, local knowledge, and ephemerality. Many of its best rides are unrepeatable and unshareable in any meaningful way. What cannot be captured cannot easily be commodified. This is not a grand political gesture. It is a practical one.
Perhaps the most radical aspect of tracklocross is its insistence that a good ride does not require proof. You can ride badly, beautifully, awkwardly, or slowly without needing to translate the experience into evidence. The memory is enough. The tiredness is enough. The satisfaction exists without external validation. In a culture obsessed with documentation, this is a quietly subversive position.
The question facing cycling is not whether data will disappear. It will not, nor should it. The question is whether cyclists will continue to submit to data as an authority, or reclaim it as a tool. Tracklocross does not demand a rejection of measurement. It demonstrates that measurement is optional, peripheral, and contingent. It shows that cycling can flourish without being fully legible.
Cycling does not need to be saved from inefficiency, ambiguity, or slowness. It needs to be saved from the demand to explain itself constantly. When every ride must justify its existence through numbers, cycling risks becoming a moral chore rather than a human pleasure. Tracklocross reminds us that some of the most meaningful practices resist reduction. They are valuable not because they perform well, but because they are lived.
To ride without needing to account for oneself, to an app or an audience, is not regression. It is ethical resistance. It is a reminder that cycling mattered long before it was measured, and that it will continue to matter wherever riders are willing to let it be gloriously, stubbornly, and unproductively human.
Fiefdom Tracklocross 
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