Why Tracklocross?

I have written about what tracklocross is, tracklocross saving my life, neurodivergence and tracklocross and philosophical takes on tracklocross, but never on why tracklocross. Which is a good question, and I’m glad I asked myself that.

After writing that introduction paragraph, I now just stare at the cursor mark on this page; it flashes at me, showing impatience with my thinking process and possibly annoyance that I hadn’t fleshed this out or created notes before I started typing on WordPress.

Impatience when riding a tracklocross bike feeds into a terrible rhythm; your cadence needs to settle into a rhythmic pattern, and then the rewards of riding will follow. That is why tracklocross matters. Riding impatiently will bring chaos; trying to fight here will bring more chaos.

Fundamentally, that is everything I have written and talked about this year: allowing yourself to relax while riding a fixed gear bike. The world at the end of 2025 is a mess, and we’re being dragged further into that mess. Go cashless, use ChatGPT, blame foreigners; this is not the world many of us envisioned at the high point of 1999.

I have started this year to switch off from the news, remove myself from toxicity as much as possible, and now I want to go and ride my bike(s). I had difficulty in the summer riding bikes, removing myself from my own personal hell of toxicity. It put my nervous system on high alert, and I simply could not go for a ride. I highly recommend going through this process, it is hard, but ultimately worth it. I can feel my nervous system restoring itself. I am slowing down and becoming less impatient.

This post is probably the least academic I have written this year, and I’m all for that. They both have a place, but informal writing with no purpose other than chronicling a simple idea, such as “why tracklocross,” has me now pondering the infinite cosmos and how riding such an inefficient bike can be a godsend.

Allow me to indulge myself.

This video did well by my YouTube standards because people want to slow down. They are thinking about it, maybe not explicitly but subconsciously, and that is because:

I have thought about this quote a lot this year, and I feel it ties in with a lot of the existentialism and slowness I have prattled on about.

Our emotions were forged while walking, watching, and waiting; we are meant to be in the moment, that is how we evolved. Our social structures rely on inherited authority and outdated institutions. Our technology is advancing faster than we can perceive; according to some predictions, we are due to hit the singularity before 2030.

We are all emotionally unprepared for where we are.

This is where existentialism comes in. If meaning is not given by institutions that lag behind reality, nor by technologies that outpace ethical reflection, then it must be made consciously, situationally, and with full responsibility. The existential person stands exposed between instinct and abstraction, forced to choose how to live without reliable scripts. Freedom here is not exhilarating but weighty, because every action is taken in a world where tools amplify consequences far beyond the scale our emotions evolved to manage.

Going slow is not simply a retreat but a rebellion. I believe the words “rebellion” and “feedback” are the two most common words in all my writing this year. Going slow returns us to our palaeolithic emotions. Tracklocross lets us explore this slowness and our emotions without having them open enough for exploitation. In an existential view, this is allowing you to take authorship of your life, so ride tracklocross to take ownership of yourself.

Be more human, that is why tracklocross.