Scolarian offered me the chance to test their frameset, and I jumped at it. I couldn’t quite do a traditional bike review, but it’s replaced my Surly Steamroller in my heart, and that is probably all you need to know.
What distinguishes this steel tracklocross frame over extended use is not any discrete performance characteristic but its persistent refusal to withdraw phenomenologically into transparency: rather than disappearing as a neutral conduit between rider intention and environmental response, the frame remains continuously present as an intermediary, requiring sustained attentional coherence rather than episodic effort.
In conventional cycling discourse, such non-withdrawal might be read as inefficiency; here, however, it functions productively, particularly in the off-road fixed-gear context where the absence of coasting renders motion temporally continuous and error non-localised. Cadence instability, imprecise line choice, and wavering commitment are neither amplified nor corrected by the frame but instead recorded and extended across time, producing a riding experience oriented less toward moments of optimisation than toward the maintenance of consistency.
In this sense, the frame operates not as passive equipment but as a partner in an ongoing process of individuation, mediating a reciprocal adjustment between rider and terrain in which agency is distributed rather than centralised. Over months rather than rides, this relationship recalibrates effort away from spectacle and toward sufficiency, yielding a mode of engagement in which flow, when achieved, is characterised by stability and ethical restraint rather than intensity, and where attention emerges as the primary condition of competence rather than a secondary supplement to performance.
I like it.
Fiefdom Tracklocross 
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