FGFS is Honesty

I’d probably say that FGFS is tracklocross adjacent; they both don’t need brakes or gears, and both are pretty niche. I’ve often said at work that BMX and trials are aligned, but BMX is like hitting a screw with a hammer, while trials is like actually getting the correct Phillips screwdriver. To carry on this analogy (slightly), FGFS is a pencil with no eraser, and BMX is a keyboard. Both are expressive. One just refuses to let you hide from your own input.

Mechanical honesty vs mechanical forgiveness

FGFS is mechanically rude in a way that can feel deeply polite to the right brain.

That rudeness is not aggression. It is a refusal. The refusal to lie, to buffer, to soften, to translate. A fixed gear drivetrain does not interpret your intentions. It simply executes them instantly and continuously, without appeal. The wheel turns, therefore the pedals turn. The pedals turn, your body must respond. There is no neutral grammar in the sentence, no pause button hidden in the punctuation.

Mechanical honesty begins here: causality without mediation.

On a fixed gear, intention is not enough. Desire is not enough. Even competence is not quite enough. What matters is alignment. If your internal rhythm deviates from the machine’s, the discrepancy is immediately exposed and without commentary. The bike does not wait for you to finish thinking. It does not suspend the consequences while you decide how you feel about them. It simply continues being true.

This is why riders often say a fixed gear “teaches you” things. But that phrasing is misleading. Teaching implies patience, scaffolding, and progression. A fixed gear does not teach. It reveals. It reveals hesitation, asymmetry, laziness, overconfidence, and dissociation. It reveals them not as errors to be corrected later, but as forces already acting on the system.

In this sense, FGFS is mechanically honest in the same way a mirror is honest. It does not criticise you. It does not encourage you. It just shows you exactly what is happening right now.