Everything bad, nothing well.
Or, everything well, nothing bad?
In 1992 I was a sales associate at the Sport Chalet inside the Beverly Connection, one of two malls on La Cienega between Beverly and Third. I wore a red polo shirt and made $4.25 an hour, and eventually I would be fired for putting the axle of a skateboard truck through my foot, the result of accidentally landing an in-store kickflip, primo style.
“Hybrid” was a new class of bike my manager was hoping I would sell to norms looking to get their feet wet, without actually getting their feet wet, in what was then the early days of mainstream mountain biking.
I rode a grape-purple Gary Fischer Hookoo-E-Koo with elevated chain stays around Strawberry Peak and up JPL on the weekends and at night, so I didn't really have time or energy to think about, talk about or give any credence to commuters with padded seats and boner stems that couldn't begin to manage even the lame-to-tame intercity stuff, like sessioning staircases on Hollywood Boulevard and Runyon Canyon hot laps.
I was a mountain biker, I rode a mountain bike.
The only other legitimate type of bike was a 10-speed race bike for people who were good at exercise but bad at sports. But that’s it: those were the only two real kinds of bikes for serious adults.
Hybrids, on the other hand, were embarrassing, pathetic and pointless for everybody because they did everything bad and nothing well. Also, there was no such thing as going for a hybrid ride because hybrid “surfaces” didn't exist. Mountains were mountains. Roads were roads. Hybrids were potent weed strains, various Therianthropes, and dope animal mash-ups (like my personal favorite, the Pegasus), but not a specific cycling-related environment, landscape, or set of conditions.
So yeah, it was the 90s, hybrids came and then promptly went, because they sucked, end of story.
Wrong. I was all wrong.
The first thing I was wrong about was the utility of road bike tech.
A few years after “taking it to the limit” at Sport Chalet, I tried to ride my full-suspension Santa Cruz Tazmon from Pasadena to Big Bear on a Friday afternoon. My girlfriend at the time found me napping under a street light on the side of Hwy 330, just outside the town of Running Springs, at 12:37am. She was worried because my stated ETA was nine, ten at the latest, and this was before cell phones and location sharing were a thing. Anyway, that experience forced me to rethink the efficacy of Spandex, as well as the disadvantages of riding mountain bikes on pavement for extended distances, such as weight, pedal suck, flat bars, and tire size.
A few weeks later I traded a used snowboard and some weed for a CAAD 4, which I proceeded to ride all over town, including at the Rose Bowl crit on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.
And then sometime in 2007, gravel was discovered and I found out I was also wrong about road bikes sucking at Type 1 Fun.
In 2015, a friend of mine who leads a bike cult called Analog out of an old maple shed on “some property” in the woods near the town of Poultney, Vermont, invited me to come out and do a ride he called The Mangler.
The ride itself was insane and changed—no joke—my life forever, but the thing I remember most was how stunning it was to see and ride the abominations he was “building,” through what I can only describe as a kind of Soviet-like synthesis of zero rise stems, crazy wide drop bars, and rizzless rigid mountain bike frames. The silhouette they made was nauseating, yet invigorating. And more than a little reminiscent of John Tomac’s 1990 Raleigh Ti/carbon drop bar mountain bike with a rear disc wheel.
Shortly after getting mangled by Analog, I became obsessed with all things ATB and OBTRA, and I made this website for a reality TV show that Enve sponsored but didn't really support. And I created a brand with a pegasus for a logo.
And yet, had you asked, I would have still talked trash about all things hybrid.
It’s 2025 and I’m reading a semi-autobiographical book about this guy in England who takes his 10-year-old son into the Lakes District to LARP early man and eat roadkill for ten days. Lying under his tarp in the dirt next to an ancient stone wall, half-starved but fully tuned in, while his son was off in the woods disemboweling squirrels, collecting fire wood, flint napping, etc., the author watched various weather phenomena like clouds and wind while meditating on the birth of abstract thought, the utility of contemporary vision questing, and how modern shamans are mostly all poseurs, because to be a real shaman is physically, spiritually, mentally and emotionally tortuous and requires spending 90% of your time on another plane and/or in another dimension, leaving very little room for work-life balance.
The book is called Being A Human, and at one point the author, Charles Foster, writer, traveler, veterinarian, taxidermist, barrister, and philosopher, expounds on how change, which is basically the source of literally everything good as far as humans are concerned, happens not in the middle but on the edges.
The middle is superficially attractive (Chipotle, Allbirds) but an insidious champion of mediocrity. The middle is stasis and stagnation; a spiritual doldrum. The middle is a bummer.
Beyond being one of the more engaging and potentially profound thought exercises I’ve undertaken in a hot sec, I was, in a moment, struck by a realization: this is exactly how I feel about my choice in sporting goods and sporting goods usage.
The middle is a Known Known hallmarked by hyper-specialization. Hyper-specialization strives to make everything reliably predictable, which is great for setting world records and maintaining fitness, but not great for experiencing edges, which is where all the good shit like transformation, transcendence, problem solving, collective effervescence and adventure happens.
Hybrids are tools made specifically for edges—that’s what they do, that’s what they’re for, that’s where they excel. A hybrid is a bridge, a portal, a spark, an impetus, an invitation, and a paradigm shift. Hybrids, by definition, can’t stay in their lane, because they have no lane in which to stay.
Ergo, at the risk of sounding like a creative director in the front seat of a Cybertruck casually sucking down a 20 dollar Moon Juice, hybrids are disrupters, specialization is death.
In conclusion: I love hybrids, for hybrid moments, in hybrid environments. #ATB #BCX
So good. ‘Rizzless’ is my new favorte word.
baristas know best, edging is the way ⛷️