Sometimes I stop and look at today’s world of cycling and I get a strange feeling.
It has never been this easy to have everything: ultra-light bikes, perfect components, data everywhere, training plans scheduled down to the second. And yet, talking with many cyclists, I realize that a sense of emptiness often remains.
It is a kind of hunger that comes precisely from abundance. You have a full table in front of you: new bikes, accessories, endless apps, segments, notifications, content. But after tasting everything, sometimes you realize that none of it really nourishes you.
Over time I’ve understood that not all desires connected to cycling are the same.
Some desires transform you while you pursue them. Preparing for a climb that scares you. Learning to ride better. Going on a bike trip. Building a real relationship with the machine you ride. These things require time, effort and patience. But when you reach the top, you are not the same person who started the climb.
And then there are desires that burn out instantly. The new bike that already feels normal after a week. The watt number checked every five seconds. The feed you scroll while dreaming about the next thing to buy. They give you a small burst of excitement, but they leave no trace.
Some desires are thick: they change you while you live them. Others are thin: they pass quickly and leave you exactly where you were before.
Today the market — not only the cycling one — is extremely good at feeding the thin ones. Everything is fast, immediate, perfect, frictionless. But the truth is that the experiences that really matter don’t work like that. They demand your impulsiveness. A climb cannot be accelerated. A bike trip cannot be optimized. A relationship with your own bike cannot be built with a click. In cycling this difference becomes clear when you think about the relationship each of us has with our bicycles. Some of them are perfect tools for performance: fast, efficient, designed to deliver the best possible result. And then there are others with which something different happens. The ones that, when you get on them, give you a feeling that is hard to explain but very clear: trust.
It is not a matter of watts or speed. It is something more subtle and at the same time deeper. It is as if, over time, a kind of silent pact has formed between your body and that bike. You know it will take you where you want to go. And somehow you believe in it, almost with the same natural ease with which we believe in the things that belong to our lives.
Maybe this is why we continue to build bicycles this way: one at a time, for someone specific. Not because it is the fastest or most efficient system. But because we believe that some things only make sense if they are dense, personal.
In the end, what we are really looking for is not simply a bicycle. It is a way to return to a place where, while you ride, you feel that everything is exactly where it should be. It is that moment when you come back home after a ride and realize that, somehow, that day has nourished you.
