manifest

Here’s a set of opinion pieces that explain my understanding of mountain biking, and mountains in general. These are longer reads, but it worth checking them out if you want to better understand what a guided tour with me is about.

Yes, we still need tourism

All around the world the Covid-19 forces everyone into reassessing priorities. Living so close to a life threatening situation is pushing people to have a different perspective on pretty much everything. Everywhere you look, people magically discover the joy of cooking at home. The bliss of spending more time with the very close ones. The thrill of exercising in the living room, with a lazy cat or a bored dog in the background. The futility of high-cost expenses, like a state-of-the-art new car, or the latest instalment in the ever…

Up. Down. Repeat

Cleaning and checking the bike. Sending more delicate components to specialised servicing. Updating programs and tours, fine-tuning coming trips. Reviewing the website, refreshing layouts, messages, logos. Warm-up rides on the trails that are drying up at lower altitudes, while skinning and skiing is still up for grabs higher up the mountain. This is what a regular month of March or April looks like in our shed and in our neck of the woods. Not this year. Together with the rest of you, we got rolled over by a big wave…

A season with COTIC FlareMax

This is a bike review that is not a bike review. It is a bike review because it’s about a bike that I’ve been riding almost daily for the last six months: April 2019 to November 2019. You can say we got to be quite intimate. It’s not a bike review, because I am not a bike reviewer, and my experience in riding a vast array of brands, models, takes, etc, is, to put it mildly, rather limited. In other words, this is not about how the COTIC FlareMax 29er…

Drop that seatpost!

"I use more often the dropper seatpost than the front derailleur", told me Sigge a few good years back, at the beginning of his stay in Romania, while we were riding on the trails of Bucegi, Piatra Craiului, Postăvaru. Across the marvellous mtb playground that is the Brasov area. Sigge is my kind of mountain biker. Under the baggy pants he'll always wear the pampered lycra. He's a mountain trails type of biker, loving the singletracks both uphill and downhill. His advice for me, knowing what I like and how…

To shred or not to shred?

You might have noticed while roaming your regular mtb magazines, Facebook feeds and YouTube channels: nobody rides their bike anymore, now it’s all about „shredding”. It’s more than just semantics differentiating „riding” from „shredding”. You ride the trails, but you also ride your bike (as you’d ride a horse, for instance) . When riding the trails, you are letting yourself carried along a path by the means of a transportation tool, so to speak. While with „shredding”, that’s definitely aimed at trails. I mean who in the world and in a…

Fără motoare pe cărare

Trag pe mine niște haine ca o piele de crocodil, să țină la tăvăleală. Mai adaug protecții pentru tibie, genunchi, brațe, coate, mâini, spate. Capul mi-e ascuns într-o cască full-face, pentru care m-ar invidia probabil și Darth Wader. În general aș stârni invidia la orice masă rotundă, m-ar pizmui orice lancelot. Sunt gata să mă bucur de o ieșire în natură. Mă sui pe motor și-i dau blană la munte, spintecând liniștea locului cu mugetul motorului și rupând pământul cu crampoanele cauciucurilor, lăsând în urmă o meteorică dâră de fum,…