Up. Down. Repeat

manifest

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 called Covid-19. Some are literally crushed under the weight of casualties, while the rest are hoping to be spared by the pandemic. We all are looking at an economic world that is crumbling in front of our eyes. An entire world is being brought to a halt within a couple of weeks, with an horizon of a couple of months of nothing-but-bare-necessities type of activities allowed to keep running. And with an even hazier prospect of getting back to the old-ways. If ever.

Is there, in this time and age, any point in rolling out the updated visual identity I was working on? Probably not. Tourism related services were the first casualties of the crisis, and they will be the last to recover. All around the world people will re-think their priorities and expenses, and who can blame them.

But maybe it is worth the trouble. Keeping with the regular routines as much as possible is one simple way to stay sane in a world that seems to go crazy. It might look now that travelling abroad to see new places is something totally unnecessary for a bare survival. But we got to be where we are now precisely because we wanted so much more than just mere survival. The Covid-19 is a big blow, on a short and medium term, but on a longer term we’ll be still looking outwards, to new adventures, and new horizons.

Our new three-words-headline concentrates the whole mountain biking experience as we see it. It kind of popped up naturally, while processing tons of videos and photos from our past tours, while writing trip reports about amazing trips with incredible people. But it obviously is about so much more than mountain biking. It is about our lives, our world, before, during and after Covid-19.

Up. Down. Repeat

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