The Human Resource

If my mission at Sea Otter this year was “see all the new stuff and report on it”, I clearly failed. I didn’t see all the new stuff. I barely saw any of the new stuff. Instead, I saw a lot of old people. And we talked a lot, because when you are old, you have time to talk, and the new stuff doesn’t seem as pressing or as important as the catching up. And reaffirming that we are still here is sometimes a long conversation, one we were probably in too much of a hurry doing Very Important Things to engage in when we were younger and more involved in doing Very Important Things.

A correction is needed. We are NOT all still here. The growing number of notable absences among the people I have been seeing every year (but one) for the thirty-some year span of the Sea Otter is felt with more weight and more sadness each year. This is one of those unavoidable truisms of aging. The older we get, the more familiar with death we become. And while this growing sense of our own mortality pulls our remaining time on this planet into a much tighter focus, it also provides some measure of circumspection and acceptance, even as it sets off quiet alarm bells in our heads. So we are not all here, but a surprising number of us are, and we have spent our lives in this fishbowl and are still here chugging along in love with bikes, albeit with quite a bit more gray in the mix.

And some of us are still doing Very Important Things, but we are all feeling those gaps and losses where other friends used to be, and we have more time to talk as a result. We make more time. The Very Important Things can wait for a minute, and we can instead catch up during the few short days where we are all in one place. So rather than talk about whether that fancy new helmet chin retention is going to be the next MIPS, or to what extent that Chinese company ripped off that German hub design, or debating the value proposition of everything from tires to new inverted forks, we show pictures of our kids graduating high school, or getting married, or we compare surgery scars for everything from basal cell carcinomas to heart surgery zippers. We talk about falling in love, about getting divorced, about getting drunk, about quitting drinking, about gardening, about food, about art, about war, about plastic in the oceans, about our dogs.

We do this because we have seen each other riding bikes forever, and we have the time and space to talk about other things now, to get to know each other beyond the bikes. We were all skinny and Lycra clad once upon a time. Some of us were skinny and dressed in wool, with hairnets and toeclips instead of helmets and SPDs, because many of us are that old. We met on bikes, at a time when we were all a lot younger and more zealous about everything. Most of us have opened up our thinking since those younger days of strong opinions and heightened self-righteousness, but a few of us have gone the other way and hardened into crusty unwillingness to see anything but our own convictions. All of us have been in this rodeo long enough to have had our convictions about design and evolution overturned at least a few times. All of us have watched as our own sport, our own chosen industry, has chewed any number of us up, devouring projects, products, ideas, brands; rendering labors of love worthless while chasing profit with a bottomless thirst.

We meet here, at this Celebration Of Cycling, and we talk about the other shit that matters because we have spent our lives here, talking about bikes. We have spent decades at it; talking about bikes, about racing, about the manufacture of bikes, about the politics of industry, about the often stumbling incompetent dance of PR and marketing, about application of materials, about manufacturing techniques, about corporate consolidation. And for all those lifetimes spent working and talking about bikes, surprisingly few of us are looking at a comfortable retirement. So we steal a few minutes here, and we look each other in the eye, and we speak truths about life. We drop the uniform we’ve been wearing for 30 years, 40 years, more, and we drop the bullshit along with it, and we ask each other how we are doing.

I was in too much of a hurry, too self-absorbed, along with too shy, to talk about anything but bikes in the first couple decades of my working in the industry. The first decade I was also trying to absorb everything I could that pertained to bikes, so there never felt like there was time or bandwidth to talk about anything else. To this day I regret that I did not slow down, listen more, ask more questions of the humans I was meeting about the lives they lived when we weren’t all sharing time on bicycles. I feel like I missed out on a lot.

Nowadays, I probably swing too uncomfortably in the other direction for some folk. Not everyone wants to talk about non-binary children, cancer, increasing ocean temperatures or whether social media is turning us all into narcissists. In many respects, it’s way easier to just stick to bikes. I have gone from being too aloof to the human connection to being a little too pointed and not always reading the room correctly. The tells come in the form of clenched jaws, quick glints in the eye, and uncomfortable conversation endings.

But then something occurs like the colossal boner that Kent Outdoors pulled at the Sea Otter this year; directing the Kona employees there to stop assembling their booth and take it all apart instead, on the Thursday of the event, right there in front of thousands of spectators as well as most of the assembled bike industry. Talk about making an impression. For three days, in spite of all the rad new product on display elsewhere, in spite of the assembled industry lifers gathering to talk about all that other stuff that I have been navel-gazing about for 1000 words now, all ANYONE was talking about was Kona. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” P.T Barnum once quipped.

Gotcha there, P.T. You might have just been proven wrong.

Some of the grey haired faces that were missing this year used to work at Kona. The past few years have been a harrowing time in this industry, and the greying out of my peers has accelerated during and following the pandemic. There’s an element of this that is just the natural process of getting older. One day you wake up and you are grey, and so are all your friends, and it can be jarring to realize. But at the same time, as I traded hugs and fist bumps with people who have been absolutely foundational in the evolution of mountain biking, people without whom the sport may not have evolved at all, as I considered the lifetimes of accumulated experience as well as the lifetimes of service given to this sport, and we talked about the scars that life leaves, I couldn’t help but think that the mileage might be a little kinder if we hadn’t all experienced some variation of what happened at Kona ourselves, often repeatedly.

No-one gets out of here alive, right? I get that loud and clear. I have no regrets about the choices I have made. I could’ve gone and developed a career around something more lucrative than words and bicycles. But I love this shit, and I love the other lifers that washed up on this Island Of Misfit Toys alongside me. No tears.

It’d be nice though, even just once, when I read about yet another brand folding up its tent (literally, in the case of Kona at the Sea Otter) or hear about another wave of layoffs while knowing full well that some asshole in a suit got a healthy bonus for “increasing shareholder value” or some other such horseshit, that I also heard about the depth of that knowledge and experience being preserved instead of gutted. Honored instead of cut to the bone and discarded. Just once. I won’t hold my breath.

But you’ll have to excuse me while I steal a few minutes to knock back a beer with some other lifers and talk about anything but bikes on their bosses' dimes.