Twenty-twenty-two has been a bit of a year. In the first month, I ruptured my right Achilles. In the last month, a car crashed into me riding my bicycle home from work. Somewhere in there, we had a leak in our condo unit. As I sit here, some half my neighbours are dealing with water damage to their units after some of our building’s rooftop drains froze and spilled over. 

I know Christmas is just another day, another week, another month of another year but water damage for Christmas still seems like a bigger F-U from the universe than any of the other fifty-one weeks. It certainly makes me feel like an asshole when the biggest thing getting me down – and it is getting me down – is how little, relative to past years, I’ve ridden a bike in ’22 and even more so, how little I’ve ridden a bike in the last few weeks. 

This month I finished lacing up some Velocity Quill rims, setting up some 40c Schwalbe groad tires, and mounting some SKS P50 fenders on my Waltworks V1. A little pre-Christmas gift to myself to make the bike a little more commuter and a little less ATB. Same P321 single-speed hub running a 6-speed Shimano XTR M970 drivetrain. 

I’m really excited to put a lot of miles on it in ’23 and hopefully find some of my general cycling fitness. I seem to have misplaced a whole heck of a lot of it. I’m looking forward to a little Tunnel Talk about that bike once I’m back turning wrenches at the shop again. 

My Cetma found a new home this month. A wonderful family that’s going to get years of the same enjoyment that the Clairebarian and I had. It was very emotional – surprisingly emotional – watching Chris pedal it down the road when he picked it up. His joy matched my own the day I bought it off Clint. His initial effort matched too. I’ve never been hungrier than riding the Cetma from Vancouver to Deep Cove and home. Chris pedaled it from my place in North Vancouver all the way to UBC. 

The new bike purchase I have in mind for this year is a kid-commuter for Claire so we can replicate parts of some of our cargo-bike rides with her pedaling. I’m imagining a setup where we’ll drive, or maybe bus, part way to school to avoid the most dangerous roads in North Vancouver and then we could pedal quiet streets the rest of the way. 

On the parenting front, it’s been a fantastic year. Claire was so resilient when we had to switch to busing everywhere for the second half of the school year. Where we live transit is excellent but getting to and from her school was a grind by the end. School is going very well both socially and academically, she’s progressed amazingly in hockey and piano, and she’s a genuinely happy little human. 

She’s riding up a storm too, which brings me full circle to our third annual #CumberlandWORX trip, which will be happening around the second week of August again this year. I’ll post again closer to the date but we’d love to get out for a pedal if you’re local and around – and Claire notes here, especially if you have groms who ride. 

No, you don’t have to ride a hardtail. 

Me on the other hand, wow do I want to ride my rigid single-speed. It’s bizarre to me how much that fire burns going back to my Redline Monocog in 2001. It’s delightful how many other people I communicate with every year who are chasing a similar experience on real mountain bike trails. There are folks riding multi-speed rigid rigs, folks riding hardtails with #1FG, and even folks riding multi-speed hardtails who are all looking to maximize their smiles using their simplest version of the mountain bicycle. 

I’ll be back with some New Years Revolutions on January 1st but ’23 MEATengines is going to be more of the same with the intention always being to celebrate the simplest mountain bicycles – whatever the frame material. 

Thanks for reading.