Editorial Issue #30 – stay pinned!
As the trail steepens, trees fly past, and the outlines of my surroundings start to blur, my muscles are tense, and the synapses in my brain are firing at full tilt. I’m on the hunt, not for a new best time, but for something much better: maximum flow!
By now ubiquitous and often overused, the term “flow” describes more than just a feeling: it describes a physical state which we feel very clearly when mountain biking. You’re completely focused, living perfectly in the moment with nothing on your mind but the trail in front of you. Work and stress infinitely far removed. You’re tuned out by going full speed – because it demands all your attention. It’s one of the reasons why we love biking!
Racers often reach this tunnel vision state just by getting on their bikes at the starting line of a stage. Nothing matters other than having that perfect run and setting the fastest time. You’ve trained for it for months, everything for that one moment. Our latest comparison shows what a huge difference the right equipment can make: over six seconds separated the fastest and the slowest bike on a two-minute track – the difference between victory and defeat. To find out which bike is the fastest, we pitted ten enduro bikes against each other on a race stage in Finale Ligure. The times speak for themselves.
The term “multitasking” is omnipresent in our society. All too often things have become about getting as much done as possible, juggling several tasks at once. We expect the same from the products we buy; they have to be and do more than one thing, which is good, as long as you don’t lose sight of the single most important thing. With helmets, the most important thing is safety. The only problem is that the current standards are outdated and don’t push the safety of modern helmets to the limits. In order to find out which of the latest generation of detachable chin guard or highly vented full face helmets best protects you, we carried out a radical experiment.
If you have a goal, you should at least have a rough plan on how to achieve it. Our editor Trevor and his wife Catherine stumbled naively into a bikepacking adventure around Mont Blanc and received an alpine slap to the face. Their story reveals their greatest mistakes, how to avoid them, and why, in the end, failure can be a success.
We at ENDURO have one goal in mind – as well as a plan to get there. How good that plan is also depends partly on you. It depends on you telling us what topics you’re interested in, what’s important to you, and what you expect from us. Thus, we were happy to see that 27,000 readers from 95 countries participated in our Readers’ Survey this year! Thanks to this overwhelming amount of feedback, we can create the content that you want.
Finally, we have been working hard to improve the design and layout of the magazine so now you can navigate through our exciting content faster than ever before. We hope you enjoy the new flow.
On that note, have fun reading this issue!
Cheers
Christoph
