Bikes, Bikes, Bikes: How a Hobby Can Become a Community

What do you do when a three-day long deluge of rain hits your city, leaving the trails too muddy to ride on for a while?

You can throw yourself into work, clean out your dryer vents (probably no one does this often enough), wash your baseboards, slog through some miles on your spin bike… OR you can watch a cool mountain bike movie and dream about riding! We watched Anytime, which follows sixteen ambitious riders across forests, deserts, cities and high-alpine peaks, and won a Sports Emmy in 2025.

Stunning, beautiful, serene, wild, scary, intense are all words we can use to describe the film. Inspiring is another word that fits, but not in the way where we were inspired to go DO exactly the kind of riding that is featured in Anytime. It didn’t leave us wanting to “send it” in the very extreme way these people do. We haven’t added “learn backflips” to our vision boards. We probably aren’t going to ride our bikes as fast as we drive our cars anytime soon.

We were mostly just inspired to spend more time on our bikes as soon as the trails dry out!

Watching someone do something you don’t want to do can still inspire you to do something you do want to do.

You might never want to get flown to the start of a trail in a helicopter. You might hear the word backflip and back right out of the conversation. Luckily, there are so many different ways to participate in mountain biking.

You don’t have to want to progress from tipping over on a neighborhood pump track and scraping your knees all the way to competing in Red Bull Rampage. You can get on your bike and ride without turning on Strava or Garmin. You don’t have to be chasing QOMs or KOMs. You don't need to ride so long that you start researching high-carb drink mixes just to get through a ride. You don't have to buy a bike bag and weave mountain biking into every trip you take.

We also want to be very, very clear that mountain biking doesn't have to be the singular focus of your life to be worthwhile. You can get better at something without needing to become the best at it. You can ride just because it's fun, because it gets you outside, because it makes you feel strong, because it helps you clear your head after a hard day, because it gives you a reason to leave your phone in your pocket for a couple of hours, because you get to spend time with people you enjoy.

A mountain bike ride can also bring you peace in times of grief or struggle. Sessioning something after a layoff or a breakup or loss can bring a little bit of lightness and joy back into your life. Also… AI is never going to pedal your bike for you. Some things still require us to be fully present, and a hobby like BIKES is one of them.

Mountain biking is a hobby that can bring a lot of fun to your life. It might even change your life or change how you choose to live your life, because sometimes hobbies expand into our lives in ways we weren’t expecting.

It feels so good to put yourself out there by doing something new! Sometimes you end up meeting awesome new people while you're at it.

People don't come to our ride groups or clinics thinking, "I hope I meet someone who will help me write my mom's eulogy in ten years." They don't think, "I hope I meet someone who likes coffee as much as I do and will go to Columbia with me." We aren’t sure if people think, “I might meet my future spouse at this mountain bike skills clinic!” (Though we are considering adding mountain bike speed dating to our 2027 programming...👀)

Most people who come to clinics and Ride Club are just hoping to get a little more comfortable on their bike by riding consistently with other people, but you never really know who you're going to connect with!

It could go like this: you start showing up to Ride Club, take a clinic, volunteer at a trail day, or buy a ticket to the Mountain Bike Film Festival. You bump into familiar faces a few times, learn some names, and before you really notice it's happening, you've built a community around this whole mountain bike thing that started as a chill hobby.

The people you learned to ride skinnies with become the people you text when something good happens, or when something bad happens. You celebrate birthdays together, meet each other's friends, and show up for one another when life gets messy. Some of those people become close friends. Most won't, and that's okay too.

You aren't collecting friends (you might start collecting bikes though). What you're really doing is building connections to the people and community around you. Sometimes that's as simple as waving at someone you recognize from a volunteer trail day or chatting with somebody before a group ride about what your work weeks were like. You’ll start to feel real camaraderie when you realise that anytime you hit the trails there's a good chance you'll run into someone you know. All of those kinds of small moments can do a lot to reinforce the feeling that you belong here.

Met at bike school, became friends, started a bike biz together. You never know where a new hobby will take you!

Have you noticed how your friendships change as you age? People we used to spend every weekend with move away, start families, get busy, or simply find themselves in a different season of life. That's normal, but it can also leave people feeling more isolated than they'd like to admit.

One of the things we love about mountain biking as a hobby in particular is that it can create opportunities to meet people outside of our usual circles. It is SO cool to look around a Ride Club group or skills clinic and know that we're riding with teachers, nurses, tradespeople, business owners, accountants, engineers, retirees, and students.

Joining a group ride or taking a class with a bunch of people who are all working on the same thing even though our lives are very different can be really affirming.

There is something powerful about being in the same place, at the same time, trying to learn, improve, and have fun together. Community can change how we feel about ourselves, our city, and our place within it.

Mountain biking is also a hobby that can evolve as you do. You might take a hiatus to get through the shitty frozen-shoulder phase of perimenopause. Maybe your young kids need most of your attention and you aren’t interested in riding singletrack while pulling a Thule. You might move to a new city or start a new business and not have time to get out on your bike for a while. At some point, you might go from sending features to slowly walking around them as your bones start to creak a little more than they used to.

The beautiful thing is that you don't necessarily have to stop riding. Maybe you switch to an e-MTB. Maybe you ride fewer kilometres but spend more time chatting in parking lots. Maybe your relationship with the bike changes entirely a few times over the rest of your life. What we hope remains though is the community you've built along the way.

With mountain biking, you might realize you’ve built more than a hobby. All of a sudden, when something happens to you, good or bad, you want to “go ride your bike about it”. You want to tell your bike friends your news because they're not just the people you learned how to ride corners with anymore. They're fully formed friends. Next thing you know, you're planning birthday parties together, asking them to stand beside you at your wedding, or biking over to their place because their dad passed away and you want them to know they're not alone.

Watching Anytime reminded us that the best hobbies aren't really about becoming the best at something, even though the people in this film truly are some of the best riders in the world. Mountain biking is about having something else in your life that brings you joy, keeps you curious and learning, gets you out of the house and off your phone consistently, and connects you with other people.

Come ride bikes with us!