Electric mountain bikes are ruining mountain biking by impacting our personal relationships with effort and reward.
Traditional arguments against eMTBs centre on jeopardising trail and land access rights, abuses of in-built, country-specific speed limits and tearing up the trails with excessive erosion, among plenty of other legitimate concerns.
I agree with those frequently aired arguments – anything that puts our sport, and anyone’s right to go out and make the most of the countryside at risk, isn’t positive.
But I think the real reason eMTBs are ruining mountain biking is a deeply personal one.
It’s a reason any long-standing cyclist – who’s been around way before ebikes zipped up and down our hills and mountains – can surely identify with.
Heck, even those new to our sport can understand and appreciate how there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Type one fun – the descents, a jump line, freewheeling to the bottom of the hill – was, in the past, only made possible by copious amounts of type two fun.
The long, slow, grinding, sweat-inducing winch to the descent’s start makes that very fling with gravity even better, even more fun and rewarding.
But here’s the kicker, that type two fun with its grimace-making effort of burying yourself is, in retrospect, also highly rewarding and enjoyable.
Electric mountain bikes are disrupting our relationships with these two core ingredients of mountain biking like never before, and we’re much worse off for it.
An off-piste acknowledgement
Before I go on, there needs to be an acknowledgement that eMTBs – and what they enable people to do – are excellent.
For people with a disability, people looking to start their fitness journey, people who don’t have much free time to ride, those coming back from an injury, or anyone else for that matter, they’re such a great tool, facilitator and enabler.
Even as an able-bodied, relatively fit guy who tests bikes as a job, I love riding mine, and there are plenty of people like me who love riding theirs.
Whether that’s for a lunchtime blast, an all-day epic or just a regular ride, ebikes are wicked.
I’m not singling anyone out, I’m not judging you for your choices or what you ride, but I still believe my point stands.
Unsatiated
When eating out, or even at home, have you ever finished a dish that’s supposed to be a main meal and thought, 'that was a nice starter, I wonder what’s for dinner'?
You leave unsatiated, hungry for more, dissatisfied with the quantity – cheated even – regardless of whether the food ticked all your other boxes.
In my eyes, ebiking is cycling’s equivalent of a lacklustre lunch.
More frequently than not, at the end of an eMTB ride, I’ve been left feeling slightly hollow, disappointed and unfulfilled.
Those rides have been long enough, they’ve had enough elevation gain and descent, and were tremendous fun, but the relationship between how much effort I’ve been putting in and the amount of sweet downhill reward isn’t in balance.
That same feeling of mild disappointment you get when you’ve not been given enough food lingers after an eMTB ride.
But it wasn’t while riding ebikes that this occurred to me.
Buzz kill
The penny dropped when experiencing the balance of effort versus reward at its most stark while riding chairlifts and bike parks in the Alps earlier this year.
After casually racking up more than 6,000m of ascent and descent in one afternoon riding laps on what can only be described as some of the best trails in the world, I expected to have an afterglow; a buzzing, elated feeling I could relive and ride through the evening’s lull until the next morning’s fix.
But the feeling didn’t come.
I was flat, unfulfilled, my appetite unquenched by the repeated laps.
The next day, rather than buying another lift pass, I decided to pedal to the chairlift’s summit instead of slouching on the soft, padded and comfortable lift.
One lap was only 600 metres of elevation change, and the pedal – while not taking that long – set the tone for the ride.
On the way up, I decided to see how long I could hold certain power outputs for, I drifted off and thought about the mountains, I enjoyed the cowbells, I appreciated the morning sun and dew on the grass, and I pondered the lines I was going to take on the descent.
I got to the top of the mountain sweaty, energised and ready to savour every last turn, braking bump, root and rock on my way back down.
Earning something precious – created by the relationship between the climb and descent – added so much value to my lowly, single downhill run.
Pedalling to the top of the track made that run infinitely better than the 10 I did the afternoon before.
Back to ebikes
While I’ll admit chairlifts and ebikes don’t have a great deal in common, taking the example of effort versus reward to its extremes helped me grasp what was going on.
On the chairlift, you’re sat fully stationary, free to snack, scroll or do whatever you please, while on the ebike you’ve got to be engaged, pedal, steer, brake and exercise.
But I realised that same hollow feeling I’d been experiencing at the end of ebike rides was the same I got from lapping the chairlift all day.
It was a eureka moment – the disruption between my effort input and my reward output was messing with my head and causing a disconnect.
Electric mountain bikes are preventing me from accessing the pleasure only the purest all-out efforts seem to be able to unlock.
Don’t be angry
I’ve said it before, but I’ll reiterate it again.
You can still bury yourself on an ebike.
You can max out your heart rate, you can burn as many calories as you want, and you can certainly get stronger, fitter and become a way better rider with one.
You can also put in the same amount of effort as you would on your pedal bike, but go twice as fast or twice as far.
But don’t be angry if I call you out – how many people are using their ebikes like this?
How many of you are going as hard as you can – in the same way you would on your non-assisted bike – on your eMTB?
From personal experience, I’m going to bet confidently that very few are, me included.
Hitting the bike’s speed limiter feels like ramming headlong into a brick wall while maxing out the motor’s cadence window, so when support drops off it's also demoralising.
There’s no incentive to push just that bit extra, to lift yourself truly out of your comfort zone as you would on your regular bike because your ebike doesn’t give you that instant, torquey, powerful dopamine hit when you do.
Recalibration
The next time you head out on your regular bike, it takes a while to recalibrate – I frequently asked myself, 'why isn’t this climb easier, or worse yet, already over?'. That is, until I came to terms with the impending slog.
Our perceptions of the amount of effort needed to get to the top of a favourite trail versus how much effort is required are totally out of whack.
It’s easy to see how people get stuck riding only ebikes.
They begin doubting whether they can make it up the climb on their non-electric bike and they question whether they’d be able to do more than one or two climbs and descents in a day.
Along with the other – very good – reasons for riding only ebikes, people get stuck, hooked on that gentle glide to the trail’s top.
eMTBs are ruining mountain biking
There’s no substitute for your regular bike, for pushing yourself, for going that little bit harder, for longer.
And, most importantly, for earning that sweet reward on the way back down after hours of hard, all-out effort.
The dichotomous relationship between time spent going up and down, and the amount of fun they both bring to the equation isn’t mathematically sound, but it’s the reason I and many others love this sport.
The effort makes the reward – no matter how small – that bit more worth it.
My advice: don’t ruin it by only riding eMTBs.
