It was wet and cold yesterday but I rode anyway:
I got wet and cold.
Still, I felt very much at home on the Milaukee, a bicycle which is now entering its 11th year of faithful service. Also, for the record, I’ve been riding this bicycle on Very Small Rocks™ since it was new:
Keep in mind that this was a mere two years after gravel was first invented.
Amazing, right?
Plenty of people would probably consider the Milwaukee an “old” bike, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way to me. Sure, that’s partly because I had it refinished and I treated it to a new drivetrain, but it also doesn’t feel old because I myself am old. See, when you’re 20, 10 years is 50% of your life. But when you’re my age it’s a…well, it’s a smaller percentage, I guess? Look, I’ve never been good at math, especially percentages. The point is, when you get to a certain age, 10 years ago seems like yesterday, which is why when your smoke detector starts going bad you’re like, “What the hell? I just put that goddamn thing up there!” and conclude that it must be faulty. Then you fall off the stepstool while changing it and break your hip.
I’m so old I remember when fixie riders used to use absurdly narrow bars:
Now they use absurdly wide bars:
More legerage, I guess, but tragically they can’t squeeze between cars anymore:
It’s also been several generations since New York City was actually gritty and dangerous. Now everybody looks gritty and dangerous, the most dangerous thing they’re likely to encounter on the streets is dorks on e-scooters:
Anyway, I was thinking about the Milwaukee’s age because as I was attempting to bring my core temperature back up after my ride I came across the following article:
Apparently, according to a survey, their readers get a new mountain bike every 3-5 years:
TIL that in 2025 the average passenger vehicle on the road in the USA was 14.5 years old. Though I can’t say how old the average mountain bike on the trail is, it’s certainly much younger than that. Based on our own surveys, most riders buy a new mountain bike every 3-5 years. And new bikes are great! The technology changes rapidly, and I would argue today’s bikes are a better value than they’ve ever been.
Speaking of being old, TIL that “TIL” stands for “today I learned.”
YLSNED.
So apparently mountain bike consumers are so fickle you must cajole them into keeping a bike that’s a mere five (5) years old. So in this context, a mountain bike made before 2016 is positively ancient:
Such is the fast pace at which mountain bikes “evolve:”
Mountain bikes have evolved faster than any other type of bike in the last 20 years, and mountain bikes released only 10 years ago will look extremely outdated to experienced riders. Does this mean mountain bikes made before my 2016 cut-off are bad bikes? Heck no! In fact, there are plenty of older mountain bikes that I think are awesome (I still love my early-90s Fat Chance Yo Eddy and 2013 Salsa El Mariachi).
But when I’m looking for a mountain bike to recommend to customers, family, and friends, I tend to stick to bikes made within the last 5-7 years. As a business that specializes in buying and selling used bikes, TPC also prefers to buy mountain bikes in that same age range. Here’s why:
By the way, that article from The Pro’s Closet is itself already three years old–so old that The Pro’s Closet subsequently went out of business and then reopened, in what was the most indifferently received comeback in all of cycling:
The only thing that changes faster than mountain bike tech is private equity financing.
In any case, we take it for granted that mountain bikes change more quickly than road bikes and other types of bike. However, looking back, I’m not entirely sure that’s true–at least not for the past 10 or so years. By way of “researching” this, I traveled back in time via the Specialized website and had a look at their 2015 offerings (that being the year I got the aforementioned Milwaukee). Here was a high-end road bike in 2015:
Here was a high-end trail bike:
And here was what would have been considered a “gravel” bike:
Though they did also have those hip-for-the-times steel AWOL bikes:
So hip in fact that Ultraromance was the official spokesman:
Now let’s return to the present–that’s 2026, in case you’ve lost track. Today, a corporate road bike looks like this:
A trail bike looks like this:
Here’s the latest iteration of that “gravel” bike:
And it seems like they’ve given up on the hipster touring bikes altogether, no doubt ceding the market to the boutique companies because they just weren’t pulling it off:
By the way, I asked the AI to generate an image for “Steve Buscemi ‘How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?’ Meme Only With A Bicycle Over His Shoulder Instead of a Skateboard,” and here’s what I got:
Wow, it’s both adorable and horrifying to watch the emerging digital consciousness as it does its best to piece this stuff together, like an infant struggling to assemble the weapon with which it will one day murder you. I mean I’m not saying it’s going to go that way necessarily–hey, AI may turn out great, who knows?–but in the meantime, at least based on this image, I certainly wouldn’t want it doing surgery on me. I can imagine going in for that hip replacement after trying to change the smoke detector and leaving with my leg attached to my head.
As for those bikes, while the geometry of the mountain bike may have changed, I’d say that the other bikes have changed more profoundly. The rim brake road bike completely disappeared, the gravel bike of yesteryear is basically the road bike of today, and a 20-something buying a gravel bike today is basically buying the mountain bike his father bought in the ’90s. And the Milwaukee? Forget it. You basically can’t buy a bike like that anymore. That thing might as well be a pennyfarthing.
But the biggest change of all is that all those bikes are also available with an electric motor. How do I feel about that? Ask me in another 10 years when I finally surrender.