Mountain biking a couple of days ago in Whistler when I came across a few guys at the entrance to a technical black trail. Only one is wearing gloves and no one is wearing elbow pads. They were talking big so I let them go first, but within 10 metres of the start, on a small drop, one goes over the bars with his hands bloodied. The trail gets much harder so I don’t know what he was going to do.

It doesn’t seem to be a gender thing either. Today, I passed a group of ladies on another technical black trail - I would say half were not wearing gloves and no one had elbow pads.

I get it if you’re an expert, but these people were not riding like experts and these are not easy trails. Hands are one of the first thing that hit the ground in a fall.

I wear gloves, elbow and knee pads and padded shorts because I’m old and it takes too long to recover from injury. Am I a dweeb?

Edit: I may have sounded kind of judgy and concerned about what others think in the above. I’m old enough that I don’t really care what other people do and I don’t care about what others think about what I do. It just made me kind of cringe watching this guy go OTB right at the start and then his ride is ruined after a 45 minute climb just because he wasn’t wearing gloves and wondering if it was a new trend. For those of you from Whistler, it was Micro Climate.