Some months ago The Ride Journal  asked me to write a little story about Fairdale. Funnily enough they had seen our momentarily viral R+D video and wanted to know more about what we were all about. Though I expect they were hoping for something as goofy as that video I gave them a much more sincere version of “our story”. This ran in their mag a few months ago which you can download from Ride Journal. I imagined myself trying to explain my motivation for the brand to someone who didn’t know anything about Fairdale.  -Taj A Change of Gear by Taj I want to keep my bicycle innocence. I want to walk a into a bicycle store and feel amazed by all the spaceship styled machines inside. When the salesman spots me lusting over the top of the line road bike I want to still feel bewildered when he tells me the “cross-weaved carbon-fiber lay-up” makes the bike so strong it’ll win the Tour de France (but don’t let it fall over because it’ll break if it lands on anything sharp). I want to remember the discouragement I feel when the mountain bike that looks like a motorcycle with no engine somehow costs more than a motorcycle WITH an engine. I want to remember what it feels like to not know anything about bikes… to just want to go for a ride. Not long ago walking into a bike shop was an alienating experience for me and that’s strange because I’d spent the majority of my life as a professional bike rider. I was a BMXer though and the little trick-bike world on the very fringe of cycling has been content to be defined by stone-age single-speed chromoly steel-framed bikes. My “cycling career” on the edge of cycling has been a unique journey that brought me to an almost metaphysical understanding of what riding a bike was without actually knowing much about bikes. That’s not to say I didn’t “know” BMX bikes, on the contrary, I had signature model bikes, parts and even shoes. They were all designed out of my personal necessity as the rider who would use them. I had no engineering background or scientific understanding outside of millions of hours of brutal bike-destroying trial and error. Even so I was left relatively ignorant of what the rest of the cycling world was doing. After a spinal injury it was time for me to step away from BMX. That led me to a job at long time sponsor Odyssey BMX. With little bikes being off limits post surgery I started visiting bike shops looking for a bike I could ride. With my innocence intact I started wondering why bikes weren’t more like I thought they should be. If BMX teaches you anything about bikes it’s that the most simple bikes can do some of the most amazing things. My bike shop friends seemed to see things differently. They said what I really needed was the new electronic gear system, and that I would […]

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