When I took up bike racing many years ago, we used to drill holes through our components to get the weight of the bike down. 10 kilos was the target then.

Mankind has advanced in leaps and bounds since then and we are approaching the 10 pound racing bike now. Along the way, many rules had to be changed whilst some are stubbornly resisting change.

Is there a limit on how light we can get?

There was this 3 hr movie that I saw recently that was themed on Gravity. In space, human beings can go weightless. So, take your favourite bike for a space journey and a 10 gram bike is within reason.

We are shackled to this world by rules and the biggest rule of all is Gravity. Gravity traps us. It pervades every single second of our lives. Not only does it make your bike heavy, everything in your life is performed under gravity. Most of us will never know what it is like to live without gravity.

On our planet, gravity controls everything. But in the vastness of the universe, gravity is negligible. This means that when we eventually die and leave this planet, where we go will most probably have no gravity. And in a world without gravity, the rules are different and scary. Mortals cannot live without the rule of gravity.

When I was a kid (and even now as an ancient), I have played with the longing to break the rules of physics. Being able to fly (without mechanical aids) would be so cool. What if I could become invisible? What if I could travel through time or if there was no limit to the speed that I could move?

But the reality is that if I was to throw myself into the air, I would not travel very far. The resultant bruising would be very visible and I would have gone rather slowly and only travelled with time (rather than through it).

In this 3 hour movie that I saw, the greatest challenge in moving human beings out to space (and into a ‘better’ world) was the vast amount of energy that it took to get out of earth’s gravity.

Likewise, in our lives it takes a vast amount of energy to take us out of our world to someone else’s ‘better’ world.  Even an ‘A’ grade rider in one of our club races would admit that to become a Tour rider would take some doing. Someone with a few thousand dollars in their bank account simply will not get up enough steam to fill it up to approach the size of Bill Gate’s petty cash account…

The question is: Do we proceed to burn ourselves out trying to get out of our current world onto greener pastures? Or do we just accept the world that we have been born into?

If you ask me, I am quite happy hanging onto the back of A grade on a Sunday. The pro tour riders can have the glamour racing world to themselves.

……And after 3 hours of trying to leave earth, our movie cast eventually succeeds in getting into space by defying the natural rule of gravity. But in the vastness of space where the rules can be so different and possibilities abound, they have instead chosen to build themselves a spinning satellite to live in. With spin, comes gravity and in their new world where gravity rules again, they can go back to their old world and the comfort that it brings…

So, what about the 10 pound racing machine?

Gravity allows us to put a weight on a bike. We have (and will continue to) put a lot of energy into defying this weight thing. Drilling holes was so lot tech. Nowadays, it is computer analysis and expensive composites….But if it was not for gravity, we would not be able to play this game about producing the lightest bike.

Ultimately, we need a set of rules to live by… just so that we can spend our lives trying to break them.