Out of the group. Now it’s fashionable to pedal with gravel bikes but mountain biking is still mountain biking, whatever you decide it to be: road, country, mountain, sea and amphibious bikes from often unreachable beaches, a link between the desire to stay away for own affairs and the possibility of doing so, going wherever you want even getting lost in the mists. It’s not a little. As he said Renzo Arbore in one of his shows, “The fewer we are, the better off we are…”. Mountain biking is a nice way to stay out of the fray, to not socialise, not to share, to not be in the wake, to choose those impervious and forgotten roads where today there is no traffic anymore because we prefer to live comfortably on the motorway. It takes you where you want to go, where sometimes you would never think, where the roads end but then continue. Just look for them. It is the only means of transport that allows you to go up where most normal people struggle on foot, to go down paths that go who knows where, to cut ties with noisy civilization for a few hours. There is a strange charm in following paths that often don’t know where they go. Sometimes you get a bit of anxiety even if you are in the heart of industrious Lombardy and not on a plateau in Tibet and in your backpack you have inner tubes, a #9 Allen key and a mobile phone… But as the sun is about to leave you you move away from a town by pedaling on the dirt road that enters a forest and as you go you try to look back. The houses can no longer be seen, the farmhouses disappear and it seems unthinkable that we will be able to meet anyone for a few hours. The only sounds are those of your wheels crunching the gravel and the animals moving away among the leaves hidden by the fog that you can’t even understand what they are. And they make you gasp. It’s a bit like swimming. A bit like waving while keeping an eye on the reassuring black line at the bottom of a swimming pool and instead going into the open sea, moving away from the beach. There is a moment when you are truly alone. With the sound of your breathing and the sea crashing on you and wherever it wants. Swimming and cycling, verbs in the infinitive, how the space where you find yourself often appears is just an illusion because there is a world that continues to do the usual things around you, a few kilometers away. But the magic remains. It doesn’t last long. And, for those who know how to appreciate it, this is enough…