>>1269070>Well I ride with a big group of lycraclad riders and none of them think they're going pro and nobody fights about the sport or yells at anyone either, don't be strawmannyThat's pretty much /n/ in a nutshell: lots of strawman posts about people they've never had an actual sit-down conversation with therefore they don't have a clue what they're actually about or what they're like.
What the casual/recreational/commute/utility riders of /n/ don't get, is that for the sport of cycling, you don't get anywhere with it with half measures. You either do the training or you don't. For instance, most of /n/ couldn't imagine why anyone would want to spend a couple hours doing hill repeats: climbing a hill, only to spin down to the bottom to do it again, over and over. They think 'you got to the top, why aren't you just continuing on?' Similarly they don't see the point in riding as hard as you can sustain for 3-5 minutes, to the point where you can't see straight and are gasping for air, then spin easy for a couple minutes, then do it a bunch more times; it doesn't look fun (it's NOT!) so why bother? Or a TT: ride as hard as you can manage for 10 to 25 miles without stopping. Let's face it, it's not fun, but standing at the top tier of the podium, even if it's an amateur-league race, is fun, even if the prize money wasn't enough for you to break even on the gas it took to drive to where the TT was held.
This isn't the sort of thing you can explain to someone who doesn't get it, and have them suddenly 'get it'. You either are wired this way or you aren't, apparently, your brain is either wired to be competitive or it isn't, and to someone who isn't wired that way, nothing you can say to them will make sense to them.
I'm not saying that someone who trains and rides for competition purposes is 'better' than someone who is purely casual/recreational/commute/utility riding. They're two totally separate things that don't compare to each other.
