Joe Parkin has the secret of getting fit and he’s willing to share it with you. Spoiler alert: it involves riding your bike.

JOE PARKIN

Adults are idiots. Seriously. We go to amazing lengths to take the fun out of everything we do. We have cultivated in ourselves an incredible, insatiable need to quantify and qualify everything. We are increasingly unable to do stuff just for the sake of doing stuff.

Think about the average bike ride for a minute… It’s not enough just to ride a bike – you have to define the ride (road, gravel, mountain), and then you have to choose the various subcategories that might apply to each. If it’s a mountain bike ride, you have to categorise the wheel and tyre size, whether you’re riding a hardtail or full suspension bike, whether you’re riding cross-country or trail or enduro or freeride or downhill or if you’re bikepacking. And while you’re actually riding, you have to record everything and post it somewhere and analyse it to death.