Burn your lycra.  Give your clipless shoes to a gym rat.  Replace your fitbit with a Casio.  Ditch the magic food and buy an ice cream sandwich.  

To Tanglefoot is to shrug off the beeps and the data and the monitors.  What is this, a hospital?  No, it’s a bike ride.  Your bike shouldn’t beep at you.  It shouldn’t issue instructions.   Your bike shouldn’t run out of batteries.  When you were a kid the lamest toys were the ones that used batteries.   Childhood should be about making stick boats down at the creek and jumping your Huffy off gravel piles.  Helmets are a thing that astronauts wear.  Bikes are about exploring, not like some National Geographic special where people make beer out of banana spit, but exploring your world, the one right out  your door.  Your own backyard, the ditch, the pine trees on the ridge, the dirt paths worn by kids running home from school, the thicket of briars just beyond which lay a sparkling riffle of water.  Cuts and bruises and dirty fingernails, tired feet, PB&Js, sticks in mud, howling coaster brakes, camping even when you live close by.  

Tanglefooting is pushing your bike up huge climbs only to find there is no view.  It’s snow biking without a fat bike.  It’s thawing your derailleur with a trail side fire and when that fails, peeing on it to melt the ice.  It’s stuffing your tire with moss when you are outta tubes. Stopping to check out porcupines, eating moon pies, killing the afternoon in a stream drinking warm beer and watching the herons stalk minnows. Using the sunset is your compass. Drinking water right out of a mountain stream. Thumbing rides when you are too tired to go further.  Roasting donuts in an ice crevasse on the coldest day of the year. 

What is Tanglefooting?  Freedom to have fun.