Unpopular opinion: 90% of what makes a bike the type of bike it is is what tires you put on it.
You can make any gravel bike a road bike for $75.
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BRB… gonna slap some 700c Enve tubeless wheels and tires onto a Trek Session and slay everyone on the next road ride 
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I just had to look up what that was. Would be fun though haha.
Totally agree with this unpopular opinion as it pertains to making off-road bikes suitable for road. So much misguided obsession on geometry, gearing, and weight (which matter very little compared to the motor sitting on the seat).
I’m not sure it swings as dramatically the other way since there is no tire option that can turn a road bike into a workable mtb.
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Yea it’s a lot more dicey the other way, and totally dependent on the trails available. Some newer disc road bikes can take pretty wide tires, so there’s definitely some crossover. I take my cx bike on 33mm tires on the sketchiest of trails where I live.
But I’ve seen ‘real’ mountain biking, and I’d be terrified of rappelling down the trail with a rope, much less any kind of bicycle…
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You’d probably be surprised how fast it is on the road if you stuck a 38 ring on it. I stick skinny gravel tires on my FS XC bike every summer for road training and generally do fine on fast group rides. It does make for a day of hard and fast pedaling, but not that much harder than running a gravel bike with same tires. Again, back to the tires being the biggest difference. I may just stick some GP5000’s on my MTB this summer to make it look totally ridiculous. The biggest problem you’d probably have with a downhill bike is the annoying suspension bob (I’m assuming they don’t typically have full lockout).
It’s nice that we can continue to litigate something people were raging about in Letters to The Editor 30 years ago.
Don’t think you could possibly ride off pavement without monster knobbies, suspension, enough titanium for an ICBM, and enough gears for at least two whole bikes? Don’t be a trained parrot by thinking this and don’t let the greedy hawkers control your thoughts and your pocket-book! Simply put, invest in some skills, some style, some finesse, and some balls (girls included), not more over-hyped bike junk.
Read it, learn it, and live it: ‘Technique beats technology any time, anywhere.’ And that’s what I deadpan to every nimwit mountain biker who asks me how I managed to blow him away without tweaking my wheels and cracking my frame.
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There is definitely something very satisfying about passing full suspension mountain bikes on trails while on a CX bike 
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Is it popular? TR is a popular app and look at the majority of TR training plans.
Science has largely ignored easy training, which is why we hear so much about HIIT and vo2max and sweet spot interval training. Remember when cyclists did 20 hours/week of easy training and got fast? Not very easy to study that in the lab.
If more people cared about heart health after 50, zone1 and zone2 would be more popular. Heck look at Peter Sagan, 34 and having ablation procedure. Don’t know when he started but guessing Sagan’s heart has 20 years of high-intensity training and racing. After 50 the heart muscle loses flexibility, like all the other muscles in your body. Except your heart is always pumping along at 1-5 watts, day after day, minute after minute, second after second. Pile on 20 years of wear&tear from high-intensity training to a muscle losing flexibility and you’ve seemingly got a recipe for another The Haywire Heart book.
Unpopular opinion:
Most people don’t play the long game.
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How often does this happen on the downhill? 
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I might be wrong but wasn’t Sagan one of the, probably accidental, pioneers of Zone 2 training. I’m sure his teammates have often been quoted as saying his training mostly used to consist of just going for long, slow rides while they were all smashing intervals
In Chicago pretty often lol. The downhills are more like down sortaslopes.
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This is how they all trained back in the day. They just rode a lot. A LOT. I don’t think Sagan pioneered pros going for long rides with little to no structure.
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Yeah, Long Slow (Steady in some circles) Distance (LSD) goes WAY back and is essentially Z2, Endurance, going long and likely other terms applied through decades.
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Apologies, I wasn’t trying to say he was the first to do it ever but he certainly seemed to train in a different way to most of the pros in his era
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Here is a good article on the history of training for running. Lydiard of course popularized the “Long Slow Distance” movement, which was then refined by Bill Bowerman implementing the hard/easy structure. So the idea has been around for some time.
Curious if anyone has seen something similar in regards to the history of training for cycling? It would be interesting to see how training philosophies have changed over the years (specifically in cycling).
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Don’t make me get up on my soapbox on this issue. 
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Not to go down a darker path, but if you’re going to do that study, it would be interesting to see how it changed as the drugs of the moment changed too. Did a lot of us spend years trying to copy training protocols that were inferior for those of us who weren’t eating EPO for breakfast and drinking litres of our own frozen blood? I’ll never get over the fact that there was a time when people thought smoking “opened up the lungs”, for example. Reading the stories about the first Tours de France is incredibly eye opening. Guys dashing into bars to steal alcohol and snacks while powering through on stimulants. It’s crazy. And incredibly interesting too.
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My unpopular opinion: I’m over, over-analyzing & horse-beating related to training modalities
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