It’s been a good year for the biking — so far, anyway. With the diminution of La Niña, which contrived to soak us over the span of two summers, we have finally had enough dryness to string together a decent series of rides. Your author’s progress chart on Strava looks less like a close-up of a buzz-saw blade and more like the slopes of Gillamatong: a nice, steady upward gradient to the halcyon horizon of Olympic-level fitness.

Of course, with riding the bicycles comes tinkering with the bicycles, cleaning the bicycles, and, inevitably, philosophising about the bicycles. It’s not so much a rabbit-hole as a whole package of things with an all-or-nothing stamp up top. You have to go deep with this stuff.

This involves getting up to speed [pause for laughter] with the latest trends in the bicycling space — and this is where it first became clear to me . . . things are definitely getting bigger.

Take wheels for example: when mountain biking became A Thing in the ’80s, wheels were deemed to have a diameter of 26 inches (559mm), because this is what size the cruiser or klunker bikes had at the time. And they proved to be pretty good: a smaller wheel accelerates faster, and the bikes could be compact and agile (what we mountain bikes like to call ‘flickable’).

But the seasons passed, the years rolled by, and someone somewhere started agitating that a bigger wheel would be better. Just like the years, it would roll better, with greater gyroscopic stability; it would handle bumps and logs better, due to the more optimal approach angle or somesuch; and better traction due to their larger area of contact with the ground.

Big wheels come with a downside too: weight, of course, and . . . well, they’re bigger, so the bike is bigger, so it’ll take up more space in the shed, or it won’t fit in your station wagon.

If bigger is better, more bigness is more betterness. Here’s a bike someone has built using even bigger wheels. Don’t ask me where its owner keeps that.

Who knows where this wheel-size arms race will end?

And it’s not just wheels: the bit where the handlebars join the frame, known as the headset, has become bigger at the bottom — 1.5 in vs 1.125 in. The cassette (that array of different-sized cogs at the back) will now have a big cog that’s twice the size of the front one — ’tis against nature! And there are twelve of them, as opposed to the appealingly simple and easily divisible eight or nine.

Handlebars, which since Adam and Eve hit the trails in Eden have been content with a svelte 25.4mm diameter, have now bloated out through 31.8mm and are now pushing for a ubiquitous 35mm standard. That’s fat. And wide! Your 1992 bike would have had narrow little 560mm things. Now we’re at 800mm for some models.

A cynic might see that this is the work of devilish marketing departments, who know that the cycling spods out there will immediately run out and buy whatever new standard is introduced. No doubt there are marginal performance gains to be had, but you can also get these by riding more and/or losing a bit of weight. Back to that in a minute.

The upshot of all this progress is that the nice old gear you’ve had for a decade or two which seemed perfectly capable a little while ago, is now going obsolete. Good 26″ tyres are harder to find. Your fave handlebars aren’t made in the old 25.4mm your old faithful MTB requires. Then you need a new stem to accommodate the new fatter bars. Front forks, which you might have swapped out in half an hour, won’t fit the new frames, so no-one services them anymore. Worn bearings in the headset? Good luck finding a nice 1 1/8″ model.

Now along with all this bicycle inflation, could it be that riders are also getting bigger?

Of course, we’re just scratching the surface when it comes to the bignification of things. Look at these cars. The ’60s models are dwarfed by their contemporary equivalents — a sneaky ploy by the manufacturers to build on the image of these conveyances as ‘small’ when they are not.

And look at that boon and bane of all our lives, the mobile phone. While the boffins are forever finding new ways of miniaturising all the springs and cogs and the like that make our phones run, somehow the phones have been getting bigger. We all snigger at those monstrous ’80s brick phones, but the fact is, we’re rushing headlong back into that space.

So this is where we get to speculate as to why this trend, which I have established beyond reasonable doubt, is happening. And here, as they say, is the thing: beyond the ‘bigger must be better’ assumption mentioned above, it’s all a bit of a mystery.

Well, kind of. The thing is, when it comes to bikes, there are good reasons for this pursuit of largeness. Most of the embiggenments of handlebar, bearing and stem are made for greater stiffness. When your puny rider is the only source of power, any loss of energy through flex or flop can be significant. You want every watt of your insignificant output transmitted to the back wheel, thus to move you forward more efficiently.

That’s a good thing for sure. The downside is that if a thing is bigger, it contains more material, and that makes it more expensive. The old saw really is true: you gets what you pays for. Materially that is — but if you’re a devotee of sports car designer Colin Chapman, whose guiding principle was “just add lightness”, you’re not buying that precious commodity.

However, perhaps the overriding consideration for the impecunious bike tinkerer is that keen gearheads in pursuit of the latest bling to flaunt on the next group ride are discarding perfectly good stuff at knock-down prices. That’s good — you get the older, smaller stuff for smaller money. You get flickability for peanuts and lightness for next to nowt.

It’s not state of the art, but if the art isn’t what you’re here for, does that matter? My legs and lungs can still reach a state of whimpering exhaustion using the old kit; my thinning hair still blows back when shooting downhill at exhilarating velocities. Call it the miser in me, but doing this on fewer dollars and a whole lot of getting your hands dirty brings a certain kind of satisfaction.

There’s a name for this tendency — I think it’s ‘recycling’.