We’re standing naked on a beach with two of our readers, and Ben from Specialized. Fuck, it’s cold. Grinning like idiots, we hop across the sand as the first rays of morning light hit the coastline. A waterfall crashes straight into the Pacific. Kike throws his arms into the air. Nobody says much. They don’t have to. The look in everyone’s eyes says it all: We’re exactly where we’re supposed to be.
A Once-in-a-Lifetime Invitation
The idea started a year earlier. Specialized had invited me to California to experience a prototype of a new bike concept. Sleeping bags, campfires, Birkenstocks, the Sierra Nevada. Somewhere between dusty trails, wrong turns and stories about bears around the fire, a thought started taking shape. Back in Germany, I called Ben – Brand Voice Leader at Specialized:
“You don’t know it yet,” I told him, “but you’re going to launch this bike together with E-MOUNTAINBIKE. And we’re going to do it in a way that neither Specialized nor any other bike brand has ever done before.
Instead of a traditional press launch, we wanted to bring real people. Not journalists. Not influencers. Not pro athletes. Readers.So together, we created an invitation:
Specialized is at the beginning of a new chapter. One that expands our understanding of what’s possible on a performance eMTB, and challenges the way we think about innovation itself. And you can be part of it – long before the rest of the world even knows it exists.
What happened next surprised even us. Thousands of readers started the application process, and many never finished it. Of course, we could have made it easier, but that wasn’t the point. We weren’t looking for as many applications as possible. We were looking for the right people. In the end, more than 300 readers invested over an hour into their application. Two made it through: Jonathan from Idaho, USA, and Sasha from Ecuador.
Together, we’d explore San Francisco and California on two wheels, ride where mountain biking was born, camp in the wilderness, go behind the scenes at Specialized, spend a night at founder Mike Sinyard’s house, and keep returning to the same question: What does innovation really mean?
How Big Is Your World These Days?
The smell of freshly fried dumplings drifts through the air. Chopsticks circle around the last dumpling balanced on the rack. For hours we’ve been wandering through San Francisco. Chinatown. North Beach. One side street then another. No destination, no schedule – just following whatever catches our attention.
At some point, we realize how unusual that feels. And how good it feels. We live in a world with more options than ever before, yet somehow our worlds keep getting smaller. Komoot plans our routes. Social media tells us what adventures are worth having. Our dreams arrive neatly packaged and ready for checkout. We know which bike to buy, which trail to ride, and which photo we’re supposed to post afterwards.
But do we still know how to explore? Jonathan puts it perfectly a few days later:
“Mountain biking has shrunk from its roots.”
Mountain biking used to be about discovering something new. Today, many of us ride the same trails, visit the same trail centers, and return to the same bike parks over and over again. That’s not to say they’re bad. It’s because they’re familiar. Because they’re safe. Because we already know what’s waiting for us. Maybe that’s the real danger. Not that we’re running out of adventures, but that we’ve stopped looking for them.
A few days earlier, we’d all met for the first time at a beach house in San Francisco’s Sunset District. Sasha, a partner at an international law firm in Quito, Ecuador. Jonathan, an outdoor enthusiast from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Kike, our photographer and Charlie, our filmmaker, both from Barcelona. Ben from Marin County. Greg from Santa Cruz – the guy who somehow always makes everything work.
And me, trying to find a clear story inside seven days in California, two readers, a crew that had never worked together before, and a thousand moving pieces. People from completely different worlds, connected by a single question: What happens when we step beyond the boundaries we’ve built for ourselves?
A Laundromat, a Surfboard, and a First Date with the New Specialized Levo X
Before heading into the wilderness, we decided to put everyone to work, and send each other on small adventures. The kind of adventures most people would never associate with a performance eMTB. Jonathan ended up doing our dirty laundry at a laundromat. Sasha showed up to a business meeting in a suit. Kike headed to the beach with a surfboard. Ben rolled up on his BMW GS motorcycle to embody the original idea behind the Levo X – and challenge Sasha to an impromptu drag race between traffic lights. Charlie disappeared into the city with his camera and a homemade filming rig in search of B-roll. And I spent the afternoon riding through Golden Gate Park with my Californian girlfriend Katie sitting on the back of the bike for our first real date.
That’s the thing about adventure. It rarely begins at the end of the world. It begins where routine ends. We continue exploring farther and farther, yet often move within smaller and smaller circles.
Maybe that doesn’t just describe mountain biking. Maybe it describes modern life. Because it’s surprisingly easy to buy adventure, and never actually live it. The industry sells us possibilities. Social media sells us dreams. Algorithms tell us where to go, what to see and what we’re supposed to experience while we’re there. But who still explores? Who leaves without knowing exactly where they’re headed? Who follows curiosity instead of a plan?
A few days later, deep in the redwoods, Ben says something that sticks with me far longer than any marketing slogan ever could: “Keep looking at where the edge of your life is, and where your curiosity leads you next.” Look for the edge of your own reality, not the edge of the map. Maybe that’s where your next adventure begins.
Whatever You Do, Don’t Follow the Plan!
“Over there!” Ben points from the balcony of our beach house, across the rooftops of San Francisco toward a distant mountain. “That’s where we’re going.” Mount Tam. The mountain where mountain biking history was written. He doesn’t say much more than that, except that we’re going there to continue the story.
We don’t say much either. Instead, we start packing, stuffing our bags with sleeping bags, coffee, spare clothes and everything else we might need for a few days outside. We take our time. Another coffee. A quick stop at the grocery store. Then we finally roll out, heading across the Golden Gate Bridge and into Marin County.
Less than half an hour later, the world already feels different. With every pedal stroke, San Francisco fades a little further into the distance, taking the noise, the routines and the worries of everyday life with it. Ahead of us are rolling green hills, coastal fog and the Pacific Ocean. We stop constantly. To take photos. To look around. To soak it all in. At one point, a great blue heron glides alongside us as we descend toward Muir Beach. It’s one of those moments that you couldn’t plan if you tried.
Eventually, an English pub appears. The sun has long since disappeared below the horizon and it suddenly dawns on us: we really don’t have time to stop here. We need to keep moving, set up camp, and our production schedule has something entirely different in mind. So we order a pint. Then another.
What’s the rush? We already have enough things we “have to” do in everyday life. We’re here to have an adventure. To have fun. To feel alive.
Not to tick boxes on a schedule. The best moments usually happen when you abandon the plan, let go, and give yourself permission to simply be. So we play darts, chat with the locals, and swap stories about our lives.
By the time we leave the pub, it’s pitch black. It hardly matters. We’ve got lights. The final miles to our campsite seem to roll by almost effortlessly. Ahead of us, the bay shimmers in the faint moonlight. On the horizon, the lights of San Francisco twinkle in the distance.
We’re sitting around the campfire. Jonathan pulls out the steaks, and as we look around at one another, it hits us: nobody is talking about range. Nobody is talking about watts. Nobody is talking about newton metres. Instead, we’re talking about the day’s experiences, our dreams, and whatever happens to be on our minds.
The Forgotten Question
The next morning, we set off for Mount Tam. Fog hangs over the hills, hiding most of the legendary views the mountain is famous for.
The Repack Trail itself is almost underwhelming. Sometimes it’s wide, sometimes narrow. This is where mountain biking history was made? If it were anywhere else, we probably would have ridden straight past it without a second thought. In places it’s washed out, in others surprisingly well maintained. At the end of the day, it’s basically just a fire road.
And that’s exactly what makes it so fascinating. Fifty years ago, people came charging down this hill on heavy clunkers with barely functioning brakes, and no concept of what it would eventually become.
Today, we’re riding the exact same trail on some of the most advanced e-mountain bikes in the world. Of course, these bikes can do things nobody back then could have imagined. But after a while, you stop thinking about that.
We ride. Brake too late. Play with the terrain. Laugh. Like kids do. Later, covered in dust and grime, we meet Joe Breeze and Otis Guy in Fairfax. Two of the pioneers who were there from the beginning and who now run the Marin Museum of Bicycling and the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame.
These are the men who, during the off-season from road racing, simply asked themselves: what would happen if we rode our bikes up places they were never meant to go?
It was a simple question. But sometimes those are the questions that change everything. What happened back then wasn’t a product innovation. It was a shift in perspective. The idea came first, and the technology followed.
Today, we often jump straight into discussions about range, weight, watts or newton metres. The question back then was far simpler: what experiences could we have on our bikes that we’d never had before?
A few days later, sitting around Mike Sinyard’s kitchen table, the conversation finds its way back to exactly that point. The founder of Specialized remembers the launch of the first Stumpjumper:
It’s not a new bike. It’s an all-new sport.”
Of course, Mike cares deeply about better suspension, better motors and better bikes. But what for? “Performance for what?” The real question isn’t what a bike can do on paper. It’s what it enables people to do in the real world. To venture further into the woods. To feel more confident. To carry more of what matters. And ultimately, to experience things they otherwise never would.
Specialized Levo X – The Most Innovative Thing About This Bike Isn’t the Technology
This is where things get complicated. Technically, this is the point where we should start talking about the bike. The motor, the battery options, the unique rack system, the suspension, the range. All the things you’d normally expect to find in a bike review.
But that wouldn’t do the story justice. Electric Overlanding isn’t really a technical innovation, at least not in the traditional sense. The individual ingredients already existed: eMTBs. Racks. Fenders. Navigation. Adventure. What’s new isn’t any of those things on their own.What’s new is the perspective, and the way they’re combined.
Later that night, sitting around the campfire, Ben sums it up perfectly:
“A bike like this: If you have curiosity – what’s beyond that next ridge? What would it be like to ride with friends and sleep under the stars? – This bike lets you explore that curiosity.”
That’s what makes the Levo X so interesting. Not because it invents something entirely new, but because it opens doors that many of us have forgotten even exist. An after-work ride that doesn’t end at the parking lot. A night under the stars instead of another evening in front of a screen. Taking the long way home simply because you want to know what’s beyond the next hill. A bike that rolls through the city in the morning, devours trails in the afternoon, and ends up around a campfire with a sleeping bag, a stove and a few good friends at night.Bikepacking? Kind of. But not really. An eSUV? Maybe at first glance, but the focus is different.
While most SUVs eventually stop where the road ends, the Levo X is only getting started. Wide tires, full trail bike geometry, capable suspension and, most importantly, a rack system that’s part of the sprung mass, allowing it to work where most racks would be rattled into oblivion.
Maybe the best comparison comes from outside the bike world; from dual-sport motorcycles and true overlanding vehicles. The thing that makes them so appealing isn’t the machine itself. It’s the freedom to move between everyday life and adventure without having to change vehicles. That’s what makes the Levo X feel different. Not because it creates yet another isolated category, but because it suddenly makes existing categories feel surprisingly small.
For riders who already own a Levo 4 or Levo R, there’s good news: you don’t need a new bike – you can simply retrofit the rack system.
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And that’s exactly why Electric Overlanding reminds us so much of the early days of mountain biking. Not because the product itself is revolutionary. But because the question behind it is:
What can we experience with our bikes that we haven’t experienced before?
What Are We Actually Looking For Out There?
The Pacific is roaring in the background. Slowly, I open my eyes and see Ben walking across the beach carrying an armful of driftwood. The embers from last night’s fire are still glowing beneath the ashes. It’s cold.
Time to get the fire going again – something that turns out to be surprisingly easy, even with wet driftwood – and put on a pot of coffee. It’s day three, yet San Francisco feels like two weeks and a thousand miles away. In reality, it’s barely fifty miles down the coast. Maybe even less. The crazy thing is that many of the people living over there probably don’t even know places like this exist. Many never will.
The day before, we’d ridden from Fairfax through the redwoods all the way to Wildcat Beach. Once again, we left too late. Once again, we arrived after dark. Once again, it turned out to be exactly the right time.
This time it was the redwoods that slowed us down. We kept stopping, looking up, taking photos, talking, riding, stopping again. Eventually it got dark. Then really dark, and the fog started rolling in.
By the time we reached camp, a thick blanket of mist covered the coastline. Out of the darkness, pairs of glowing eyes appeared everywhere. Dozens of them. Maybe a hundred. Elk.
Nobody really knew where we were going. Except Ben. We could hear the ocean. That was enough.
Now we’re sitting on the beach with coffee in our hands, staring out at the Pacific. And somewhere between conversations, a question surfaces.
Why does this feel so different? Why can a place that’s only an hour away feel like a completely different world? How can strangers become friends in just a few days? What makes these moments so memorable years later? The fog, the campfires, the cold fingers. Sand in our shoes, sleepless nights. And yet we barely remember the perfect hotel rooms.
Maybe we’re not looking for a place at all. Maybe we’re looking for a feeling.
Later, Mike puts it into words. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since:
“Most of the time we’re not going anywhere except in a good place.”
Most of the time, we’re not really going anywhere. Except to a good place. And maybe, sometimes, that’s more than enough.
Two Lives. One Longing.
When we published the invitation, something happened that we hadn’t expected. Readers from 34 countries applied, most of whom invested more than an hour into their application. They told us about their everyday lives, their dreams, and why they wanted to be part of this adventure.
The more we read, the clearer it became: Most people weren’t applying because of a bike.
They were applying because of the opportunity to be part of something. Out of curiosity. To experience something new and unique. To meet people, exchange ideas, learn from each other and go exploring together.
In the end, it was Jonathan from Idaho and Sasha from Ecuador who joined us in California: two people who couldn’t have been more different.
Sasha is a partner at an international law firm. His calendar is more crowded than the trails on a sunny Sunday morning. He loves bikes, technology and adventure, but the question that drives him isn’t which bike is best. It’s how to fit adventure into a life that seemingly has no room for it. Over the years, he’s owned nearly every generation of Specialized Levo and Kenevo, and few people can speak from more firsthand experience. Yet even for him, the Levo X opened up an entirely new perspective.
Jonathan lives at almost the opposite end of the spectrum. Outdoor enthusiast. Camper. Nature lover. On his dual-sport motorcycle, he regularly disappears into the wilderness for multi-day trips, sleeping under the stars and waking up in places most people only ever see on vacation. Until this trip, he was a committed analog mountain biker, and never owned a single eMTB.
Different lives. Different routines. Different skill sets. And yet both arrived at the same conclusion. Maybe that’s because they came with the same questions. Not just which bike is best, but how to experience more of what truly matters, and where this whole journey is heading in the first place.
For Jonathan, that was one of the main reasons he applied. He wasn’t interested in a new bike. He was interested in the bigger question behind it: Where is mountain biking heading? What will innovation mean five or ten years from now? What role do we as riders play in shaping it?
The Real Opponent Isn’t the Trail. It’s Everyday Life.
More than two months after our trip, I’m back in California meeting up with Ben again. Naturally, we’re not in a conference room. Instead, we load up our Levos and head out from Specialized HQ in Morgan Hill on a Tuesday afternoon, riding into Henry W. Coe State Park.
“Hey Robin, good to hear from you. I am jealous! I am stuck at my desk at the law firm instead of riding. I see that Ben replaced the flute with a puppy… hahaha!”
Sasha isn’t feeling stuck because he’s unfit. Not because he doesn’t own a bike. Not because he’s run out of adventures. Life simply gets in the way. Meetings, obligations, calendar entries; all the things that often seem more important than they really are. Which is exactly why Sasha may have been the perfect person for this trip. His real question was never which bike is best – it was how to fit adventure into a life that appears to have no space for it.
Jonathan saw it in a similar way. E-bikes, he said, give people options. And more options create more opportunities for experiences. Not everyone has time for seven days in California. Not everyone wants to camp on the Pacific coast. But almost everyone has an evening. And that’s where things get interesting.
Ben summed it up perfectly. You don’t have to travel around the world. You don’t have to quit your job. You don’t have to reinvent your life. You can simply call a friend, throw a burrito and a beer into a bag, and head out on a Tuesday evening.
It sounds ridiculously simple, which is probably why so few people actually do it. Maybe most of us don’t have an adventure problem. Maybe we have a habit problem.
We spend so much of our lives searching for better bikes, better routines, better plans and better versions of ourselves, waiting for the big trip or the grand adventure to finally arrive, instead of making the most of what is already possible right now. Adventure doesn’t begin at the end of the world. It begins at the edge of our routine.
Are You Coming Next Tuesday?
The Levo X can’t give you these experiences. It can only enable them, in a way that, right now, no other performance eMTB really does. Which is why the real invitation is something entirely different.
On our last evening together, Ben put it better than any marketing slogan ever could:
The biggest mistake is that people never try. They talk themselves out of something before even trying.
Most people don’t fail because they lack time, or equipment, or opportunity. They fail because they’ve already convinced themselves it won’t work. And the next adventure doesn’t have to be big or spectacular. A burrito, a beer, a sleeping bag, a good friend. Often, that’s enough.
That’s why Electric Overlanding is more than a new bike category. It’s a reminder to stay curious. Just like those riders on Mount Tam all those years ago. The question isn’t whether you’ll come to California. The question is what’s waiting beyond your next hill, and whether you’re willing to find out.
We’re currently working with Specialized to make experiences like this accessible to more riders, through compact overnighters and two-day adventures, suitable for seasoned outdoor veterans and for people who have never spent a night outside before. Talking about products is one thing. Actually experiencing what they make possible is something else entirely.
Interested? Join the interest list and tell us what kind of experience would inspire you most. (Link)
Or better yet: Call a friend, pack a burrito and a beer, and ask: “Are you coming next Tuesday?”
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Words: Robin Schmitt Photos: Kike Kiks, Charlie Farrera