Photos and video: Noah Engler
Marvin is one rad German dude from Heidelberg.
He’s a Starling ambassador and just an all-around good guy. He loves riding, meeting new people, going fast and being part of the mountain bike community.
Marvin currently rides a Starling Twist, built up with his own lineup of custom components.
To celebrate building the bike up, he made this dream build-style vid showing how he put it together.
//Starling Cycles Twist: The Twist is our steel-framed, mixed wheel bike with a 29″ front wheel and 27.5″ back wheel. It’s available as the ‘Twist’ with 135mm rear travel or ‘Mega Twist’ with 165mm rear travel.
I’m Marvin from Germany, 34 years old but feeling more like a teenager, especially on the bike!
I love the diversity of mankind and how you can express your personality through the bike you ride.
There’s no other sport where you can meet such a big amount of nice people and enjoy the simpleness of life: enjoy your given time and share it with beautiful people while being in the nature! Awesome!
The last two-three years I struggled a little bit to find my identity.
I was a personal trainer for 13 years and loved every aspect about it. With the perfect product in my hand and with my professional skills I helped countless people to improve there health and quality of life. The most outstanding moment for me was to help a client on her way through eating disorder and sports addiction to give birth.
Why am I telling you this? Because after 13 years I had to quit this journey and that was a big task for my head to deal with because I didn’t know anymore who I was and what I wanted to do.
The special thing about biking for me is, that it is the best medication in the world. Just go out for a ride, enjoy the sound of the tyres on the ground, hear the suspension working, feel the air and sun in your face, feel the speed and get the adrenalin flowing, and enjoy the nature around.
That’s a special thing which brings energy back and was always my way to free the mind and regroup.
That helped me to overcome this big change in my life and now I am happy to say, that I am the managing director of a small but really nice bike shop in the beautiful city of Heppenheim.
Heidelberg is not just famous for the old town and castle- it offers some of the absolute best and hardest trails in Germany and the bike community there is a nice one! Especially because our local Mountainbike Club Heidelberg Freeride e.V. is making a great job!
Mountain biking for me is to ride all the different niches within this sport, from dirt and slopestyle to enduro and even big mellow rides.
The most important part is to have good people around and have fun on the bike. I like especially the harder and technically more demanding trails because for me it’s easier to find the flow.
Last year I raced my first national Enduro Series and got a Podium (5th) and at the end of the season 7th overall in my class.
My mother always said: “Everything is good for something” and she is right. Everything has turned out well for me, and an essential part of it was and will always be biking.
It’s the Starling Cycles Twist V3 in size Large.
I’m 181cm and 95kg race ready.
The specs are:
Since the build I have been riding bike parks, home trails and one enduro race and because it’s my only bike, I did my MTB courses on it of course.
The most shocking moment was the first ride, which was in the Lac Blanc Bikepark in France. I didn’t know what to expect because till this moment because there was no opportunity to have a test ride.
Turns out that Joe must have a little bit of knowledge to him because on the first ride without any suspension tuning I was going so stupid fast on the bike and felt right on the bike, it was crazy. The bike has so much pop that I overshot every single jump on the way down- especially because it was just such a blast to ride it!
There is a special ride feeling to the steel frame which is hard to understand when you have never ridden a steel bike. So try it!
For comparison: My last bikes were the Raaw Madonna V2 and the Crossworx Cycles Dash29. Both are unbelievably good bikes (like the people behind!), totally different from one another but the Starling Cycles Twist is outstanding.
The most exciting thing on the bike was the Starling Cycles Barbecue Event hosted by Fabian and his beautiful wife from Ironworx. It was a weekend of tech talk, riding bikes with nice people and having great food, camping and getting to know other Starling riders.
We changed bikes and that was for me the opportunity to ride the different models ie. the Murmur, Swoop and even a gearbox-driven Spur.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t test the Mega Murmur because Joe runs his brakes moto style and my brain couldn’t make it work!
The best thing about the Starling Cycles in general is the simplicity of the whole concept.
No crazy machining, no complicated carbon layup, no overcomplicated suspension kinematics with thousands of levers and bearings. Just plain simple.
For me life is about the simple things, because its sometimes complicated enough.
So in a complicated world with a lot of things no one needs, the Starling Cycles approach is a refreshing one. And the most crazy thing about it all: it works so damn good on the trail.
The suspension has so much support in the mid stroke and its not constantly bottoming out- honestly its really rare to get the bike to bottom out. In the 99% of use case it just works brilliantly, tracks the ground unbelievably well and the pop of the bike makes it a really good allrounder.
It can be both a downhill ripping beast and at the same time a fun-to-ride poppy singletrail slayer.
To have the opportunity to make the best sport in the world with a (how I think) significant sustainable approach is something special. Steel has a much lower environmental impact than aluminium or carbon frames.
The Starling frames need a lot less energy to get built like carbon counterparts or complicated suspension layouts because to put it simple: you need less machining, less material. ie. two bearings instead of 8 is a significant amount less. Steel is repairable AND has better material characteristics than aluminum or carbon frames.
I met Joe in Morzine and we had the chance to ride together and chat a little bit in the gondola. For the people who didn’t have the chance to met him in person: He is easily one of the nicest people you will ever meet and you can talk with him openly about everything and he is really interested in getting real world feedback.
