Chipps takes a ride with the Minehead mountain bike club that’s just for youngsters.
Words & Photography Chipps
Saturday mornings are busy for parents, with many different demands on both their time and their mum/dad taxis with myriad choices for youngsters to spend the hours between breakfast and mid-afternoon snacking and socialising. There’s football, netball, ice hockey, drama, ballet and more. Assuming, of course, that their offspring want to do anything that involves leaving the house, when they have the whole of the gaming, chatting and Netflix world at their thumbtips.
And yet, here we are, just shy of 10am on a Saturday morning, in a frigid, wintry car park, not far from Exmoor’s Dunkery Beacon, with a gale force north wind whipping in off the Bristol Channel… and there are dozens and dozens of kids on mountain bikes, lining up for two hours of mountain biking around the woods under the watchful eye of numerous mentors.
Welcome to the Minehead Merlins.
I’ve got the blues. And the greens.
Anyone who’s despaired at the thought of trying to get a teenager to find and lace up some shoes and leave the house within the next hour, would be impressed at the enthusiasm and discipline on show today. The children are all raring to go, with little of the faff that accompanies most of the grown-up rides that I go on. Saying that, though, even the competent-looking adults ride leaders have their own military precision going on.
The young riders are divided into four groups: Green, Blue, Red and Black, based on riding ability, rather than age. Numbers are capped to ensure that groups don’t get unwieldy, and to keep within the club’s own safety and safeguarding ratios of leaders to children.
The kids all group around their coloured flags and their ride leaders. Despite the near-freezing temperatures, everyone’s in good spirits; the younger riders look to their leaders for news of the day’s ride while the older ones chat, fiddle with bikes or swap ‘Did you see?’ YouTube riding stories.
Soon enough, registers are ticked and bikes are ‘M-checked’ ready for a couple of hours on the trails. Riders fall in behind ride leaders and organised strings of colourful bikes and riders take to the singletrack leading away from the car park. Organised, that is, apart from the journalist who obviously wasn’t paying attention at the briefing and who followed the wrong group – but a quick chat between leaders on the radios and I find the group I’m meant to be with.
Doing it for the kids
This kind of massive and successful undertaking doesn’t happen overnight and the Minehead Merlin’s Chairman Wayne explained the origins of the club over pizza, a few beers and a game of pool the night before the ride at ‘Clive’s Man Shed’ – the club’s unofficial staff canteen.
The club started back in 2013 when it became obvious that the local cycling club wasn’t that interested in having the youth-focused section that Wayne had suggested, so Wayne and his friend Clive decided to set up a youth-only, mostly mountain bike club for Minehead. The age range was, as it is still, based around 6 to 16-year-olds, but early rides were kept to fairly conservative skills drills around the local tennis courts. That was until local rider and British Cycling leader Alicia, who’s also an outdoor instructor, suggested more adventurous forays into the local woods and bridleways.
This immediately propelled club meetings from dull-sounding skills practice into exciting adventures into the (relative) wilderness of the numerous wooded trails that sit on the southern edge of the town. Initial outreach into local schools soon became unnecessary as word of mouth quickly swelled the club’s numbers.
From the start, the idea wasn’t to teach kids how to ride, but to show what they could do with the skills they’d learned – where (and how) to ride in the woods and to show them a glimpse of the great wide world of mountain biking. Along the way they learn about bike maintenance, riding skills and fitness, but the big focus has been on the experience of being out on the trails.
The club is open to all children from 6 to 16 and currently has around 80 members, eight British Cycling Level 2 qualified ride leaders and another half dozen coaches or leaders-in-training. While this sounds an ideal mix of adults and young charges, the club makes sure that every ride is overstocked with qualified leaders for safeguarding purposes – and, of course, not every adult can make every session (hey, grown-ups have lives too!), which can limit the number of kids who can ride out. The club is still actively seeking more leaders to let them take on more youngsters.
Oh, and there’s a waiting list, some 35 kids strong. Applicants for the Green-rated group need to show that they’re “able to pay attention and listen to instruction, able to ride for 15 minutes without stopping and able to use brakes to stop safely”. I’m not sure that all of my riding friends would actually qualify. The criteria for the Black group involves front wheel lifts and non-rollable drops, good climbing ability and fitness for rides of up to ten miles.
Let’s not lose anyone
Back in the woods, I find my group of amalgamated Green and Blue riders and follow them down a beautifully twisty bit of singletrack, with the looming Exmoor hills very visible in the grey winter light. Some of the smaller riders look impossibly tiny and precarious on their five-speed hardtails, though everyone gets round the rocky corners and down the rooty steps just fine. Most of the bikes I see are in great shape and there seems to be an active stream of hand-me-downing going on through the strata of the age groups.
While the club specifically states that they won’t teach children how to ride, there’s a lot of encouragement and tips given to them to help improve, especially for the Greens and Blues. Being out here on a winter’s day in some vicious wind, they also can’t help but learn about keeping warm, and wind and shelter, or about layers and synthetics vs cotton T-shirts. Every time we stop, there are some jumps and windmills to keep small riders warm while they wait for the slower ones. The Green and Blue riders seem to have no pecking order. There’s no ribbing of slower riders and no particular praise heaped on the quicker ones, though the leaders keep a hawk eye out for stars in the making who might benefit from going up a group, as well as for riders who start to flag.
After a while, and not surprisingly, there’s a rider or two who can’t get warm enough to continue enjoying themselves (though they’re still trying.) A radio call is made, a parent is contacted and a smoothly executed Plan B is enacted to get those riders back to the warmth of a waiting car.
As we regroup back in the car park, Alicia’s group is being kept busy with a number of well-practised drills as the riders circle the gravel lot. She calls out random commands and the children instantly obey: “Low Bridge!” has them hanging off the backs of their saddles, avoiding an unseen obstacle, but also learning how much you can move around on a bike. “Wave!” and the riders are unconsciously practising circling while controlling the bike with one hand. As well as keeping them warm, they’re soaking up trailcraft and bike skills without even knowing it.
It’s time to swap groups and I take off with the Red and the Black group, also merged today due to the weather and an understandably smaller than usual turnout. If this was a quiet Saturday, I’d love to see a full complement of 64 riders. It really is an impressive sight.
I’d like to comment on how well the riders rode, but most of the time they were tearing down the trails ahead of me. Many of the older riders, though barely 16, had the ease of movement that regular riding and skill progression brings. Given that many parents are keen riders too, there are inevitable weekends and holidays away to the bike parks of the UK and holidays further afield to take on the skills and fitness that big mountains can teach.
Mixing it up
I think it’s a genius bit of work to have the riders based on ability rather than age. It was quite normal to see a dramatically smaller rider in with the bigger Merlins. If you show the leaders that you can handle a bike, or that you’ve improved over the year, then you go up a group (and no one, yet, has ever gone down…) Then the cycle starts again, as the new riders get to ride with and learn from the (usually) older, better riders on more technical trails and they improve again.
Compare that with the world of school, or Saturday morning junior football: you’re forever in with your own age group, playing with (and against) the same players, all moving up a group together every year or two. With the Merlins, good riders get constant chances to improve and progress – and the ones who are happy where they are, are happy too.
This has greater impact than just on the world of cycling. Wayne tells me that when kids move up to senior school, they often start their first day already knowing students a year or two, or even three or four, their senior. In my school days that would have been a mind-blowing achievement as few students mixed out of their years, and knowing older students would have instantly marked you out as being super cool to your peers.
On my day with the Merlins, one thing that I really noticed was the level of social confidence of many of the young riders. They mixed easily with the older riders, swapping stories, Danny MacAskill videos, or trail tips and learning just how sociable and non-hierarchical the world of amateur cycling is. They didn’t seem intimidated by riding with the adult leaders either – and several of the older riders could mix it with the best of the grown-ups. I got the sense that self-confidence on the bikes and trails could only transfer over to weekday life, whatever they were doing. The ride leaders were seen as riding peers, rather than teachers or coaches who gave instruction and then stepped back. Here the riders were learning and then riding with their teachers, confident that everyone is equal on the trails.
It was all very heartening and not something I would expect to see in the world of competitive team sports. As someone who was last to be picked during school football matches (an experience I seem to share with many bike journalists, it seems) I wish I’d had this world of instant community and camaraderie to discover, back when I was a skinny, uncoordinated youth.
Although riders eventually top out in their 16th year, they’re still welcomed on rides until they are 18 (by which time, they all have better things to do, I’m sure). Something the club has started doing with its most promising youth riders is getting them to qualify as British Cycling Level 1 coaches. This helps keep the riders learning and engaged with the club, and three of the riders today – Joe, Lucy and Harry – had all passed their coaching qualifications and were there to help and advise the younger riders with their experience. And, judging by their enthusiasm, I can’t imagine they’ll be losing interest in bikes, well, ever.
Sounds idyllic, eh? But what’s that?
The club is going great guns, the riders are all turning into pillars of the community, so everything should be great, right? Nearly. The club’s biggest problem at the moment is in attracting new ride leaders. Although a British Cycling Level 2 qualification is a reasonably big commitment (it’s a two-day course, some avid logbook keeping, an outdoor first aid certificate and a one-day exam) the club actually covers the majority of the costs for adults looking to qualify. With two to three leaders per colour group, cover soon wears thin and prevents the club taking on more young riders.
No, the issue appears to be one of self-confidence in adults. In contrast to the log-dropping, slope-smashing youngsters we’ve been riding with, it seems that many of the assorted parents and friends of the club who could make ideal ride leaders either don’t see the point of getting a qualification for something their children will grow out of soon, or they’re worried about their level of fitness, or competence to make the grade.
As a BC leader myself, I’ve seen this reluctance and these excuses in my own riding friends. ‘Surely you have to be a dedicated outdoor lifer to want or need such a ticket?’ Or ‘I only ride locally, so I have no interest in guiding others over the hills and far away’ – or just the ‘I don’t think I’m good/fit/confident enough a rider to lead others’. All of which are valid concerns, but I’m with Wayne and the other leaders in the club who are confident that a mountain bike qualification is achievable by most riders and it’ll come in far more useful than you’d imagine. Just having the confidence to know what to do in a situation helps with your own self-belief; the subtle shift in perception to where you realise you’ve subconsciously been paying attention to the weather on the ride, to the trail conditions, and to the physical and mental state of your riding companions – your friends – is a very self-affirming thing to acknowledge.
This was brought home on a social club ride recently where one of the adult riders crashed hard, breaking his neck and going into cardiac arrest. The trainee leaders on the ride were able to coordinate a rescue while keeping the rider alive, and while he has a long road to recovery, there’s no doubt the training they took to ride with youngsters, helped their friend.
As an aside, I spoke to Dan Cook, British Cycling’s Leadership, er leader, about why regular riders should consider taking a course or qualification.
“The rewards of leading groups of mountain bikers is unparalleled; seeing mud-splattered smiling faces at the end of a ride asking when the next one will be is overwhelming. Yet you don’t need to be the best rider there to lead that group. Leadership in fact is about identifying the aspirations of the riders and creating a ride to fit these; that ride is about engagement, environment, enthusiasm, atmosphere and social elements, not just a route.
“At Level 2, of course you will also have some knowledge about mountain bike navigation, trailside fixes, etc., as well as some riding skills, but you don’t need to be an expert in these. They are all covered within the training course where your tutor is skilled in helping you develop as a leader. Often riders uncertain about their capacity in these areas are influenced through being surrounded by very experienced leaders, and are expecting to have to emulate them. Remember that even experienced leaders started out on their leader journey as riders like you.
“Where you want to take a smaller step into the world of MTB Leadership you might find the [brand new Fundamentals of Mountain Bike Leadership] FunMBL qualification suits, but you can also start directly at Level 2 to lead groups across a wider range of trails.”
Lunch!
One important lesson every mountain biker learns (usually the hard way) is that you need to keep fuelling the fire to keep the legs turning, but fortunately a lunch stop was built in to the day’s ride. As we sheltered in a small combe, riders unpacked packages of lunch and the chat resumed again. It seems the Merlins are being well brought up in the ways of the mountain bike snack stop and chat. You’d think that I’d know better, but I only had sports chews to keep me going.
While I was still being sad about my underwhelming choice of trail snack, it was time to ride again and this time the trails took on a steeper, slipperier turn for the Reds and Blacks. A long blast from hill top to valley bottom followed, with riders (and even some of the leaders) whooping with happiness, excitement and the odd dab of fear. I saw one youngster follow her peers down a slope and then, as they flailed down the bank at the end, she simply declared ‘Nope’ and calmly turned round and went the less sketchy way instead. Lessons are obviously being learned.
Unfortunately, the final lesson was that one about ‘What goes down the fun singletrack, must get back up somehow, and we all turned round and started the slow (but hugely educational, I’m sure) plod back to the top.
Dunkery Bacon
At noon, we made the ridgeline and spun back into the car park to deliver charges to waiting parents. While some parents ride with their offspring on Saturday mornings, others drop them off and pick them up, like any other Saturday club activity. There were flasks of hot chocolate and warm layers being bandied around and, as soon as I’d forced everyone to shiver in their Minehead Merlins tops, (extensively subsidised, incidentally, by the club’s many trade sponsors, like the local Jewson branch) they were off to whatever it is that kids get up to on a Saturday afternoon.
With the air quieter, but no warmer, Wayne suggested that we ride with Sam and Darren, who were supposed to have been taking their Level 2 exams that afternoon, but the assessor had called off, due to the extreme weather (not that it seemed to have bothered the kids). Lucy, Sam’s daughter, and one of the junior coaches, came along too.
With the iconic mass of Dunkery Beacon looming over us, Wayne thought we might like to take in some views, now that the weather was clearing a little. I won’t pretend that we slogged up the road to get nearer the top as there just happened to be a couple of club members driving vans that way, so we hopped a lift.
However, no amount of fudging could prevent us from being well and truly laundered by the wind as we rode the firm, stony track up to the beacon itself. At over 500m, we had no protection at all from the chill of Storm Arwen blowing in from the Arctic. Without as much as a summit selfie, we were soon on to the fun trails of the descent. There are many long and challenging bridleways in this area, often overlooked by the better Hilltop PR of the Quantocks, or of Exmoor itself. With fast-draining, sandstone soil, traction was great, despite the wintry weather and eyes-streaming, we made good time to one of the more sheltered combes that are typical of the north Somerset hills.
Once into the trees, Wayne set his bike onto an overhanging branch and performed an impromptu technical training session for the would-be leaders, doing a great job of double-checking the bike repair knowledge of the pair in lieu of the practical test they should have been taking.
With school over for everyone for the day, we could get on with enjoying the rest of the descent (and Sam’s husband Matt’s bacon sandwiches waiting for us in the car park) and concentrate on just being mountain bikers again.
After all, this is why we all do it and why the Minehead Merlins work so hard to show the next generation just how fun our sport can be.