Could there be a way to extend the benefits of a ride?
Words Hannah PHOTOGRAPHY Amanda
The curse of ‘one last run’ or the last lap is well known. You should never say you’re going for one last run: that way lies disaster, A&E, and broken components. However, I think I may have found the solution…
At the recent Trash Free Trails Summit I heard a lecture by Dr Emma Pope who studies nature as a transformative setting that can help bring purpose and benefit to our lives. She identifies that there are hedonic and eudaimonic forms of activity. Hedonic experiences are short-lived and generate pleasure, but eudaimonic experiences are associated with purpose and generate pleasure that is long-lasting. She posits that both hedonic and eudaimonic forms of activity contribute to well-being, but it is eudaimonic experiences that create a better connection with nature. These, she thinks, are the most impactful if we are to take back to our daily lives the benefits of the experience of being in nature.
As a result, she suggests it is important to create space for meaning when out in nature and, therefore, create a eudaimonic experience. These might be characterised as slow adventures. In mountain biking there are certainly groups of people who undertake these sorts of slow adventures. Bikepackers immerse themselves in landscapes, not travelling through them at pace of a stopwatch, but instead to the rhythm of the days, the daylight and the landscape.
However, perhaps there is room for the hedonic riders of bike parks and fast riding to benefit from meaning making, or slow adventures, while still getting their speed and adrenaline kicks. How would it be if that one last run was a deliberate slow adventure? You go at a pace that allows you to observe the trail around you, and the ground beyond the trail. You go slowly enough to pick up any litter you spot, and to notice the autumn fungi, summer flowers or broken eggshells from springtime nesting birds. You don’t just meander by them, but you stop (leaving the trail clear for those on a hedonic journey to pass, of course), pause, take a closer look. You look up to see the nest that the eggs came from, you kneel down and peer at the underside of the fungi, examining the gills and the frill around the stalk. Do you feel the moss under your feet? Perhaps you sit for a moment, let the dampness soak through your chamois as you listen to the woods around you. Maybe you pause at a puddle to clear a drainage channel, or bend a wayward bramble away from the trail. The ‘one last lap’ becomes a reverential ritual, a moment of acknowledging the surroundings and appreciating the landscape you’ve been riding through.
Even in our sterile commercial forests there are wild things to be found and living things to be observed. Taking the deliberate step of riding one last lap could present an opportunity for you to give back to the trails, and for you to take home the benefits of the trail in a way that lasts beyond the washing off the pine needles from your tyres or the drying out of your knee pads.
Break the curse of the last lap, make it a deliberate, purposeful adventure, and see whether the afterglow of that ride lasts just a little bit longer. If nothing else, by staying out of A&E you should be able to return that little bit sooner.
