Chipps encourages us to get to know our ride-group neighbours.
As a reasonably feeble and glasses-wearing schoolboy, I was never great at ball games and was usually among the last to be picked for school sports teams. Imagine my delight when I later discovered mountain biking; a sport where you didn’t have to catch or throw, that you could do at your own pace and where you didn’t need a dozen friends to all want to turn up at the same time at a specially dedicated pitch.
Our sport has always been about the rider and the landscape – sometimes riding in harmony with it, other times fighting against it and the elements, but the basic essentials are just you and a bike. If there are other riders along too, that rarely makes things significantly easier, although it does improve the range of snacks and bike spares on offer.
Mountain biking has a funny relationship with groups, clubs and teams. It’s a sport that doesn’t need any other organisation beyond working out what time to meet up to ride, but we so often fall foul of things like our local councils or the forestry service flattening or ‘improving’ trails because they can’t find anyone to talk to who represents the interests of local mountain bikers. Our nonchalance about being organised sometimes bites us back.
There are usually local walking groups, horse-riding groups, groups of bird-spotters and badger-lovers seemingly in weekly contact with their local Rights of Way Officer.
And then there are us mountain bikers, enjoying that our sport has no set times – the countryside is open to all, all the time. We love that there is no ‘right’ way of going round the bridleways – although we usually only ever go the same way – and we seek out the trails and times where we know that we’ll get the place to ourselves.
This all makes pinning us down to champion a common cause very hard (like land access, representation at Rights of Way forums or even just getting together to show that we’re major users of the countryside). There are loads of us, but we don’t know who anyone is…
You’d think that riding a mountain bike in a small town would automatically make you known to all other mountain bikers within ten miles. They know you; you know them. And, yet, this is never the case. After 20 years of living in Todmorden, I am still seeing new riders on the trails, or hearing about the rad Wednesday night ride that is an offshoot of the ‘too tame for some’ Tuesday night ride and which then inspires the ‘not rad at all’ Thursday night ride.
If we all actually lined up together in one place, we’d be quite a formidable-looking force, but we never do. Those Park Runners might not have thousands of pounds of gear to show their dedication to their sport, but they all turn up in their hundreds every Sunday morning, making it appear that jogging is the popular thing to do. Meanwhile, us riders have all nipped round the back of the park and headed up into the hills in our ones and twos.
You can’t even rely on a single campaigning medium to bring everyone together. The Monday mountain bike group might have its own Facebook group, while the Tuesday lot communicates via WhatsApp and the Wednesday riders just meet at the same time and place every week. Meanwhile, the Thursday club had their list of venues, ride leaders and distances sent out on a spreadsheet months ago. The thought of mobilising this lot of ragtag riders into a political force for good is enough to make the most organised, clipboard-toting campaigner give up.
We probably should at least try to make sure we know some of our riding neighbours, though, even if they ride in ‘the other Wednesday group’. You never know when the local council Vogons are going to turn up and want to plough a concrete dual carriageway through our favourite woods. After all, they’ll say they checked with ‘all of the outdoor users’, like the Ramblers, the Rotary Club and the pigeon-fanciers and no one seemed to mind.
At a time when ‘being political’ seems both pointless and yet never more important, a passing knowledge of who your potential campaigning pals are is probably worth knowing.