Kids These Days...

As the week ploughs on into the cold I know I’ve been thinking of the summer, and getting away, and riding somewhere better than the roads between my home and my work. On that note there were some excellent points made on this Singletrack forum about how much we need trail centres to get people riding.

Trail centres are great fun to ride. In the same way that a BMX track is fun, and snaking through the woods and hills on purpose –built tracks is fast, exciting and easy in terms of navigation and effort. They pull together the best bits of your favourite trails and give them to you over and over again. But then you definitely don’t need them to get to love riding a bike. I, and thousands of other cyclists fell in love with the whole thing on the dotted lines of a map, or riding lanes and waste-ground between houses, with the occasional trip to some bigger country and some rocks and moorland with less change of a broken-glass puncture. Perhaps people have got it too easy these days where trail fun is served on a plate and there’s no map-reading, or remote mechanicals, and you don’t have to find your own fun in the local bridleways and forgotten paths that litter the edge of most cities, dodging the burnt out cars and worse and with no all-weather surface, but building a relationship with being on a bike that will never fade.

As the evenings get darker lights get more important, but you have to ask yourself if this is taking it too far?

A