The Great British push up
Be runnin' up that road, Be runnin' up that hill - pushing back up is good for the soul.
Over the course of this winter I dug my first proper trail. I don’t know why but ‘trail’ feels weirdly too grandiose and ‘track’ seems to fit better. It’s a track, at heart. I didn’t want to write the column I feel like I’ve read a million times over about how good it is to build a trail - ‘NO DIG, NO RIDE!!!’ etc. The truth is I’m three decades into riding a lot and have never really dug or been asked to dig before. So I guess that that doesn’t apply here.
I’ve discovered two main things. The first is that when you build a track yourself it kind of feels like that bit at the end of a Spotify playlist when the shuffle starts riffing on what was on the playlist. You walk about telling yourself that yeah, this is great music when in fact, this is exactly the sort of stuff that you like. There’s a moment when you are confronted by the fact that this is an algorithm and you are in fact an idiot - of course you like it; it’s your music.
It’s just serving you back the stuff that it’s worked out (fairly easily) that you like. Off camber corners? There are about six dozen of them. Needlessly technical roll-ins? Yep, almost too many to count. Ruts? Axle scrapers, mate - all 16 of them.
Just like Spotify’s not-so-magical musical prescience, this can result for an embellished sense of enjoyment. “Wow! This is a GREAT track!”.
Secondly, the top third of it is accessed only by push up. And I weirdly really like that about it.
If you’re new to mountain biking or arrived via a chairlift, e-bike or trail centre you will have missed the dark art of the push up. Slowly manhandling a bike up what feels like a 45 degree incline that you’re about to skid back down.
When I first started riding proper downhill tracks in Rostrevor in my early teens there was lots and lots of this. The bikes weighed much closer to 25kg and so the bit that you actually rode got progressively shorter as the day and pushing wore on. Helmet clattering, hung off of the bars and goggles around your neck. Get to a tree, lean against it, feet on, drop in, mess up a corner, repeat. At the end of the day you went home happy, massive leg armer stinking in the back, shoulders aching.
Pushing up the final stretch of trail/track (‘traick’?) each time over the last few months weirdly accessed that part of mountain biking I’d largely forgotten. In truth, I probably never actually considered it to be part of riding my bike but it sort of felt like it always must have been. You take time, see more of what you’re about to ride, kick rocks out of ruts, move branches and generally think much more. It’s crap but in a strange way good as well.
Maybe it’s not even ‘good’ as such - just familiar. It does feel like I spent more time shovelling, whacking and sawing than I would have done given a direct pedal to the top. You see more, think a bit more and ultimately shovel/whack/saw… betterer.
Your brain gets what feels like an hour off screen time and instead gets to look, evaluate and push for a bit.
What it has really underlined to me though is that there’s much more to this sport of ours which is great other than the instant gratification part. The negative spiral of algorithmic fuckery which seems to be gathering pace and is forcing many once trusted news resources and newer mediums such as podcasts further down the U-bend of doom mongering doesn’t/can’t affect you when you’re pushing a bicycle up a hill. In fact, nothing much can. All that you can think about is getting to the top, how you want to not mess up that turn and if the inside that follows it would be any quicker.