WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY TOM HUTTON
Mountain bikers are creatures of habit. Even the more pioneering among us, those of us who are still happy to grab a map and a compass (Google it if you’re not sure) and head out into the mountains and moors, still return again and again to the same trails.
Why? Because we know they work. They’re fun; they’re the right level of challenge for our limited ability. And most of all, they pay back. Those of us with limited spare time (probably all of us) want to ride, not push. We want flow, not gates. We want smiles, not grimaces. In short, we’re looking for maximum downhill bang for our hard-earned uphill buck. Some dashes on a map or a second-hand GPX we haven’t tried before could lead to our one chance to get out being wasted. So when someone suggests we spend Sunday on the Long Mynd, my first reaction is to smile – this is a great area with some awesome riding and it’s definitely somewhere we don’t get to often enough. Next up though, my mind migrates to those same old trails. Yup, the ones everyone rides and the ones we’ve ridden so many times before. After all, they really are fun. And we don’t come here often enough to gamble on something that just won’t ‘go’.