Very early in my mountain biking days, I did a solo round of the Mary Towneley Loop. It was the first day of a heatwave, and I ran out of water. There were no shops or pubs, and the farms I passed looked too scary and remote for me to feel like I wanted to be a lone female knocking on their door. Eventually, I decided I couldn’t go on without finding water, so as I passed a small terrace of houses in a valley I chose the one with the neatest floral display outside (serial killers don’t do gardening, do they?) and rang the bell.
What might have been the oldest man in the world shuffled slowly to the door, and then all the way to his kitchen sink to fill my water bottle, and all the way back again. He seemed cheerful enough about it, but I felt terrible to have disturbed him – it was clearly a huge physical effort walking back and forth. Thanks to his exertions, I did finish the Loop but have never felt the need to do it again.
-Hannah
I was on a multi-day tour of the Lake District back in the early noughties with CycleActive. On the furthest part of the loop, one of our group’s pedals shot off the axle leaving him pretty stuffed for the rest of the trip. The nearest bike shop was (we reckoned) around a 30mile drive and would be shut by the time we got back to the pub we were staying in. Luckily, early 2000s phone technology let me get a text off to Benji in the Singletrack office asking if he could post about our predicament on the forum. Within ten minutes, a forum user who lived ten minutes from the pub posted to say that he’d be down that evening with a pair of barely used SPDs he’d be happy to lend us. He didn’t even drink, so accepted a lime and soda before disappearing again.
-Chipps