Happy 10th Birthday Mountain Biking Club!

Date: Wednesday 10 June 2009

The Junior School Mountain Biking Club celebrated its tenth birthday just before half term with an expedition to Bedgebury Forest, where the 10.5 mile purpose-built single-track mountain biking route must offer some of the best riding of its type in the southeast of England.

The club started as the Junior School Cycle Expedition Club back in 1999. We trained on Sunday mornings and twice each year we mounted significant expeditions along well-known long-distance off-road mountain biking routes. At first, the concept was to ride in relays of cyclists, perhaps three or four riders in a group, riding stretches of approximately ten miles before handing over to the next group. In this way each rider might cover 20-25 miles in a day and this enabled us to put in some long routes along the South Downs Way in Hampshire and Sussex (two expeditions) and the Peddars Way in Norfolk. There were always options for fitter riders to cover the entire route, as Matthew Penn and Oliver Chalk did on the 45-mile Peddars Way: a considerable achievement in off-road riding for 12 year-olds.

Subsequently, training moved to Friday evenings after school and the expeditions became more ambitious. The relay concept was dropped in favour of all riders covering the entire route. Twice we cycled 27 miles of the most spectacular sections of the Ridgeway in Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Wiltshire; twice we cycled the North Downs Way from the Medway Bridge back to School; we had a number of expeditions to the Surrey Hills, taking in Leith Hill, the highest point in the southeast of England; and we had a number of expeditions on the downs to the west of Canterbury, a route we christened the Stour Valley Circuit.

More recently we have focused less on distance trails and more on technical riding, and Bedgebury Forest has drawn us back time and again with this in mind. Much has happened in mountain biking in the last decade. Then, it was a fledgling sport with relatively few involved: now it is very popular and the range of bikes and varieties of equipment available are mind-boggling! It’s not just the Junior School club that has come of age, but the sport itself.