Viper Rural

The view of Active Mendip from my Bike

Author: Jim Hardcastle

Jim helps people plan and deliver effective communications. His background in the countryside sector provide him with a wealth of experience in rural marketing. Facilitation, fueled by coffee, with Post-Its at the ready, he’s here to help .

I swear you can feel where the muscles and tendons are attached to your bones on the tenth lap of the CLIC24 route. When you’re climbing up through Rowberrow Forest knowing that you’ve only completed half of the 10 mile course and the second half is all up hill back to Charterhouse your legs have a way of complaining like never before.

This year I was quite proud of my 10 laps in 24 hours given the horribly cold weather and my lack of preparation. In previous years I would have started training seriously in January doing at least three mountain bike rides a week, come April I would’ve thrown in some hill climbs on my converted road bike. In the last few weeks I would be watching my diet trying to minimise fat, then carb loading in the preceding week. I would fret over what kit I needed, packing and repacking, weighing up all the different tyre options I had for different trail conditions and checking every bit of the bike. I would plan my calorie intake based on consuming approximately 1000 calories after every lap. This year was different.

Preparations started in earnest on the Thursday night before the event. All my mountain bike clothes were thrown into one box, I raided the kitchen and shoveled what I could find into another box, leaving the family with empty cupboards for the weekend. I put my bike box into the back of the car figuring if it wasn’t in the box then I didn’t need it. As for training I was averaging one ride a week. I even nearly drove to the event without my bike. Pre-ride preparations reached an all-time low on the Friday night after several pints and a night in a tent.

And I still did 10 laps, more than most years. The lesson here is just to give it a go. Over the last five years, this is an anniversary issue after all, my attitude has changed a lot. I did my first mountain marathon with three weeks notice. Ok, I was trail running regularly anyway but there’s a huge step between going out a few times a week with the dog to legging it across mountainous terrain for 36 hours. I put it down to naive optimism: a little bit of preparation, a bit of confidence and ‘give-it-a-go’ attitude. Mark and Steve from the Mendip Times must have had this attitude when they started. Print sales are generally down across newspapers and magazines. Would anyone seriously want to start a free magazine for a rural area with the digital wave sweeping the nation?

Active Mendip’s birth shared the naive optimism. I'm one of the founders and a current Director, we sort of knew what we wanted it to do for us, the community and the Mendip Hills so we cracked on. A little bit of preparation, a dollop of confidence and the right attitude saw Active Mendip take some huge strides in the early days. It’s ticking along now given that we’re all volunteers trying to run businesses first and foremost in these difficult times. The website is a pick-n-mix sweet shop of ideas about how to fill your life with adventure. The networking get-togethers (I would never give them the earnest title of meetings) are enlightening. En masse we can react to opportunities that individually we wouldn’t be able to do like stands at the Bath & West Show, the inside cover of the latest Visit Somerset.

Has Active Mendip benefited the community of Mendip? We did a ‘volume and value’ survey a few years ago, this showed that Active Mendip organisations generated £5million for the rural economy, employed 175 full-time equivalent people and helped over 400,000 people enjoy the area every year. Even if you can’t see a direct benefit you live in a more prosperous area because of Active Mendip members. Yes, we do encourage people in to the area and yes, this can lead to problems. I thought about this a lot as I rode around the CLIC24 course. I knew my action was causing erosion, I could see the line we were creating. I’m no mathematician but there’s a formula that needs working out that looks at the impact of the event compared to the good it does. We raised £30,000 for the CLIC Sargent charity, that’s nearly enough to pay a CLIC Sargent nurse for a year and Blagdon PTA, who do all the catering and stewarding, raise thousands for the school. Is there a net loss or benefit for the wider community? Is the temporary visual scar on the landscape that runs along the Limestone Link offset by the wider community good of the event? I’m not qualified to answer that.

Active Mendip is as much about the people as it is the landscape. It’s about being active in a community not just active enough to shed a few pounds and break a sweat. Those community activities and connections are hard to pin down and prove to people because they aren’t physical. But, like the Mendip Times, we think we’ve made Mendip a richer place to be. So, give it a go, get active on Mendip in whatever sense you can. Happy Birthday Mendip Times.

Follow us on Twitter at activemendip and join the Facebook group Active Mendip, or just go to the website activemendip.co.uk


 

- Posted on Wednesday 12 May 2010 at 15:50 by Jim Hardcastle

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