Cycling, Glentress, Young People, Mountain Biking and East Lothian Bike to Work?

One of my favourite places to drink coffee at the moment is the Hub Cafe at Glentress – it’s a lively family orientated mountain biking café near Peebles. Where nobody cares what they look like, in fact, most people are covered in mud! It sells great (simple food), amazing filter coffee and award winning Banoffee pie.

I was down at Glentress at the weekend – trying my best to get fit for my summer expedition to the Cascade Mountains. If you have not been to Glentress before I would definitely recommend it, they have routes for all ages and abilities and you can hire a bike if you don’t have one of your own. One new feature since the last time I want down is the establishment of a new Blue decent route – it’s fantastic and would be great for beginners to develop their confidence.

The other great thing about my trip down at the weekend was the amount of young people out cycling. Notably several pupils from Peebles High School – wearing their school Mountain Bike Shirts. It’s not often that you get pupils out of school time to wear, in essence, school uniform. These young people were obviously proud to be part of the team and had fostered a real sense of community.

North Berwick High School have recently started a Mountain Bike Club and also bought some Mountain Bikes for the pupils that don’t have them. I have been thinking about trying to do a similar thing at Musselburgh for a few months now – the problem is we don’t have the storage space to keep the bikes? And I’m not sure how we will ever get around this problem in a PPP school?

The other thing I was thinking about is wouldn’t it be great to develop somewhere for Mountain Biking for young people in East Lothian? Wouldn’t it also be great if East Lothian participated in the Bike to Work Scheme, like many other councils (such as Edinburgh) and other East Lothian employees do. Even if council employees didn’t cycle to work all the time having access to bikes would mean that people would still get out at the weekend, improve their fitness and reduce their stress levels.

Comments

[Iain Stanger]

Hey Ollie hope you are well. I am just in the process of introducing Mountain biking at Banchory. We have a fleet of bikes arriving at the end of the month and will be doing it as both a curricular and after school activity. Cant wait to get going.
Iain

[OllieBray]

Thats great Iain - I new you would be ahead of the game on that one! I will be really interested to find out how the roll out for Mountain Biking goes. Hope your enjoying being back at school! Ollie

[cycling bikes]

I remember the old days when riding a bike was very fun, up in the hills with friends , early saturday morning, those days will never be back.

[bellhavensurfer]

i have heard rumors that there is going to be tracks built @ pressmennan wood