Hannah Attenburrow pulled together the event for British Cycling

What could be more noble than the efforts we make to get kids onto bikes?  And what nobler than to get them on Mountain Bikes showing their proud mums and dads their newly coached skills?

This weekend we supported British Cycling‘s Mountain Bike Coaching event at the Surrey Sports Park in Guildford. Our boys and girls refined their skills (or learnt them for the first time) with professionals and topped the day off with final races on a fixed course with well deserved medals to compete for. It was a top time to demo our new North Downs series, our South Downs and our Surrey Hills maps.

It was great to share the space with Paligap who distribute Marin bikes (fond memories of my first war-horse with these guys!), Bird 650b (a very new Hampshire based MTB manufacturer) and GearedUp Cycles (a very cool Surrey based bike shop).

Bird recently launched their new bright yellow range of bespoke, high-end but affordable hard tail bikes.  We had a great discussion as both our businesses started with Crowd funding. Born out of  (our favourite!) Swinley Forest Mountain Bike riders group in Berkshire, it’s no wonder that such a terrific MTB centre would spawn such an enthusiastic response from the cycling world.  It took them only 5 days to raise the £45 000 needed to launch the business and have their first frames manufactured!

Final races on the day

Geared up were good enough to fix the bike I rode up on whilst Paligap have great potential if we go down the distributor route with SplashMaps.