Occasionally, it’s important to read academic papers like “The role of belonging and affective economies in managing outdoor recreation: Mountain biking and the disengagement tipping point”, particularly if you’re a bike journalist or working in outdoor management. Most of the time though, it’s more important to ride your bike, and to feel like you belong somewhere. MTBMeetup combines both of those latter things with none of the academia. Last week a couple of the organisers nipped up to Hebden Bridge to join us for the Singletrack Reader Awards, and also let us know they were about to announce dates for next year. There are just 235 days to go!
What’s MTBMeetup? It’s a non-profit, community event held at Llandegla, where there’s a great trail centre (we sometimes day trip there to do back-to-back testing of bikes and assorted other things). Of course, with a few hundred mountain bikers in one place, #brands inevitably turn up too, but they have a host of stuff mountain bikers are generally interested in, from beer to fancy wheels. They also donate prizes for a raffle at the event, which this time is raising money for the Welsh Air Ambulance.
Fundamentally though, MTB Meetup is about riding bikes with your mates, and/or meeting like-minded people. Dates for 2018 are the 1st – 3rd of June. You can find the Facebook event here, or find out more on their website.
“At the heart of MTBMeetup is the simple notion of riding your bike with other people who like to ride bikes. Nothing more complicated than that. There are rides in the trail centre, rides outside the trail centre. There are some organised rides, but mainly it is a case of you, coming along, riding your bike and meeting people doing the same.
“MTBMeetup is free. The time to create the event comes entirely from volunteers. We have a carefully curated group of independent companies selling great products, we think you love, but we are not a business. We’ve also managed to source a few treats, experiences and goodies from Friends of MTBMeetup, but at the end of the day, the reason we exist is to meet people who ride bikes.”
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It’s not the gnarliest, but it is the best MTB event in the UK. It’s just riding bikes and chatting and eating cake and riding and maybe a beer and riding and chatting and riding and laughing.
You get to meet so many great people and look at / play with / buy stuff from local smaller brands, the kind of people who are at the heart of British MTB.