I have always had an affinity for
hills. It doesn’t have to be
mountains – although a decent, properly craggy top will always grab my
attention – generally it just needs to be somewhere with a lung expanding
amount of height, offering the promise of a view, and that provides the ‘map
like’ perspective you only get with a good dose of elevation.
It’s hard to say what it is about
being in the hills that I like most.
Sometimes it’s the subtlety of a wraparound, velvety contour as the
clouds judder over the ridge, but on other days it can just be the downright
grandeur of the geology itself, writ large against the ravages of time and
people.
Perhaps not surprising then, that
from the moment I jumped on my first fluro-forked, fully rigid, canti-braked
Marin; mountain biking has been the perfect way to feed my soul-led desire to
be in hilly places.
So, finding myself on a rainy,
overcast Sunday morning en route to Thetford - gazing out at the steadfastly
flat landscapes of Norfolk - I was having some distinct problems reconciling my
view of how the ‘mountain’ and ‘biking’ bits were going to fit together.
I’d been lured by a good friend
who knows the area well, with the promise of ribbony, flowing, mile upon mile
of singletrack. “Honestly, you’ll love it!” Honestly; I wasn’t so sure. Some people find big horizon skies liberating, I could feel
myself mentally hunting for a bump or hillock, in fact any sort of feature that
I could ‘tuck’ away into.
Turns out, I needn’t have
worried. As I was led on a dance of twists and turns through the trees, I
stopped looking for hills and quickly switched to seeking out bumps and turns
as my speed sources. In fact,
slight elevations became interruptions to the increasingly ‘flat out’ chase, as
my eyes and expectations adjusted to the terrain. Even the experience of being on an extremely diddy, loaner
singlespeed didn’t alter the sensation of momentum, and the narrow [bordering
on retro-chic] handlebars, made gap squeezing a breeze.
You’re never going to convince me
that riding the flatlands is mountain biking as I know and love it. But it’s certainly biking in its own
right, and with good friends for company that’s more than enough – even for
this mountain goat!
Ruthx
