I know I’m not unusual in that no two days are the same and finding days flow into weeks into months. Just pressing pause for a moment and reflecting back on recent weeks though reminds me of the pleasures of business and why I set up the company just following my vocation not a business plan. Riding my bike was (and remains) one of my sporting passions.

In the early days of the business I produced a number of route guides, many of which are still in existence, such as the Lancashire Cycleway, Bowland by Bike and Mountain Biking in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, and naturally to do so involved riding my bike to set and plot them, along with photo sessions. To have the beautiful Lancashire and Yorkshire countryside as my ‘office’ is hard to beat. Throw in all the days spent creating and riding routes for the dozens of events we put on and I worked out in one particular year I must have done nearly two month’s work literally in the saddle. Naturally as the business developed and the team grew with multiple strengths, skills and roles necessary to keep us moving forward as a leading events business, that number decreased whilst others had the pleasure.

However, a current project has given me both the chance to get back out (on my mountain-bike) and a nice trip down memory lane. This particular project for Blackburn and Darwen Council has included some updates of routes I originally plotted and so fell naturally to me to get back out and re-ride them with GPS tracker and Go pro (two bits of technology that weren’t around when the original booklet was produced). It was hard to believe it was over 7 years since I created the routes and rode those trails - looking at the photos produced for the booklet, I’m sure we still look the same!

The autumnal weather could not have been better as I set off in Witton Park up into the woods and the testing good technical sections of this particular route. Of course, riding with Go Pro meant trying to avoid any embarrassing falls or dabs so bit more pressure on than before, though the warm weather surely the reason I was sweating....! I certainly still got the same buzz from doing it as I did then and surely that’s one of the great things from doing any activity, aside from the health benefits is simply the way it makes you feel?!

I was also delighted to see plenty of evidence of high usage of the trails, and the growing popularity of the Witton Country Park Cycle Centre (home to the community cycling club – with a resident British Cycling coach). This further demonstrated to me that the public’s passion for cycling and cycling events is not on the wane and is still clearly growing year-on-year – as evidenced by the well-used trails and the wealth of sportives available to the novice and avid cyclist alike and I am delighted to therefore be the head of a company that continues to push the boundaries by offering new and innovative routes to our cycle events.