Tomorrow marks the day that Derbyshire County Council will finally make a decision on what’s going to happen to Rushup Edge.
We’ve had eight months of so-called consultation.
In that time there have been hundreds of emails, hours of meetings, many phone calls and numerous late, late nights writing emails and reports. It’s been a slog.
But it’s been made easy by the immense support from the mountain biking community here in the north and beyond. Over the last few months, the Rushup campaign has galvanised thousands of riders and created a fantastic community spirit. Words of encouragement and support on forums, Twitter, Facebook and in email has kept the energy levels up and driven us on to carry on pushing DCC. And it’s not just riders. We’ve had great support too from walkers, horse riders, climbers, councillors – even MPs.

It’s been incredibly rewarding to see this groundswell of support.

And it shows that we can all pull together.

Of course, we may not get a result we’re after on Rushup. We hope DCC see sense and start listening no matter how late in the day it is, but whatever happens we’ve achieved a huge amount since this all kicked off with a tweet about the work starting.

At the very least we’ve made DCC think twice about ignoring mountain bikers as an influential group. But more than that, we’ve also built strong and important bridges with other non-biking groups. We may not always see eye to eye, but now we’re actually talking and that’s a big difference to this time last year.

As such, we now have a whole host of allies to call on next time DCC do something daft. And it will happen again.

In the meantime – ahead of DCC tarmaccing the rest of the Peak – I’m going to get out on my bike. It’s been months.