James from Bike Garage sent me a quick whatsapp. “Have you got MBR?”

“No, why? Anything good”

So it was a bit of a surprise this week to see myself quite so prominently featured in MBR’s September issue. I’m the bloke on the contents page riding a very old bike, very poorly on the Cutthroat descent. And I’m the bloke with the fat face profile photo on the Trail Blazers feature in the mag. It’s all a bit embarrassing really, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit proud. And of course, it wasn’t a total surprise as a few weeks ago I’d spent an amusing few hours schlepping up and down Mickleden Edge and Cutthroat having pics taken and then had a fun hour talking to the brilliant and very patient Sim Mainey from MBR.

If you’re reading this on the back of the Sim’s feature, welcome. It’s wonderful of you to come and find out a little bit more about what KoftheP is all about. I hope you find it useful enough to stay and offer a bit of support to what I try to do here.

But what exactly is that? Well to be honest I’ve just kind of made it up as I go along. It started with the conditions updates, then someone said “so who’s doing something about it?”, so I made some calls and sent some emails. That then put me in touch with the people who have the power to allow better access and I started asking (with others) what could be done to improve things for mountain bikers. And as more people started following, I felt I should try and do a bit more for them all. Doing a bit more led me to also joining the excellent Peak District MTB as a committee member and doing what I can do over there. Go and have a look yourself at their work.

I try to get a couple of tweets out every day at least to my followers and every so often cobble together a blog post. I spend a silly amount of time emailing, letter writing, going to meetings and trying to find contact names for various things; but there are small improving steps being made.

I’ll keep on going.

I always say that the big thing that does keep me going doing this is you lot, the KoftheP community. Small, but perfectly formed, your engagement and support is what makes it. So thank you.

Anyway, that’s my slightly longer welcome to those of your joining despite my ropey riding and stupid fizzog in the pages of your latest MBR. Thank you again for joining in and thank you to Sim for the invite in the first place; it’s brilliant to see advocacy getting more and more column inches.

Enjoy reading!

Chris