Currently working for Cycling UK as Cycling Development Officer for Greater Manchester, Ellen is a utility cyclists, active travel enthusiast, timid mountain biker and wannabe bike packer.
Organised by Lady Pedal Manchester
Videography and editing by Blue Start (find more of their work @superjumpkid on Instagram)
um we will get started so our very first speaker is a really good friend of Lady pedal someone who supported us for a long time um this is Ellen she works for cycl UK she’s very much a utility cyclist active travel Enthusiast uh she described herself as a timid mountain biker but I’ve seen her pictures and she didn’t look that timid um and definitely if I wouldn’t try and one of be bik Packer so yeah we’d love to welcome Ellen to the stage to about is that working yeah so I’ve not planned this out very well so it’s just G to be a random stream of Consciousness until you tell me to stop but yeah so just kind of my pying journey I guess so um I was very fortunate I did learn to ride a bike as a child I had a bike I did Cy proficiency I failed it twice on my brother’s B make that what you will I’ve on to work in a industry but anyway so yeah but I don’t remember CCL being a huge part of my childhood I think CCL started becoming something more important to me when I went to University H so I went to un down in Leicester there was a HS of residence it was quite far away from the campus I was staying on and you could either pay £300 a month or something like that for a bus pass or you could cycle uh so I borrowed my mom’s bag this one here and never gave it back to her and it all kind of started from there so yes um so then again super fortunate but back in the day before we bre exited uh there’s something called arasmus which is kind of like a exchange to Europe so I went and did a year in a place called Gran in the Netherlands North Netherland really cool place definitely recommend visiting it it’s kind of like a small uh student City H it’s the first city in the world to become a kind of cycling City so that’s basically the when they did a study over 50% of Journeys in the city made by bike it’s that kind of cycl friendly and when you get out the station I’m not there’s like thousands of bikes it’s probably like 5,000 bike stands or something just outside the station it’s insane um so yeah super super um accessible for bike and that I think that’s when I really started to kind of become util cyclist and see kind ofy as a way to do things so uh that’s a picture of the Halls that I was staying in um this is back in like 2009 2010 it was a really bad winter that year a lot of snow but people just kind of like kept cyphing through that so I wanted to like show those photos but yeah those kind of all the bikes even with that much snow on all the students in the residents were just kind of getting them out and getting on them and riding to Lees and even at Ikea you could borrow like if you bought some furniture you could borrow a trailer and just ride it home on the bik um so yeah that was kind of yeah my experience over there so yeah terrible photo I hate that phot didn’t have many photos from this time in my life so that one um but yeah so after that I kind of moved back to leester for a bit started working for local Council in kind of a sustainable travel program called choose how you move uh and I got the opportunity to train as a cycl instructor so I started doing that as a second job uh in the evenings and weekends and things like that and again that was kind of like a big turning point for me when I started you know I was traveling more Vi bike but I started saying actually this could be something that I could turn into a job and kind of yeah I wanted to kind of share that with other people especially teaching adults to RVE I just found that so rewarding you know kids are learning more stuff all the time but adults when to get on the bike and start pedaling kind of later in life which is amazing to see really really enjoyed doing that um I was live with Harris mates at the time who triath on isow persuaded me to do one they all had fancy Ro bikes that as you can see it’s like my mom’s bike that I I wanted to get it wasn’t aord but yeah that bit so yeah kind of a few years down the line I’ve moved around a bit and had a few different jobs and got into kind of sport development but then uh kind of 2019 I moved over to Manchester to start working for cycl UK which is the job that I still do now so uh I work as cycl development officer for great Manchester it’s such a cool job it’s awesome I really really love it and my favorite part of the job is just the people that I get to work with a lot of people in this room really really cool people I think anyone who puts so much kind of time out of their busy lives into communi cycling he’s just such an inspiring person like the type of people that you meet is just amazing um and you know everything going on in Manchester is just just fantastic at the moment I think the event of the weekend I was good that I couldn’t make it but all those kind of things that are going on in Manchester really kind of an exciting place to be for C at the moment um yeah I get I get to lead ride leader courses now so I’ve done a few courses that M bike leader and stuff like that with s in UK and yeah the ride Le course is again one of my favorite parts of the job because yeah if you’re someone who’s kind of put yourself out there not just do CCL for yourself but you want to take the people on rides and and show them how great CCL is yeah you get to meet some really cool people on those courses so yeah so yeah a bit more about my kind of personal cycling at the moment so this is just during lockdown I decided I was going to learn bike maintenance and I was going to build a bike and I bought a box on it and my par was like you’re not going to do that she’s like you have a go it and then yeah it will just end up in the basement and she’s right it has ended up I dismounted my ipped all the threads uh and then I couldn’t put stuff back on again I had to take it down to Plat field and they had to get some like massive hammer and so it’s still I still have it one day you know Shing when there’s another lock down I will get it back out and break it and yeah um so yeah M bik and bike pack and stuff like that I’ve started getting into um over the years like a bit more like C’s always been a mod of travel for me but over the past few years I started a bit more kind of something to enjoy and um yeah kind of get out leder riding so this is the first time I went bik packing this is the Mary Town L Loop uh which is in North York so it’s about 50 miles of offroad kind of M white bike packing um it’s my partner on the left um so she bought all the like fancy bags and stuff and St the bike I was like I’m not going to spend all that money stuff I don’t know if I use again so I just got my like big hiking look and just put in that I was like I’m sure be fine it was not start is really heavy and really bulky and like anyone who does a bit of M need to be quite and be able to like that you also need you know when you kind of disced on M biking ter you need kind of a really good like line of vision so you can see what’s coming up ahead I could see anything the B the bag like bul is on the back of my head the whole time so I did come off going quite fast down the hill cuz I couldn’t really see where I was going and the impact of coming off actually like knocked the back wheel off my bike so it’s quite a big pause and I think I did get mild compition so I would recommend not wear M like that but I did have a nice time didn’t put me off so that’s yeah so so we B took baby just slept to the woods and it was such an awesome experience even despite all that I was like yeah we want to do more of this um so yeah we were like okay let’s we enjoyed that one little weekend away let’s do something bigger let’s do uh the pen on rideway which is so it starts in the south of the um Peak District Middleton top and it finishes in the oror it’s part of a bigger route for the great North Trail I don’t know if anyone’s um heard of that but there’s a guy that I work with at UK like a old tradition Cy stuff he does all crazy stuff all the time and he was like oh yeah that’s even for him it was kind of a massive deal to have done that so we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into we definitely our in deepend um but we thought okay it’s a really nice plan but how life go you didn’t get R so we thought if we do it for charity then we will end up doing it so we raising money for Ark in memory of P’s nephew who was born sleeping um and yeah that kind made us do it CU we like okay you know people have given us some money we have to do this now and we set ourselves a date and when the date rolled around like looking at the Met Office before we set off and there’s loads of like name storms rolling in and we like why did you put all this stuff online saying that we’re doing this thing we like okay we’ll go ahead but how bad can it be because you know do a bit of riding in the rain like it can’t be that bad but again yeah it was pretty bad the difference between like going for a bike ride on a Saturday or something coming home and drying out compared to like yeah multiple days of just getting wetter and wetter and all your stuff just getting wet and so the plan was I thought we’d be able to ride it in seven days don’t know how but we managed about three days we got as far as headen bridge and then we like there’s a train back to Manchester we’re going to get that um so yeah it was a massive learning curve but we were like okay yeah we do have a limit and we found it um so we we we got the train home and that’s the train home yeah next SL so we also thought because we’ve done a bit of M miking and stuff but again it was like really B train and we were pushing up hill and we were pushing downhill we were really going very slow so we thought we probably need to get a mountain skill Ming skills to speed a bit more so then we spent the winter kind of yeah getting out on the trails and kind of enjoying ourselves and the idea was go back again uh the spring complete it so we did um and Thea the weather forecast was much better this time around it was yeah like blue skies forecast all week so we like okay we’ll give ourselves a full week instead of trying to overdo it um and yeah we take FY kit we were like okay forecast really reliable we don’t pretend that we lost a bit of weight though and it was a bit easier um and yeah it was fantastic the sunshine made a huge difference I wouldn’t recommend B pack in the rain I think I’m fair with a B P of it yeah we had a great time again like my setup wasn’t ideal I didn’t quite buy all the fancy bags and stuff um as you can see I had like uh this time I put a PA back on and kind of put all my sleeping kit in a bag and like strapped it to the P because my bike’s quite small I couldn’t fit um all the right water bottles on and stuff so I got like a bottle of Pop size bottle of water stra that onto the top of the bag it popped all my sleep and he got completely dress um same back of her bik one of her bunge snapped when we going down the hill the back it was still we’re definitely not pros at this still but we kind of model for we had an amazing time and we’re like this is amazing we want to do this all the time that was two years ago I would not done anything like this that’s just how I feel but yeah it was also Rec it um oh yeah and this is more kind of like type two fun so last summer we went on um there’s a a climb that we wanted to see in the Lake District up quite a remote Valley so um a lot of people take bikes uh because it cuts off a bit of the walking time and so like oh we just speed things up and take the bikes but then we packed kind of like two days of camping it and all the CL of stff and all our food and everything those bags were so heavy so we weren’t really cycling any f walking back we were just pushing the bikes it wouldn’t make things any easy it just more fast and we were just kind of again pushing bikes up and downhill um but anyway we got up did the carbon it was awesome we had a really good weekend again the forecast was really good it was supposed to be kind of like sunshine all weekend and as we settled down for tea on the second night just saw these massive like purple storm clouds rolling in down the valley so like right we need to get out of here and so we had to kind of like pack everything up and kind of jump on the bikes and really slowly kind of make way back to the car we didn’t beat the storm we got completely dous and rain on massive buor so that’s the final photo if you’ve ever tried sleeping in the back of a high I not very comfortable as a very small car and that’s kind of how the weekend ended but again yeah it was fun but it was very tight too fun I’m sure will appreciate you using that as the final has anyone got any questions for I’ve got one um have you got any more any sort of dream Adventures that you want to go on P py wise or is that it now no hopefully not it I think um yeah everything is just fit and stuff isn’t it but um I’d like to do some backpacking up in Scotland I know you’ve done some your best after chat to about that but yeah I think something up in Scotland and yeah again I think a bit more faffing with bags to get a different set up to all these chaotic ones before something do theas in influence your Cent good question uh not enough I’d say um I think to say that was 10 years ago and that’s what can be achieved um in a city like grenan and how far ahead the Netherlands are than the UK I think you know manchesters make a big difference but definitely you know the infrastructure there is incredible Manchester I think it does help with someone’s flat um Manchester is quite flat in the center anyway um so there’s so much more that can be done and when people say you know all rain and stuff like that it rained a hell of a lot over there um so yeah it’s kind of No Excuses really I think the UK needs to kind of get speed your lessons [Music] learn there was times where it was horrible but I would definitely say just kind of get out of it CU I think that’s something that can put you off is just like oh not right care or you know right type of bags and stuff like that but just kind of trial and error I think of yeah just kind of get out there and do it but definitely pack lighter I’m not very good at packing light so yeah leave some stuff at home this one’s more about work um I read report last week about how uh this study about how the most on kids is parents and I just wonder through work do think’s understanding yeah really good question so one of the programs that Big Revival load of people in this room involved in it and that’s kind of one of the reasons within the big partal try and encourage which is quite tricky and because I think you can excluding a lot of kids but kind of like family orientated events rather than events where kind of kids can turn up on their own because there definitely like you say a lot of research that um you know even even if a child is competent confident cyclist their parent doesn’t think or kind of Guardian doesn’t think it’s safe for them to get on the road and the own they kind of won’t let them all encourage them to do it um and the parents do have to be a bit bought in to you know find somewhere super from to store bik and help them make sure it’s constantly kind of like in ather condition and things like that definely kind of getting from the units involved where you can super important and so yeah I think I think there’s some work trying to be done around bability with that to kind of yeah get bit more parents involved and see the whole picture question what do you think we can do yeah good question I think everything that is been doing but just kind of like amplify I think stuff’s chronically underfunded I think stuff’s kind of taken too long um so I think whether that’s the infrastructure itself or kind of all the community projects and programs I think if you look at how much investment there is you know on programs that we work on at like big bik reval and stuff like that it’s just a drop in the ocean if you think if you could kind of fund that on a much bigger scale if it was kind of you know not just some parks but every Park had C events just some scores over scores and things like that like I think it really needs that huge you know not just pockets of provision and there but kind of much big scale thank you so much Alan that was amazing so big round of applause