In this article:
 

• Shimano teams in eight countries roll up their sleeves to work on MTB trails.
• Discover just how much MTB trails mean to Shimano.
• Read about the European trail building day through the eyes of a member of Team Shimano.

Eindhoven, Shimano Europe HQ, the crack of nine a.m. on an autumnal Friday. We are handed t-shirts and gardening gloves, coffee and croissants.

I’m the last to enter the meeting room and find the crew that will join more than a hundred Shimano employees across Europe on the trails today to help local communities with their maintenance tasks.
 

We’re talking executives and HR, legal teams, IT, two Shimano influencers, marketing—like myself—sales, and beyond, some defying local child labor laws to bring their children along for some good old-fashioned hard work.
 

Everyone’s dressed agri-casual. I’m talking jeans, dungarees, flannel, and the t-shirts we were given printed with a deer and the words: TRAIL BORN.

“Thank you all so much for coming. Today we’re part of a European effort to support the important work of trail builders,” Ties opens. “There will be wheelbarrowing, shoveling, leaf blowing and beyond. And lunch is arranged.”
 

A sigh of relief.

The teams, created in the group mail beforehand, head to their respective trail communities. I’m off with Josh and Khory, our two influencers and arrive in the actual Dutch middle of nowhere: Netersel. Our team consists of twenty colleagues who rendezvous in a log cabin near copper-colored forests of elms and oaks and rolling hills. Pieter briefs us. Hans hands us bottles of water. Dirk asks us if we ride MTB.

“Not really.”

“Ah.”

“But I love the forest,” I add.

“Me too,” he says.

It turns out Dirk is our foreman today. He walks us to the site: a self-built, self-maintained trail —one of the best in the lowlands —fashioned after UCI-level trails from the professional circuit. He explains how they built the rock garden and the jumps, then shows us the pile.
 

The pile is a seemingly infinite mound of concrete-soil mixture that hardens when it rains.
 

“It’s quite expensive, we had it shipped just for you guys,” Dirk tells me.
 

“Awesome,” I say. It really is.
 

Just uphill, Martijn from retail and his two sons set to work with a set of leaf blowers. A colleague from finance hikes up towards a ridge. Another group goes off with picks and shovels to maintain the advanced part of the trail, as across Europe, shovels are pressed into mounds, dirt is unleashed into barrows to be raked out over trails that allow local MTB riders to enjoy their forests and trails safely.

Sweat, smiles, and so, so many stories ensue. Some trail builders’ children are gunning to go pro. Others stumbled upon the community by accident and now meet up every week for a bit of honest work and a laugh. These are stories born on the trails that connect us. They’re inspiring. Beautiful. And distracting enough that it’s only when I arrive home at dusk that I realize, satisfied and tired from a good day’s effort, that I don’t recognize the shovel I remembered to bring home, or the name engraved in the handle. 
 

Darn. I can’t wait for next year.

From Slovenia to Spain, and indeed all over Europe, members of Team Shimano went out and enjoyed a good day in the dirt. It was a blast. And we’ve got the pictures to prove it.