Ali Jamieson is a guy with a deep-rooted passion for mountain biking. He’s had to traverse mountains and battle demons – both personal and bureaucratic – to build his MTB holiday company, making his story a particularly interesting one...
Trail Addiction started as a pipe dream. My best mate Ash Smith (aka Mr Trans- Provence) and I used to talk all the time about being MTB guides in the Alps, but I never thought it’d really be a way to make a living.One summer in the late ’90s we headed over to take a look.We’d open a hiking map and pick a trail that looked good. After a while we started to organise trips for our mates and it just grew from there.
When we left uni we’d take as much holiday as we could every summer to go out and run trips around the Savoie Valley. Before long we settled on the Les Arcs area as the prime spot to focus on for sheer density of awesome terrain.We felt like real pioneers. There were no politics to deal with and we didn’t really care about earning money!
My ‘real’ job finally told me enough was enough, and that I wasn’t allowed any more time of to go away guiding. Ash and I had started to have our diferences over where the guiding business should be going. I was in a pretty dark place, actually, but I decided to have a crack at pulling together the Trans-Savoie – a multi-day, ski-lift-linked race that everyone warned would be impossible, because it’d mean racing down walkers’ paths in hiker-centric resorts in peak season.
Knowing the route I had in mind would be a real cracker, I was very driven, so I took the plunge and built a website for it. On the day entries opened,my laptop suddenly started pinging. It took me a few minutes to realise that these were email entries coming in from all over the world. It sold out within a few minutes. There was no turning back now! Actually pulling it of was harder than I’d ever imagined, but certainly worth the efort.
The biggest challenge has been accepting that a ‘normal’ life was never going to work for me. I was brought up to think that doing the 9-to-5 was the only way to a prosperous, contented life. I wish I’d worked out that it wasn’t before the age of 35, but maybe it took that long for me to build the courage. The other huge challenge on a personal level was accepting that in achievingmy big dreams, I’d lostmy best mate along the way. What’s that saying about never mixing work and friendships?
France is a tough place to run a business as an ‘outsider’ and there are endless administrative hoops to jump through. Also, as our team has grown, I’ve found it tough sometimes to managemy staf professionally. Recruiting and training on a seasonal basis is an endless task and I find it hard to be the boss when I want to treat everyone likemy mate and go out and shred some trails together. I miss the daily banter ofmy old oice job too – it’s often hours at a laptop onmy own these days. But high-fivingmy customers and hearing them say,“That was the best thing I’ve ever done!” is never going to get old for me. Feedback inmy old oice job was never quite so positive...
I moved to Nelson, New Zealand, for the winter (their summer) and it’s an awesome, friendly place to be. But I’m already looking forward to getting back to the Alps. I took some time out at the end of last season to go on some trailhunting missions and found an unreal amount of amazing untouched singletrack that’s just too good to keep tomyself. Who knows what’s happening next inmy grand plan, but I’m hopeful it’ll involve even bigger and better riding adventures than ever before!