Nebraska Cycling News

The members of the Nebraska trail advocacy group, THOR (“Trails Have Our Respect”) gathered for their annual meeting, February 6 in Omaha to plan for what appears to be a very active year for off-road cyclists.

“Our primary goal was to discuss the reorganization of the club to not only spread the workload, but to also bring in new blood and new excitement to trail building in Nebraska,” says Roxzanne Abbott, Director of Operations and Marketing for THOR.

The work being done by THOR does not go unnoticed and is recognized at the national level.

In January, THOR's parent organization, IMBA (International Mountain Bike Association), sent Ryan Schutz, its Regional Director, to Omaha to meet with the club's leadership to discuss how to grow a sustainable organization. In addition to growing the organization by increasing visibility, thus increasing membership and investing in our members, a focus on putting the fun back into trail building and maintenance was stressed.

“We learned that less than one half of one percent of trail care organizations actually like moving dirt,” explains Abbott. “That was a wake up call. We need to engage our member base in more ways than cutting trail. We don't want to be known as a labor camp. We want THOR to be known as a fun group.”

Abbott continues, “We want to reach out to the community through non-competitive events and invite trail users of all kinds to join our group and have a good time.”

In order to achieve this goal, THOR created four committees to engage new and existing members. The committees include: Social Committee, Fund Raising Committee, Marketing Committee and Trail Leader Committee. Through the efforts of these groups, THOR plans to grow into a more sustainable club and take it all to another level.

One driver behind this change is to develop a “Gateway MTB Park” in North Omaha's Adams Park.

“A gateway park is a park where kids can learn to ride off-road with pump tracks and single track courses,” Abbott explains. “Activate Omaha, through its childhood obesity initiative, secured funding via a TREK grant to pay for IMBA to design a park and then to have IMBA's Trail Care Crew come in and teach the community how to build it and take care of it.”

This is where THOR steps in. In order to do this though, THOR is in need of additional help outside of our own mountain biking community. Watch Nebraska Cycling News for developments with this initiative.

To learn more about THOR, visit: http://trailshaveourrespect.org/