Hi, I'm Matthew.

I learned to ride a bike in Shanty Bay — a small village town north of Barrie where biking was just how you got around the neighbourhood. Down to the corner store, over to a friend's house, back before dinner. Fun, simple, nothing more than that. It wasn't until I moved to the Yonge and Finch area of Toronto that something shifted. My mom and I went out biking on the East Don Trail one evening — within a minute the road noise disappeared. The forest closed in around us, tall and green and surprisingly dense. I could hear the river below before I could see it. And then the trail opened up into a wide valley — pink-orange sky ahead, warmth on my face and wind in my hair. I remember stopping and thinking: how is this so close to home?

The second thing that changed everything was the first time I rode from home all the way downtown to Lake Ontario — entirely under my own power. It wasn't just the physical thing, though that felt good. It was what it meant. The city suddenly had no walls. Every increase in fitness, every extra kilometre of range I built up, meant more of Toronto was mine to explore. Neighbourhoods I'd only seen through a car window. Side streets and ravine entrances I never knew existed. The bike became less a vehicle and more a key — and my legs determined the locks I could open. The limits kept moving. They still do.

I ride with friends sometimes, solo other times. The solo rides are thinking time — you can sort out a lot on a 30-kilometre ride. Over years of riding Toronto's trails, I kept running into the same problem: the existing resources were either dry and data-heavy, completely outdated, or written by someone who'd clearly never been there on a Tuesday evening in October. Nobody was writing about these trails the way you'd describe them to a friend over a beer. So I built the thing. Just a site that tells you what the trails are actually like, written by someone who rides them.

When I'm not on the bike, I'm probably gardening, working out, or building creative projects. I do at least one century ride a year (that's 100 km — it sounds worse than it is), I've logged over 3,000 km across Toronto's trails over my lifetime, and I still think a bike is the fastest way to get around the city. I've also definitely gotten a flat at the worst possible moment. More than once.