Category: Uncategorized
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Week 15: Having a problem reaching your goal? Why refocusing is the key.
What happens when we see danger ahead on the path towards our goal? Generally, we don’t like to feel like we have failed. Or perhaps worse still, feel like others see us as a failure. Goal setting is often used as a way of making us feel we are becoming better, more improved in some…
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Weeks 12, 13 and 14: Christmas Highs, New Year Lows, and how to use goals to recover your physical and mental health.
I’ve been learning how to walk again. This is a lengthy post about my recovery from a lower back/spine problem. I’ve added tips about how I manage recovery mentally and physically. The Christmas and New Year period were for me emotionally tough (first without my mother who passed last year), then very physically challenging. I…
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Week 8, Month 2: Why bother with a career plan? Six questions to try and answer as a Mountain Leader
It might feel a bit pointless to plan your future. I mean, nobody knows what will happen for sure and we all change in unexpected ways. Some of those changes are good, some bad. And surely the careers plan for a Mountain Leader is just ‘go out and hike up mountains’, right?! This is a…
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Week 5: How do you best prepare for an outdoor qualification?
Let’s face it, starting a qualification as an adult is a pretty big deal. There are many reasons for this: it costs a lot, takes a lot of time up you could be spending on other things, and there’s no guarantee at the other end you will get a return on your investment. So how…
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A Year in the Life of a Mountain Training Candidate
So here’s a new challenge, one that I have thought about doing for a long time but always hesitated to start. Until now. What would happen if I took some of the general careers advice I usually give to students and applied it to my development as a Mountain Training candidate? What sort of things…
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So how easy is it to bivvy overnight in the mountains? And what kit do you need? Part 1.
Bivvying, short for ‘bivouacking’, is a bit of an art form. It’s a bit ‘niche’, one notch up from wild camping, and often seen as the emergency option if you’re caught out in a storm for the night. But is it really all that bad? Is it something to be endured, or can it also…
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QLD#3: Arnside to Leighton Moss via Jenny Brown’s Point
The circuit in the map screenshot above looks innocent enough – a nice coastal route with an RSPB reserve thrown in for good measure. What’s the worry? In short: cows, and sinking sand. And some pretty fast cars. The Morecambe Bay estuary is known for its sinking sands. There are hazard signs up everywhere saying…
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Rehabilitation…
Sustainability isn’t just about the environment, it’s also about how you take care of your body, especially when it decides to malfunction. I recently ended up in A+E. Not a place I go on a regular basis – in fact so infrequently that when my friend offered to drive me there I actually had no…
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Quality Lowland Day 1
The Longdendale Chain – Peak District (video at bottom of the page) I had fully intended to wild camp before setting out, but then had a second thought – I wanted to be well-slept before setting out on the first proper QLD of the scheme. A wild camp would probably have me awake around 3am…
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OHMG#5
Month five of one hundred… So far, I have done one Quality Lowland Day (blog post to come very soon!), have another planned for tomorrow, and have clearer ideas of how I want to interact with the national parks within a limited time frame. So there’s some physical progress towards qualifications, and some mental progress…
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