Category: Uncategorized
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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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Food for thought…
Selecting what to eat and drink on hikes is massively important, and I’ve had a trial of lots of different options over the years. I used to rely entirely on malt loaf to get me through but thankfully these days I prefer a variety of different things. So to eat, I take the following: Small…
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