Adventure She magazine, Issue 9, March 2020

Adventure She Empower Educate Entertain

Running New Zealand’s Te Araroa Mindful Kayaking in Scotland Scooting New Zealand Running Across Iran

Kilimanjaro

Also including Hiking Hong Kong – Part 2

Conquering Body Issues Peru’s Nazca Lines Triathlon at 70 & lots more

Issue 9, March 2020 www.adventureshe.com

Price £5.00 for 1 issue or 4 issues for £15

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From The Editor This is the 9th issue of Adventure She magazine and comes at a time unprecedented in our history, with borders closed and many towns and cities in lockdown. For a while at least, physical exploration is on hold for millions. But, whatever our circumstances, we still have an amazing asset, namely our mind and by extension, the attitude we choose to take at this time of crisis.

board games (even if over the internet), and to take that long bath.

The stories in this issue of Adventure She have been carefully selected as stories which I very much hope will help you at this time. They are stories that focus on stepping beyond our comfort zone, for that is what we all need to do right now and for the foreseeable future.

The word ‘choose’ might be controversial, after all, people don’t choose to have depression, or anxiety, or other illnesses which impact the way their brain operates. But we can choose to be grateful for what we do currently have. For whilst we are breathing, there is hope.

This issue starts off with a very powerful story from Iona Nelson. A story that demonstrates the beauty of life – seeing a white tailed eagle whilst sea kayaking, and the harshness of life – having to paddle through tough conditions, that was way out of her comfort zone, in order to make it to safety.

The beauty was pure enjoyment. But what she really remembers is how dealing with the tough seas made her grow as a person.

So, let’s focus on the good things in our life, whether it’s family, friends, even the fact we have a roof over our head.

For those in dire need of something to do, we can still do stuff, even from our own home.

Developing our understanding of other cultures also helps us grow. In this month’s Big Interview, Jessica Michael interviews Kristina Paltén who really stepped outside of her comfort zone when running across the whole of Iran.

We can research our next adventures.

We can do language lessons whether it’s over the internet or from some almost forgotten phrase book that’s currently catching dust.

So how does developing an incurable condition impact upon one’s comfort zone? That’s a question Anne-Fleur van Diem has faced. For how do you adventure when you’ve been struck down by rheumatoid arthritis? Here Anne writes about what she learned about her capabilities, physical and mental, whilst travelling New Zealand’s South Island by push scooter!

We can catch up by phone or internet video chat, with all our friends we haven’t called for a while.

We can work on our core with yoga and pilates moves.

For some of us, our comfort zone in time of crisis involves food. I know, for I’ve been there, in a bad way too. Of course, eating disorders and body issues can be aligned. Katherine Harrison is one person who’s endured a lifetime of body issues.

You guessed it, stepping out of her comfort zone with ultra-running, is what’s helped her.

We can do aerobics to our favourite music, like some of us undoubtedly did in the 1980’s.

For anyone who’s been burning the candle at both ends, now is also an opportunity to reset and rejuvenate. At least, that’s how I’m trying to think of it. There’s no longer a need to rush around to catch an exhibition, a film festival, or a talk. Now there is time to breath, to sit back, to read, to play

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One very special ultra-runner is Lucy Clark. She recently set a new fastest known time for a woman, on New Zealand’s Te Araroa Trial. Lucy’s shared her highs and lows with us, lows which took her way beyond her comfort zone. For that’s the thing in life, others might look totally ‘with it,’ but they too might be struggling. There also a Q&A with her.

Charlie Francis is a volunteer Coastguard. She discusses the role of the Coastguard and what it’s like to go on a rescue mission.

Some might of course say, ‘ah if only I were younger, I’d do that, but we didn’t have the opportunity in my day.’ That’s definitely not Mary Tuely’s attitude. Age 70 and post cancer, plus with a new hip, she’s one of the most inspiring women in this issue, doing a triathlon at 70.

Way back in 1998 I too stepped out of my comfort zone. I’d never done an event longer than 6kms before, but on moving to Hong Kong, what did I do, but sign up for a 100kms charity hike. In the last issue I wrote about the decision making process of choosing to do the hike and training for the event.

This time around, it’s the hike itself. Would the 4 person team of which I was a part, succeed? Or, would some need to drop out due to illness? That’s right, whilst pushing our comfort zone can be good, sometimes for health reasons the best response is to stop. It all depends on the person and the circumstances. Health first as they say.

On top of those stories, there’s the regular What A Woman feature, book reviews and an UNESCO World Heritage Site story. That story is particularly interesting, for it also looks at the irreversible damage we humans can do to ancient structures and features. Researching it was certainly an eye opener.

Back to Coronavirus. The reality is none of us know what lies ahead of us. There’s nothing we can do, but to follow new rules, regulations and advice. As a group, let’s be mindful of others out there, let’s limit our movements for now, let’s help prevent the spread by not travelling to other parts, parts that might currently be Coronavirus free.

One person who never seems to stop and who has boundless energy is Angharad Hodgson. Moving from Wales to Dubai. Going from a tiny village and a very small pool based triathlon, to doing an IRONMAN, she’s definitely expanded her comfort zone.

Yes, as an adventurous group of people that will undoubtedly be hard for many of us. But it’s a sacrifice we need to do, for the wider good. After all, over the centuries our ancestors suffered and sacrificed much, some even sacrificed their life.

Surely, for those of us who live in the towns and the cities, the least we can do, is for now, to sacrifice our trips to far flung wilder regions.

For some people like Sal Bolton’s sister Helen, their choices are more restricted. In Helen’s case, it’s because of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or M.E. Helen and other people like her, people who suffer and have their capabilities restricted through no fault of their own, play a very important role for the rest of us. Sal Bolton discusses this relationship as she strove beyond her usual comfort zone, to a place of pain and exhaustion, as she took on Africa’s highest peak, Kilimanjaro.

I wish you health, peace and calm in these turbulent times. Remember, if Adventure She can help you, let me know. Also if you’re bored, pitch us an article, it could be anything from a photo essay (there’s a short example of this over the page) of your dog walks, to hiking in Chile ,horse riding in China, cycling in Colorado, or even staying sane during Coronavirus.

There really is so much in this issue about extending one’s comfort zone, so that we can achieve so much more in our life. But and this is a big but, in many activities be it learning a language, playing a musical instrument, or developing outdoor skills, it’s also important to take a step by step approach. To do it, yes, but to do it sensibly.

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Cycling Ireland

Starting for real, at Cork.

A Sample Photo Essay I had a few weeks spare, my job had recently ended and I’d no commitments for a while. With time to spare, what to do? I’d been visiting my elderly father, he lived only 7 miles from the ferry to Ireland.

I hadn’t been there since I was about 3, and then only for a day. I decided it was time I visited. So I caught a ferry from Wales to Ireland and headed for Dublin.

The last time I’d cycle toured I was 16 and with friends. I’d ridden a 3 speeder, had no helmet and no sports gear. I had a basic mac for rain, sandals and cotton clothing. I’d loved it. It had all been so easy, at least with hindsight. Now mid 30’s, I was about to find that sometimes having more gear has its disadvantages, like the weight of the paniers.

The first few moments from the train station to the youth hostel were distinctly wobbly and rather nerve wracking, plus the bike felt really heavy.

Suddenly I didn’t like the idea of starting in a big city, so off I went to Cork and start the ride for real.

Qu Kissing the Blarney Stone – bizarre, I never did story telling before kissing it!

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Afternoon bike ride from Cork

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A traditional cottage on a quite country lane, enroute to Killarney

In the end I didn’t do that much cycling, for after a while the weather turned foul. I figured, I’m on a break, why suffer through the wet and the cold. Why be miserable? I’d seen some wonderful sights but what I really wanted was to explore in a warmer land.

So quick change of plan and off I headed for a hiking adventure in Spain instead.

Gap of Dunloe (also top right(

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Adventure She is published by TNA Consulting Services Ltd, the address of the registered of which can be obtained from Companies House. The entire contents is protected by copyright and all rights are reserved. Reproduction without prior permission is forbidden. Every care is taken in compiling the contents of the magazine, but the publishers assume no responsibility in the effect arising therefrom, Readers are advised to seek professional advice before acting on any information which is contained in the magazine. Neither TNA Consulting Services Ltd nor Adventure She magazine accept any liability for views expressed, pictures used or claims made. Copyright © 2020 TNA Consulting Services Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

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Page 8 – Mindful Kayaking in Scotland

Page 16 – Running Across Iran

Page 26 – Scooting New Zealand’s South Island

Page 43 – Peru’s Nazca Lines

Page 46 – Food, diets, running and the mind

Page 54 – Running the Te Araroa Trail

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Page 68 – Q&A with Lucy Clark

Page 72 – Book Reviews

Page 88 – What A Woman – Wendy Searle

Page 74 – Hiking Hong Kong – Part 2

Page 102 – Kilimanjaro, Fatigue and M.E.

Page 92- Triathlon Training Dubai Style

Page 118 – Volunteering with the Coastguard

Page 128 – Triathlon at 70 7

Adventure She magazine, Issue 9, March 2020

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Mindful Kayaking in Scotland

By Iona Nelson

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What do you do when tough times hit? That is a question every one of us is currently facing.

But, what do you do when you’re outside of your comfort zone and panicking could mean death? Not just for you, but potentially those around you?

In this article Iona Nelson explores the highs and lows of sea kayaking. The idyllic moments with wildlife and the frightening moments when you are totally outside your comfort zone.

How did Iona deal with those tough times? Did she crumble, or, did she learn from them?

It was day 3 of my first group sea kayaking trip.

We’d been riding the swells channelled down Scotland’s Firth of Lorne. To give ourselves a short break before returning to the mainland, we deviated and paddled towards a small sheltered area on the SouthEast side of Insh Island.

Wildlife watching As we paddled towards those calmer waters, I saw a huge bird flying low, not far off the bows (front) of our kayaks. Its wingspan was massive, and it bore a white breast and yellow beak.

Then it dawned on me, this was a White-Tailed Sea Eagle.

My dad and I had gone out paddling earlier in the year specifically to see these enormous, beautiful birds of prey, but that time, had no such luck.

"Dad...I think it's - "I’m cut off: "DARLING IT’S A SEA EAGLE! WOOHOO!" my Dad exclaimed back at me.

We watched the bird swoop down, before flying back up high and into the distance behind the island, leaving my Dad and I in ecstatic awe.

Kayak mindfulness Moments like this are why I adore my kayaking hobby.

Kayaks are peaceful boats, compared to most others out there. Wildlife are not scared by kayaks - actually, so many animals are fascinated instead.

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The silence of a kayak also makes it a very mindful hobby. If I'm paddling in mirrored, calm waters, I often lie back a little, close my eyes and breathe in deeply, listening to the trickling noises as my boat pushes gently through the water.

Adventure kayaking On the other side of it, kayaking can also be a great adventure sport.

Tackling awesome waves and weather conditions, it can be a tough, but also fun and adrenaline filled. The best part about kayaking is you can make it the sport you want.

Kayak Tuition I've been kayaking for around 10 years now but have only had tuition in the last few years. Don't be

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Photo courtesy of jggrz from Pixabay

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fooled into thinking I'm a pro though!

What it really means is that over time, I’ve unfortunately developed countless bad habits, like not twisting my upper body enough, panicking when I don't need to, not putting the paddle forward enough, not bringing it far back enough, bringing it too far back...AHH. It frustrates me a lot and I am forever trying to undo these habits. I constantly question if I'm good enough when I'm out on the water.

But when push comes to shove, I've been so surprised at what I can handle.

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Scary moments There have been one or two situations where I have been in some gnarly waves (at least in my opinion!), and once you're out there and challenging yourself, there's no escape. You can’t just give up and pack it in. You must find a way to do it, to paddle through to the end.

It's the only way you make it out.

As we neared the end of day one, of that three day trip when we saw the white tailed sea eagle, tough weather hit us.

We were paddling around the West side of Shuna Island. To one side of us, there were strong, side-

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hitting waves. On the other side, cliffs. I felt incredibly

“…once you're out there and challenging yourself, there's no escape. You can’t just give up and pack it in.

You must find a way to do it, to paddle through to the end. It's the only way you make it out”

uncomfortable. But if there's anything I've learned from past paddles and from my mountaineering experience, it's that you don't grow

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unless you push your comfort zones. So, I did.

There were three key problems. Huge, powerful waves smacked against the side of my boat, tipping me slightly each time (never a fun situation for a kayak – for it's the easiest way to end up in the water, as a side-way knock easily puts your balance off).

The second potential problem was the cliffs. If someone were to capsize,

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there was no beach or flat landing space they could swim to.

had it in my head that I was pushing myself too much, that I couldn’t do this.

Thirdly, the cliffs suggested a likelihood of rocks under the surface of the water. This meant if someone capsized, there was the potential problem of them hitting their head on a rock (though I will note we all had helmets on!).

The waves kept hitting me, over and over, each knock from a wave seemingly drumming into me my own self-doubt.

I panicked. My heart was racing in my chest and I kept concentrating on all the things that could go wrong. I 12

I paddled as hard as I could, always having been taught to paddle hard through any rough patches.

I'm lucky this was a group excursion through a

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kayaking group, and even luckier that my dad was on the trip. My Dad is my unofficial coach, and while kayaking is only a hobby for him, he undertook a solo expedition kayaking the Mackenzie River in Canada a few years ago, spending 10 weeks paddling and camping on his own in difficult conditions. I always feel safe next to him on the water.

So, while I was panicking on this trip, I reverted to being a

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kid again, asking my dad to make sure he was paddling near me in case anything went wrong. I fought back tears as my tired arms continued to push through the relentless waves "Arrgh I thought sea kayaking was supposed to be fun and relaxing!" I thought to myself, in amongst plenty of profanities and "I can't so this!!!" moments.

Then we turned a bend and we had made it. After what was probably only around 40 13

minutes of paddling (but felt a lifetime) we had reached the shelter of the marina, and were in calm, relaxing waters once again.

I took a big breath. I thought about what we had just done; what I had just accomplished.

It dawned on me that I was completely fine. I hadn’t capsized. I hadn’t had let my fears get in the way of my ability.

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My ability…I realised…I have that ability...actually...I CAN do this.

When I push past the fear and dig deep, I have more ability than I give myself credit for. I even decided that I absolutely LOVED the challenge the day brought me. Isn't hindsight a wonderful gift?!

Reflections I do a lot of mountaineering, both in the UK and abroad, and I know I have a strong

“small steps, like a group kayaking trip, can be a great way to push yourself in a safe environment.

One step at a time.”

mind when it comes to pushing myself up a steep

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mountain or through tough weather conditions.

But with kayaking I've always struggled with that. Since this Oban kayaking weekend, I have had a few situations on the water where I have felt myself become anxious and out of my depth. So, I look back in my memories of Oban and reminded myself of what I had achieved.

That time I paddled on and I grew, so I keep repeating to myself that I CAN do this, I DO have the ability and I do not need to panic. Just push on.

Pushing oneself There is a lot to be said in pushing yourself. Pushing your mind past those comfortable limits gives you an opportunity to really see what you are made of. And I bet you will be amazed at what you can achieve.

Photo courtesy of Susanne Jutzeler, suju-foto from Pixabay

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It doesn't have to be big leaps and bounds - small steps, like a group kayaking trip, can be a great way to push yourself in a safe environment. One step at a time.

I have never regretted a time when I've pushed myself outside my comfort zones.

It's led me to climb some epic mountains and experience some incredible paddling, across the world.

It's given me the opportunity to meet some truly inspirational people, many whom are now my adventure friends.

Above all, it has given me belief in myself and what I can accomplish. I carry that belief in every aspect of my life now, and it has all stemmed from trips like this, where I hope that everyone has the chance to confront their fears, dig deep and find that faith in themselves too.

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About Iona Nelson As well as kayaking, Iona is passionate about hiking. She freely admits that she’s not the most experienced person out there, but her passion, and knowledge, especially for high altitude trekking, increases every day. She is working towards her Mountain Leader Award, has climbed countless mountains across the UK and intends on completing the Seven Summits in the next 7 years.

You can follow Iona on the following social media channels: Website:

https://tentstreesandbumblebees.com/

Instagram:

@tentstreesandbumblebees

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/tentstreesandbumblebees/

How to get into kayaking, canoeing and paddle boarding If you want to get into kayaking, canoeing, or paddle boarding, or are looking to develop your skills, why not look up the website of organisations like British Canoeing, or The Royal National Lifeboat Institute (RNLI) and check out their tips. These types of organisations often also have links to training courses, tips on safety and (in the case of British Canoeing) even clubs.

Of course, there are lots more organisations you can go to and seek out information, and we encourage you to support safety and licensed training organisations in your country.

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The Big Interview Kristina PaltĂŠn Running Solo Across Iran

by Jessica Michael

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Last year, we received an email from Jessica Michaels stating: “Last year, I interviewed the Swedish runner Kristina Paltén, the first woman to run solo across Iran. Her 1,144-mile journey traversed not only a country we've been taught to see as an enemy, but her own fears, biases, and preconceived limitations. Ms. Paltén completed a physically and emotionally arduous feat, while engaging with a kind and vital people. Her story is remarkable, humanizing, and unique. With the threat of increasing hostility with Iran, it's become even more relevant today. I believe this story would be a wonderful fit for your magazine.

Please let me know if you are interested, and I will send it as well as the photo portfolio for your review.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Kristina Paltén’s experience is worthy of sharing as far and wide as possible. It’s taken us a while, but here finally, is that interview.

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“I’m the most scared person in the world. I like fear because it’s so complex. When I challenge myself to go outside my comfort zone, I’m afraid. Then fear shows me I’m on the right path. Then fear is a sign.”

This is how Kristina Paltén broke down how she ran solo across Iran for 58 days.

She isn’t talking about physical hardship, the kind that gripped her in 50° C heat as she loped along the glitter of the Caspian Sea, or the hunger that closed in between gaps in the Alborz Mountains. Paltén is speaking about something far darker.

“I was afraid of being raped, of being beaten. I was afraid of being thrown in prison, or that people would be angry and throw rocks at me. I thought terrorists were everywhere in the Muslim world, that they were dangerous to me.”

It’s a list of formidable boogeymen, a cacophony of demons that Paltén attempted to pin down in black ink.

Before the 2015 journey that made her the first woman to run solo across Iran, she wrote a list.

“I sat down and listed all of my fears because it felt like a giant mountain. When I wrote it out, it was 22 separate things I was afraid of. Only 22!”

She rated each from 1 to 100 and then attempted to reason with herself over each one.

“My plan was to jog with a baby stroller and sleep in a tent, but I felt very vulnerable that way. What if someone followed me?”

“So I realized, ‘Ok, don’t sleep in a tent! Sleep in a hotel if it’s available. Or ask people if you can sleep in their yard.

And if you do sleep in a tent, don’t sleep in the orange tent, it’s too noticeable. Sleep in the green one.’”

Paltén has run from Istanbul, Turkey, to Tenala, Finland, then paddled 306 miles from Tenala to Stockholm.

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She has climbed Aconcagua, a beast of a mountain in the Andes, the highest peak outside of Asia. She kayaked from Stockholm to Gothenburg in winter and holds two world records on the treadmill—one for 322.93 km completed in 48 hours, and the other 107.49 km in 12 hours. She’s spent her adult life wrestling physical and mental challenges, but it’s her 1,144 miles in Iran that catapulted her into a battle with her own biases.

“The media gives me one picture, which is the politics of a country. But this is only one small part. Iran is 82 million people. I thought they were all the same. My prejudices told me that ISIS was a big deal there. But Iran is predominantly Shiite Muslim, ISIS is Sunni Muslim. There is no ISIS in Iran. There are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. Not all of them are terrorists.”

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Unspoken is that Paltén is a Western woman traversing a country portrayed by global media as the epitome of an anti-democratic, misogynistic terror state. The very image of her slight Swedish figure running through streets crowded with men in salwars is enough to send shivers down the spines of conservative pundits.

It was enough to shake Paltén herself as she prepared to depart.

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“Right before I left, I panicked. There is always an irrational aspect of fear.

Sometimes you just have to jump into the cold water and do what you want to do.”

In a run where she averaged 37 km a day, Paltén’s first steps flattened her. The unknown ahead, filled with the potential for hostility and confrontation, shadowed her decision to do this

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unsupported. With no written or verbal understanding of the language, her alarm heightened into terror. So she did what she came to do.

She set her soles to pavement and continued. Instead of a wall of anti-European sentiment, Paltén discovered that an insular theocracy was far from her experience.

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“People fed me, ran next to me, gave me lunch to take with me. Hospitality is extremely important there.

Iranians are enormously friendly. To them, a guest is a friend of the future, and you don’t leave a friend alone. There were times when I had people sleeping next to me. It got to the point that I would take smaller roads away from the main routes just to have some time to myself.”

The tent she brought for shelter never got used.

“The intention was to be alone. In reality, there were so many people around me, including a group consisting of 50 Iranians all connected by Telegraph (similar to Messenger). There was always someone who knew someone, who knew someone, who lived where I was running.

I was sleeping at all these different families’ homes.”

Staggered by the reception she received, she was even more shocked that the country itself opened its arms to her. Newspaper articles and interviews brought knowledge of the trek to the public.

“They were very proud that I wanted to run in their country because they know that people in the West seem to see them as terrorists, and I was challenging that belief.”

She was also in the process of changing all of her own convictions.

“I would check back in weekly on those original 22 fears and rate them again. The fears that I would be raped, beaten–those went down from 80 on a scale of 100 to only a 10.”

She also witnessed sacrifice that gave the discomfort of sweat and foot sores an entirely new context.

“Families gave me food even when there wasn’t enough for them. That is extremely beautiful and painful. The first time this happened, I cried because I didn’t understand what was happening. I had money for food, money even to buy them food, but that would have been an insult to them.”

Eating what was intended for the starving gave an immediacy to helping out while honouring the tradition of hospitality.

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“In this case, the man in the family was a runner.

His shoes were full of holes and had been repaired many times. I was able to find out his size and favourite kind of running shoe. Before I left the country, we were able to make sure he got a pair.”

She settled into the embrace of the people, their quick and inherent reflex to offer succour. Her muscles found rhythm between coastal plains and foothills as she dodged the vehicular insanity that plagues the country’s roads. She met Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, and Persian people. Later, Gilaki and Balochi joined that list, a growing mosaic of culture that transformed her perception of homogeneity.

“We are individuals. It was pure lack of knowledge that made me think all of these people were similar.”

She stresses how easy it is to assign blame to entire groups whose members seem too foreign from our own.

A night on an unlit stretch of highway flung Paltén into just such complexities of prejudice.

“I was running a long distance, and it became dark. I was in the middle of a forest, no lights, nothing.

There were three men ahead of me, and one of them grabbed my baby jogger. He wanted me to come over for tea, but he was acting strangely. He must’ve been high on drugs.

It was late; I didn’t want to drink tea, I wanted to carry on. He insisted.

I was holding onto the jogger and trying to pry his fingers off, but he wouldn’t let go.

I didn’t like that, so I hit him. He let go, and I started running, and he ran after me and hit me, too.

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I just kept running. Then, he got on his motorbike and came driving after me, screaming. He passed me and then vanished. I was really scared. I thought, ‘He’s going to get his friends now. Will they attack me somewhere?’ I realized I had a monopod, and I put it on top of the jogger and thought, ‘If you come back, I will hit you. I will hit the shit out of you.’ He never did.”

The incident ignited the loneliness that she’d avoided for much of the trip, and it embodied every phantasm our collective paranoia creates: a lone white woman attacked by an enraged Muslim man in an Islamic country. It was a summation of every delicate warning Paltén’s friends and family had given her before she left.

“I never told anyone because people would have started to worry about me.

They would have tried to put restrictions on what I was doing. And in an Iranian court, the voice of a woman counts for only half the voice of a man.”

The reality of women’s enfeebled legal status scraped against the positive experiences she’d had so far. “Living in Iran, there is no democracy, no freedom of speech, no fair justice system. And that is terrible as well.”

Paltén faced a choice: to collapse back into engrained explanations of Islamic society, or to once more question her fears.

“What if I really am raped? Would that destroy my message? Would that prove that Muslims and the Western world don’t belong to each other? But if one man rapes me, it’s not a

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group, it’s not a religion, it’s not a people. That guy was a drugged individual who could have been anywhere. It’s his responsibility what he does.”

The tectonic plates of her mind had shifted. No longer was Iran a terrorist-infested, ethnocentric derelict of an empire. It was a society filled with differences, with minds that ached for recognition, and hearts that both soared and faltered. Stride after stride,

Paltén encountered kindness, generosity, suspicion, aggression, joy.

She uncovered a country filled with human beings in all their diversity.

It’s a message she wants to seed into world soil.

When she’d decided to embark on this voyage to untangle her own Islamophobia, she was approached by filmmakers André Larsson and Shamim

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Berkeh. Both were eager to take the concrete reality of Iranian life to the world. For eight days, she was joined by a local Iranian videographer, but much of the footage she took herself, guarding her original intent of a solo crossing. The result, Alone Through Iran: 1144 Miles of Trust, documents the connection of daily kindnesses and the transformation Paltén midwifed in her own mind.

Scenes of men dancing with

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her and women congratulating her pull up the roots of bias that dig their way into our belief systems.

“When I got back home, Sweden had closed its borders to foreigners, and I was so angry. Sweden is one of the richest countries in the world. I had just come from a place where poor people were giving me their food, and our politicians were saying we cannot afford to have our borders open?”

For Paltén, the movie is a technicolour reproach, a reminder of friendship between nations currently so estranged.

The film has been screened in Australia, Greece, the Czech Republic, and Sweden. In Russia, it won a

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prize for best documentary debut. Paltén’s book about her journey, Running Through Fear, co-written with journalist Desirée Wahren Stattin, has been published in Swedish, Spanish, Czech, and Dutch with German, Slovenian, and Persian translations coming soon.

Iranians still hold her close to their hearts, with Iranian TV (IRIB) recently filming a program about the run. What started out as one person’s search for the deceit within her fear has echoed into a global re-examination of our paradigm of Iran.

And Paltén didn’t stop there.

She teamed up with Swedish running organization Marathongruppen and Iranian runners, Mahsa Torabi, Susan Mosheni, and Amir Nazari to set up a 10k race for women in Iran.

Torabi took the torch when they ran into resistance and administrative difficulties.

On September 7, 2018, the race was held in Tehran, with both women and men on the starting line, an almost unheard-of occurrence since women were banned from public participation in sports over 40 years ago.

Paltén began her adventure to challenge herself physically and mentally, but it accomplished far more than that. She helped open the gateways of friendship between Iran and the world, turning her fear into global friendship.

Iran’s World Heritage Sites Did you know that in 2019 Iran had 24 places designated by UNESCO as World Heritage sites?

Hopefully one day, (this being written during the Coronavirus pandemic which has effectively shut down travel and tourism for now), the world will once again be open for us to experience and we’ll be able to travel without fear, or reprisal, wherever we go. Though alas, political, cultural and religious divisions are so enshrined, for safety purposes some nationalities might be unable to, or might be better advised not to visit certain countries (see you government’s travel advice, as to whether travel is not recommended to certain countries given your passport).

Meanwhile, why not take this opportunity to read up on the history and culture of places you would like to visit. After all, surely the more we know about the history, culture and identity of the places we visit, the more we can understand a place and hopefully the more we can get out of and give back during our travels.

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Photo courtesy of Soroush Morshedian

You can follow Jessica Michael at: Facebook:

@authorjessicamichael

Instagram:

@authorjessicamichael

You can follow Kristina PaltĂŠn at: Instagram:

@kristina_palten

Website:

https://palten.se/en/start-en/

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Scooting New Zealand’s South Island By Anne-Fleur van Diem

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Born in the Netherlands, Anne has called the UK home for the last 20 years. Always sporty, Anne couldn’t really imagine a life without exercise and adventure. Then in 2010, over a period of 3 months, she I went from doing trail races to not being able to walk.

Anne was ultimately diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), a disease where your own immune system attacks your body, in Anne’s case, her joints. It was so bad, during the first year of having RA, Anne couldn’t even tie her shoe laces or put on her jacket without help.

Anne says movement and exercise are actually good for RA sufferers. So, “after simmering in self-pity for the better part of a year”, she chose to once again be her “full self”, rather than a “half version of myself.” Starting with a 300 metre loop of her local park, over the next weeks and months, and as she started feeling stronger, Anne slowly increased her mileage. She even started setting speed goals. Week by week, month by month, year by year, Anne rebuilt herself.

Fast forward a few years and Anne decided to 6 months off to go travelling. But where to go and what to do? Inspired by hearing the scooting stories of other adventurers, as part of her travels Anne headed off to scoot New Zealand’s South Island, for she loved the idea of experiencing New Zealand at a slow but steady pace, rather than zoom through in a car or campervan.

Here rather than sharing a day by day account of her journey, Anne shares something far more important, key lessons she learned from her experience of planning for and scooting 830km (512 miles) of New Zealand’s notoriously ‘hilly’ South Island.

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Pre-Trip Planning – Love the Logictics I remember going to the adventure travel show the year before I went traveling, attending a workshop on tips & tricks to make the most of your adventure around the globe. One thing which was repeated many times, was to not use spreadsheets!

Meaning, to not plan everything down to the very last detail.

Instead allowing time to explore, take advantage of unexpected adventure invitations etcetera rather than cramming in what you think are the best bits of a country.

Saying all of that, for an undertaking such as kick scooting an island, there has to be some planning involved, not least to ensure you know the rules of the road and you try and avoid being a hazard to other road users.

Route, camp sites and food all had to be planned for, as were the daily distances I intended to do.

I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to go hungry or find myself in a situation where I had to call for help. Also, being on lifelong medication, I actually had to find out where I could have a blood test done (which had to happen every 3 months) so that my consultant could monitor my bloods whilst I was away!

So here are some of the things I did to ensure my scoot was as smooth a ride as possible.

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Keep in mind I had never been in New Zealand and had never before scooted anything more than 20 miles

hers in Wellington, who was happy to hold the scooter until I got there myself. Awesome!

Despite now having a shipping address, it all still took several months to arrange, from getting the scooter packed up, deciding on price, organizing receipt at the other end etc.

However, I couldn’t have done it without the amazing help and generosity of the team at Swifty Scooters who not only shipped my scooter, but also helped me pack it so that it arrived safe and sound in Wellington.

Pre-Trip Planning - Shipping As I was going to other countries before and after New Zealand, I had to work out what to do with my scooter, as I didn’t want to travel with it. But how to ship it to New Zealand and get someone to hold it for me?

I looked at potential locations and emailed hostels, ranger stations and even local guides to see if they would store the scooter. They were all surprisingly willing but New Zealand, as you’d expect being right at the end of the world, is so remote, shipping large items there is tough, especially to the South Island, so shipping companies charge a fortune.

Route planning So now I knew I would be able to pick up the Scooter in Wellington, the next stage was the route. I was very keen not to have to use Highway 1 as its the busiest road on the South Island and known for speeding and crazy tourists in campervans. I wasn’t going to submit myself to that.

So, after realizing getting the scooter to my desired location would be too costly, a fantastic colleague of mine told me about a friend of

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say I spent 100s of hours staring at online maps, google

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maps, questioning people on Facebook groups and planning out the route on Map my Run to get an idea of daily distances.

Dealing with tough decisions – Know your options

I also factored in rest every 4 days because, having rheumatoid arthritis, I wanted to give my body time to recover and rest.

I had planned for months. I knew the roads like the back of my hand from studying maps and calculating distances. However, the one thing no map could tell me, were the actual road conditions.

All in all, I think it came out at around 45km a day which is totally doable, but which I also knew would be tough in the beginning, as I had not done that much training and was relying on base fitness and hiking fitness picked up as I travelled the North Island.

My first big decision came at a road junction only 22 km into my journey. I’d set off from Blenheim, was heading for Molesworth - one of New Zealand’s oldest and remotest stations – and had just spent 4.5 hours plodding up and over Taylor Pass.

Whilst researching my route, I always thought about what would happen if I injured myself, my scooter got stolen, my tire would blow etc. etc. and had several contingency plans should any of that happen (like checking whether I could take my scooter on the bus!)

It turned out that about 10km of the 22km from Blenheim to the junction I was now at, was gravel, and deep gravel at that. With my heavily loaded scooter, I had to plough my way through it, as riding was not an option.

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As you already know, whilst researching my route, I’d considered what to do if things went wrong. Here I was on day one of my scoot and things were already going wrong.

hikers get lost and some even lose their lives going into the NZ bush!

Calling for rescue was something I only planned on doing if my life was really in danger, rather than because of my being stupid enough to go to a place like that on a kickscooter.

I had a dilemma. Option A was to scoot an unknown road which could be in an even worse state than the road I had just come from, and head to Molesworth. Option B was to go left and onto highway 1 and in 10km be in Seddon which I knew had a campsite and a shop.

After 20 minutes of considering the options, I realized it would simply be irresponsible to attempt Molesworth. So I turned left, disappointed my plans were already coming apart on day 1 of my scoot. But I knew it was the right decision to make at the time.

I desperately wanted to go to Molesworth, but it was so remote, what if I got into trouble? In fact, getting into trouble could mean I’d have to call for rescue if I managed to get mobile phone reception which is virtually non existent that deep into the high country. For that reason, I also carried a locator beacon. More for hiking than scooting, it was a recommended addition to your hiking kit as every year, many

During my scoot I made tons of decisions which I questioned later. Should I have done this, should I have done that. One decision I never regretted, however shitty it felt at the time, was not doing Molesworth.

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There is a fine line between throwing caution to the wind and going for it and finding yourself in a situation where you must call out rescue.

I had to figure out my next move, and bought some cake and coffee, stuffing my face and minding my own business. There weren't many people around, just me and a couple sitting a few tables away from me, and of course the ladies behind the counter.

So the moral of the story? Have a plan B, make decisions and stand by them. If you think you can do better, go back and do it again. What you want to avoid ideally is the embarrassment of being rescued when there’s no need for it.

Saying that, embarrassing situations are unavoidable in any adventure as I found out.

That’s when I felt a fart come on. It felt like it would be a small and inconspicuous one, so I let it go.

The trumpet quartet that reverberated around the cafe was as much a surprise to me as it was to everyone else there. I decided the best way to deal with this highly embarrassing moment was to look just as surprised as everyone else. I also really didn't think it had sounded like a fart, but judging by the glare of the lady behind the counter, perhaps it did?

Dealing with the embarrassing Those first few days, getting used to a new diet of freeze-dried meals and oat cakes, as well as muscles aching and spasming from all the exertion, my stomach was still a little unsettled at times. And it decided to make itself known at an appropriate time, chilling out at a roadside cafe and gas station in the small village of Ward.

What could I do other than give her an innocent look and carry on drinking coffee and eating my

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cake, though I made sure to avoid any kind of eye contact.

But being the height of summer, the town was pretty empty, with only a handful of tourists around.

Dealing with the seriously embarrassing

I arrived at my night’s accommodation, a selfcatering guesthouse, soaked to the bone and very tired. I was very ready for a nice rest day which would involve mostly sleeping, eating and reading.

No amount of pre-expedition planning or prior embarrassing moments can make up for the onset of post-scooting brain as I found out.

I had just finished one of the tougher days, scooting 43km in driving rain from a campsite in Glentunnel to the resort town of Methven.

Apparently during winter, (being close to the Mount Hutt ski field), this is the place to be.

After having checked in and sorted myself out, I chatted to the warden for a bit and he mentioned if I needed anything, he lived behind the hostel and waved in the general direction of the two houses at the back of the property.

That night, having gone to bed early, I woke around 1.30am for a pee. I walked out of my room in nothing but my underpants (I was the only guest there that night) and as I reached the bathroom, I heard the door of my bedroom slam shut behind me, and instantly knew I’d locked myself out of my room.

There I stood, in the hallway, pretty much naked, in the middle of the night. It took me a good 15 minutes to stop cursing my stupidity and consider my options.

On the couch downstairs there were a bunch of quilts. I considered sleeping there, but the prospect of some new guests arriving early the next morning put me off that idea. I could try and kick the door in, but that would cost money and frankly, was not very likely to be successful.

There was no other option but to try and wake the warden up, only whilst I knew he lived behind the hostel, I didn’t know which of the two houses was his!

I wrapped myself in the biggest bulkiest quilt I could find and stepped outside and through the still driving rain, ran to what I hoped was his house. He had mentioned that he had two

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dogs, and when I saw two dogs in the living room, I at least knew I was waking up the right person.

I knocked fiercely on his door. The dogs went mental. A slightly dishevelled warden opened the door to be surprised to find his only guest stood out in the rain wrapped in only a quilt.

I explained what happened and within 15 minutes, I was back in my room. Much thanks and apologies uttered throughout. Needless to say, the subject was avoided entirely the next day when I saw him.

Dealing with reality as opposed to romantic visions Scooting the South Island was a challenge in the sense that I set out to do something which required determination, fitness and doing distances day in/day out in order to get to my end point and keeping to those timelines.

You'd think that, riding a bright orange scooter across an island, you'd attract a fair amount of interest and making friends would be dead easy, bonding over adventures and drinking beers by campfires. The truth, as I found out, is rather different. It was very lonely at times.

On the road I was overtaken by cyclists all the time (however once I did overtake a cyclist which is still the highlight of my scooting career thus far!) but no one goes your speed. Hikers are too slow. Cyclists too fast (most of the time). I was in a sort of in between speed and couldn’t join either group.

I camped most days on actual campsites, and I met quite a few people - hikers, cyclists, locals on holiday. There were lots of merry chats but ultimately, we all headed off on our own journeys come morning.

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The landscapes and trail were amazing, but food time was dismal. I love food. LOVE it. So, to have to chew on bland, tasteless wraps and dry cookies was just terrible.

“There is a fine line between throwing caution to the wind and going for it and finding yourself in a situation where you must call out rescue.”

On the very last night, the night before walking out, I met a couple who were doing the track clockwise and so it was their first night on the trail. They had properly splashed out on food (or so it looked). Rather than disgusting freezedried coffee (sorry, I am a little bit of a coffee snob!), they had coffee bags. Basically, they're teabags with coffee in them and they're way better than any freeze dried. The wet food pouches turned out to be delicious and not even that expensive. And cheese, glorious cheese, oh how I had missed it.

Over time, that transient lifestyle left me feeling rather empty. I longed for more than just another chat with a stranger. I wanted to form relationships with fellow travellers the way you do when you're all heading in the same direction.

I am sure I could have been more proactive on this front, but the truth is that scooting is exhausting. I did between 45 and 50km a day and all I thought about is food, sleep and where I was heading the next day. My head was dulled at the end of a long hot day and whilst I loved talking to people, I was usually tucked up by 8, max 9pm.

That night was my first experience into the world of proper camp food. It isn't just about fast & light. And if it is, you are going to be rationing the underpants and t-shirts, NOT the food.

During a kayak trip months later, my guide brought out a little freezer bag of chopped fresh veg! I was amazed. I had never thought of taking vegetables into the bush as they are perishable and wouldn't last long. Whilst this is true, she said that at least you have the pleasure of some fresh crunch in your noodles the first few days.

It certainly wasn’t a romantic ‘alternative way of seeing the country' as I had kind of labelled it in my head prior to setting off on the trip.

Dealing with food when there’s no shops I know this article is about my scooting and what I learned from it, but I also went multi-day hiking in New Zealand quite a few times.

The next hike I did, that's exactly what I did.

My noodle dinners where elevated to Haute camping Cuisine!

On my very first multi-day hike, in the beautiful TeUrewera National Park on the North Island, I tried to go fast & light, taking only food that would sustain me for the hike(which doesn’t always mean it’s nice or tasty food).Afterall, fast and light to me meant eating enough carbs to do each day’s mileage. Man, what a miserable experience that turned out to be.

So, friends, please don't skimp on nice food!

Whether you are scooting, walking, running or cycling, you are working hard each day. You are going to go through some tough times (physically and mentally) and looking forward to your lunch or dinner might just be the way to lift you spirits.

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me the hotel was closed but weren't sure about the campsite. So, I decided to chance it.

Dealing with food deficit – caring for your body and mind

Those 10kms to Hurunui were hard. It was an incredibly oppressive day, heavy skies forever threatening to unleash bucketloads of rain, but never really following through. I was sweating

Having said all that, I’m one of those people who will push too hard, keep on walking, when actually I should stop and eat, refuel and rest.

One of these ‘ignore the body and mind’ episodes came about a week into my scoot, heading out of Hanmer Springs.

The start was mostly downhill and, riding on a wave of positivity and speed, I breezed into Culverden, which I had been told had a great little bakery, where they did some really good pies. I had a break, bought a coffee and donut and a pie for dinner.

It was my intention to scoot around 50km that day to a campsite next to a hotel in Hurunui.

Some people I chatted to at the bakery had told

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like a horse and the heat seemed to drain all the energy from me. So, whilst the first 35km took me about 2 hours, those 10km's took 1.5 hours which just shows you how slow going it was.

Waikari around 3pm that day having scooted 63(!) km.

I was exhausted. I scooted to the tiny community campsite, paid for a night, set up camp, showered and set myself down in the little communal kitchen. I was so exhausted I could just about eat the meat pie and a cuppa soup and collapsed in my tent at 7pm that evening.

And that was only the start of the misery.

Arriving at Hurunui, the place was completely deserted. The campsite and facilities were a building site and there was simply no one there. Considering how I felt, I really didn't fancy wild camping, so I decided to scoot on to Waikari which, at that point, was 'only’ another 17km away.

I was pretty much out of food and, with no grocery store close by, had decided to head on to Waipara the next day, 'only' 15km away, as there seemed to be a small grocery shop there.

I knew it would be hard and it was.

I woke up the next day with what felt like a hangover. It had also finally started raining, but despite this, I decided to go on anyway. After running the gauntlet over Weka Pass in the

After another 2.5 hours of scooting and a lot of walking in the intense, humid heat, I made it to

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driving rain, I arrived in Waipara and found the grocery store shut.

I again googled groceries and noticed Amberley was 10km away from where I was.

So even though I should have stayed put to refuel and rest, the next day I set off yet again.

It was a crappy day with strong headwinds, and I had to go on to Highway 1 for those 10kms to get to Amberley. Finally, the combination of stress of scooting on such a busy and dangerous road, the lack of food and the exhaustion got to me. I stopped and I cried.

After standing there for 10 minutes feeling sorry for myself, I scooted on.

This was turning into a bit of a disaster. I went to the local campsite and got myself a little hut - a bit of luxury after the last few days of physical exertion I thought. It turned out that that was probably not a good idea. Instead of focusing on the routine of getting the tent up, showering, preparing food, I allowed myself to relax completely.

And then I started realizing I was hungry. I was exhausted. I had pushed way too hard and I had not refuelled properly. I ate all the food I had left, which was a packet of oatcakes, one freeze dried meal and a little bit of chocolate. It was not enough, and with nothing to focus on, the tiredness really started to hit me.

1 hour later I sat myself down in a bakery in Amberley and ate as much as I could get into my belly. Meat pies, a gallon of coffee, custard pies, everything. It was glorious. And I felt so good after that I decided to go on to Rangiora, where there were several supermarkets and

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where I could take a well-deserved and long overdue rest.

again and that seemed a big price to pay for 'a fun way to get around New Zealand'.

Looking back on those few days, I am very proud of what I achieved but also realized that I should not push myself like that again. I am proud how my body coped with the relentless pressure my mind put on it. I am proud of how stubborn and focused I was on just getting it done, and that, despite my little 'episode' by the side of highway 1, I did not give up and eventually made it. I learnt valuable lessons as well. I could stay focused beyond exhaustion and (relative) hunger. And I vowed never to put myself in that situation again. It took several days of rest and eating a lot to feel strong

Getting back on the Scooter After finishing my scoot and packing up the scooter and sending it back to England, I felt that I wasn’t going to do that again. It was a valuable experience, but I did feel that as a result of it, I had missed out on at least some of the more traditional ‘back packing’ experience and that was a shame. There was definitely regret about how it had all turned out. I never did manage to quite reconcile the romantic idea of roaming the country on a kick scooter with the reality that it was in fact tough and challenging and very lonely.

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Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. I mean I bloody well scooted 512 miles! that's HUGE! and I am very proud of that and am glad I did it.

So, I have decided to gear up for another Scoot. This time a little closer to home though, scooting the Northcoast 500 in Scotland where I now live. Now I know what I’m in for, this one is for the challenge and the landscapes.

Another upside, I now know the difference between a challenge with a time limit, and an alternative way of transporting yourself through a place you’ve never previously been.

With renewed focus and a clear idea of what I will go through physically and mentally, I hope I am better prepared and can take better care of myself and just enjoy the ride.

Over the last few years, some of the tougher aspects of that journey have faded, and they have been replaced with the lighter and more fun aspects such as the silly embarrassing moments I found myself in, and the amazing landscapes, fabulous downhill sections, lucky encounters and friends I did get out of it.

I am looking forward to the physical challenge, the cursing as I push myself up the hills and the whoops and laughter as I speed down them.

About Anne-Fleur Van Diem As well as scooting New Zealand’s South Island, despite her rheumatoid arthritis, Anne has hiked to Everest Basecamp and Gokyo Lakes in Nepal. She is on medication and monitoring for the rest of her life. There are some things she can’t do anymore, but says that doesn’t mean she won’t try doing them all the same!

You can follow Anne on the following social media channels: Instagram:

@fleurcarpediem

Website:

www.annevandiem.blog

Where to find more information on Rheumatoid Arthritis You can obtain more information on rheumatoid arthritis, including stories by other people who are active whilst living with it, from the following websites Of course, there are a lot more websites available, but space means we can list only a few. We are making no suggestions and giving no endorsements about these, merely giving examples of where people can look for more information.

National Health Service

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/rheumatoid-arthritis/

National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society:

https://www.nras.org.uk/

Arthritis Foundation

https://arthritis.org/diseases/rheumatoid-arthritis 39

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UNESCO Feature Peru’s Nazca Lines

By Jane Harries

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In a land far far away, in a place with one of the driest deserts one earth, lies a phenomenon which has provided debate amongst scholars for almost a hundred years.

Its name? The Nazca lines.

The lines, also known as geoglyphs, vary in shape and size It’s estimated there’s about 70 depicting animals and plants, including a monkey, a spider, and a dog.

There are also around 300 geometric shapes and over 800 straight lines.

In modern times, the lines were first studied by a Peruvian archaeologist,

Image courtesy of Caroline Powell and Noel Waterston

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Toribio Mejia Xesspe. in 1926 or 1927 (we’ve seen both dates given).

The lines are difficult to see from ground level. Their popularity, including with researches, only really took off when flying became more common in the 1930’s, for pilots (and presumably passengers) flying over Peru would see this incredible ‘thing’ out there in the desert.

Nowadays as well as flying over the lines, it’s also possible to view them from a tower, or nearby hillsides.

With flying though, one can get a better understanding of their vastness and magnificence.

Researching the reason for the Nazca lines has proved challenging, for there are so many different opinions.

How can an amateur definitively decide why they were created, when not all experts have agreed?

Early researches appeared to favour astronomical calendar reasons. In the 1960’s aliens and ancient astronauts were touted as being responsible for the lines. Since then ritualistic purposes such as praying for rain, more water and fertility, have been espoused.

When they were created is also disputed, with various texts giving different dates.

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The ones we’ve read appear to agree that most of the lines were created by the Nazca people. Whether they lived in the area from 200BC to AD 600, or AD1 to AD700, or at some other time within that period depends on which text you read.

Whilst this might sound pedantic on our part, 200BC and AD1 are 200 years apart. The US declaration of Independence in 1776 is only 244 years ago. The first car ever made was by the German Karl Benz in 1885, a mere 135 years ago. A lot can happen in 200 years!

There does however seem to be a consensus that lines were also created by other people including the Paracas and Chavin, both of, which preceded the Nazcas .and possibly settlers from Ayacucno which supposedly arrived around 630AD. So how have the lines survived all this time?

The land surface of the desert where they are situated, is rust coloured iron oxide coated pebbles. But when you dig down, even for a foot to 15 inches, or about a third of a metre, you encounter subsoil that’s more yellowish grey. This layer hardens when it’s exposed to early morning mists, because of the high quantity of lime it contains.

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global scale due to climate change.”

More destruction has happened since, when a truck driver drove onto some of the lines in 2018.

The hardening process means the lines dug into this lower layer are preserved and safeguarded from natural phenomena such as wind erosion.

However the lines, of which there are hundreds, are still vulnerable. In 2009 one of the over 70 pictorial images a hand - was damaged after heavy rains which pushed around sand and clay, some of which accumulated on the hand shaped geoglyph.

In 2014 the area next to the hummingbird geoglyph was damaged following a climate change action event organised by Greenpeace.

They subsequently apologised and stated on their website “Greenpeace offers its sincere apologies to the people of Peru for our action about climate change carried out at the famous Nazca Lines. This action was a mistake, and should never have happened.”

Greenpeace continued “The action took place on the occasion of at a climate conference in Lima, where government leaders had a historic opportunity to tackle the effects of climate change.” Our intention in choosing Nazca for the activity was to pair a message of climate urgency and existential threat to humanity with an artefact from an ancient civilization.

What happened to the Nazca people on a local scale could happen to mankind on a

So, what do we at Adventure She take away from all this?

It’s that people have been creative for centuries, millennia. It’s important, we respect the treasures of our ancestors and that we learn from them, wherever they are situated in the world.

Whatever you do, if you ever organise an event, whether sanctioned or a protest, please do consider all aspects before organising it, including the impact on the land where it is being held.

There has already been enough destruction in this world, let’s not add to that destruction.

Image courtesy of Caroline Powell and Noel Waterston

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Food, diets, ultrarunning and the mind

by Katherine Harrison

Ultra-runners, you know the type, skinny as, who leap and bound over the roughest of terrain. Or is that true?

Actually, yes there are ultra-runners like that, but for many more, ultra-running is about being out there in nature regardless of their shape or size.

In this article harpist (yes, she’s a seriously good musician) Katherine Harrison, shares how she got into ultra-running and how ultra-running helped her come to terms with her own body issues.

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I never thought in a million years I would become a rock climber, a motorbike racer or an ultramarathon runner.

I had severe asthma, and as my dad politely described me, I was built for comfort, not for speed.

Actually, I spent most of my childhood sat behind either a piano or a harp and most memories of my teenage years involve music. There’s memories of the battles with my mum over not doing enough practice and there’s memories of all those long train trips to London for yet another music lesson at the junior department of one of the prestigious music college. There I’d be alternately shouted at, or encouraged. Whilst I loved music, what I really wanted though, was to hang out with my friends.

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really wanted to be good at, but which I couldn’t get the hang of. I put myself under a stupid amount of pressure and attempted my first trad lead climb before I was ready. I should have backed off, but I was climbing with three guys and I didn’t want to wimp out. I was used to being good at everything – high achiever at school, good at music etc. I had an awful accident, making a dreadful mess of myself.

only wanted to climb what I felt comfortable climbing.

After I recovered, I climbed again, but it wasn’t the same.

By now I knew what I really enjoyed was the walk in, being out in the hills and then going to the pub afterwards.

I didn’t want to be scared part way up a rock face. I

To this day I have no idea what appealed about a triathlon, but I decided that’s what I would do. I figured that if, or more likely when, cancer came knocking for me (statistically speaking, is there after all a really high

I didn’t realise it at the time, but my love of music and all those hours spent practicing kept me away from the drug and alcohol problems my friends developed. It turns out that my own addictions and desires to escape were to take a rather different form, the form of climbing, motor bike racing and ultrarunning.

At university I joined the climbing club. Climbing was probably the first thing I

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After many years living in the flat lands of Essex (East of the UK), both my aunty and my uncle were diagnosed with lymphoma within a couple of years of each other (not hereditary, they’re married to each other, just really bad luck). There diagnosis pushed me to do some fundraising for a cancer charity.

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chance), I wanted to be as fit as I possibly could be.

However, the only exercise I had done for many years was walking an increasingly elderly and slow-moving greyhound, and even that was only part-time - when I split up from my husband, he got custody of the dog.

Before I started training, I thought I’d fall in love with the cycling more out of the three activities. My dad is a very keen cyclist and had

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done a lot of amateur racing when I was younger, and I was a big Tour de France fan. Instead, I was stunned to discover that it was running that stole my heart.

It was a pretty brutal start - I could barely run a couple of hundred metres before my lungs burned. But there was something about the simplicity of it that drew me in. Putting my shoes on, not having to worry about roads or punctures or gears, and

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spending summer evenings running around the farmers’ fields where I lived.

The triathlon itself was a disaster. I nearly drowned in the sea swim, but I was allowed to complete the bike and run legs untimed.

Soon after that, I moved to Glasgow, and thanks to a triathlon forum, I discovered an informal mixed ability offroad running group that met not far from my new house.

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In my first week, I was staring at the mountains around Loch Lomond as I ran, and my heart remembered how good it felt to work hard to get myself uphill, and how good it felt to make it to the top, and how good it felt to look down at the world from up high.

All I needed to do was to put my running shoes on, step outside my front door and I was literally in a whole new world.

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I wasn’t a fast runner by any means, in fact I was (and still am) one of the slowest. But I was welcomed into a new community of people who loved to do something different with their spare time.

The distances got longer, then as confidence in my own ability and self-reliance grew, the mountains got higher and more remote.

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Just as in the past when I’d been welcomed by climbers and motorbike racers, it soon became clear what mattered was the passion we shared about our running and the mountains. It wasn’t about how “good” I was at running, it was about spending time with people who understood why you did what you did.

We supported each other when we fell and hurt ourselves, and we supported each other when the goals

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became bigger and scarier.

Mostly we all just understood why we did it.

Something else came too. I wouldn’t call it body confidence, maybe body acceptance. I have struggled with my weight and I thought it was normal to be worried about how much I weighed and what I looked like. In fact, I have some fairly deeply ingrained body image issues. I only recently

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realised that perhaps my body and diet issues was because I’d grown up surrounded by diets. Like many a person, my mum tried every possible diet in the 1980s and so I’ve been aware of calorie counting diets plus ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods, since I was very young.

a total couch potato who spent her free time doing music practice. I never exercised and when working late, I skipped meals and instead ate junk late at night.

Before I took up running (when training for that disaster of a triathlon), I was

The change didn’t come over night. Initially there was still a constant desire within me

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Now though, I feel better about my body – I appreciate what it can do and how strong it is.

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to be a different shape / build and a deeply held belief that if I could just lose weight, my life would be so much better.

I remember the exact moment when I realised, I had fundamentally changed as a person. It was the last day of November, the start of winter. My friend Sally and I were hiking up the side of the Cobbler, a very distinctive Corbett (see side bar) in the Arrochar Alps in Scotland.

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It was cold, wet, and we couldn’t see a thing. I was in my walking boots, but just for a brief but highly significant moment as I hiked up that Scottish mountain (dressed for the cold wet conditions, and ready to turn back if we encountered ice, for which we weren’t equipped), I wished that instead of hiking, I had my running shoes on, for I felt like a runner.

Running in the mountains has brought me acceptance.

I now accept there’s no point

in fighting my natural body shape. Instead, I focus on looking after myself a lot better than I used to, because I don’t want my body to let me down when I’m out doing the things I love.

As for the running, I’m still a slow runner. I doubt I’ll ever get much faster, but I’m absolutely fine with that.

There are always new hills to discover, even in a small country like Scotland, and that’s the bit I love the best.

About Katherine Harrison Katherine is an accountant and harpist living in Glasgow. She describes herself as a slow but enthusiastic runner.

You can follow Katherine on the following social media channels: Instagram: @harrieharpist Website: katherineharrison.co.uk

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Mental Health and Food If you have any concerns about your own mental health, or the mental health or another person, why not check out the link below, which will take you to the website of a leading UK mental health charity and articles they have on: • •

the role of food in mental health; and problems with a person’s relationship with food.

Remember, if you or someone you know has an issue with food, you / they are not alone. So go on, seek out those resources.

Mind is also an useful source of information for other mental health issues too, and with so many people concerned and having anxiety issues over Coronavirus, Mind is one example of a place you can go, for tips on how to manage these.

Finally, please don’t be scared, if you have any mental health issues, do discuss them with your doctor. Yes doctors are busy, but they are also there to help. https://www.mindcharity.co.uk/wellbeing-article/food-and-mood/

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About Ultra Running Ultramarathons are anything over a marathon (26.2 miles) in length. Typically they are from 50km/31 miles upwards, and can be over 100 miles long. Often they take place off road, either on trails or mountain paths or more technical terrain that can include scrambling/moderate climbing.

Sometimes they are referred to as an eating competition with a bit of running thrown in, or a running picnic, due to the need to manage your fuelling over a long period.

The ultramarathon scene in Scotland is quite close knit and is very supportive – all shapes and sizes and ages compete together regularly.

What Is a Corbett?

A Corbett is a hill of a certain height in Scotland – not quite a Munro – between 2500-3000 feet. They are often more serious undertakings than Munros as they have to have a certain amount of prominence around them so you can’t do a long chain of them as you can with the Munros.

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Setting the Female Fastest Known Time on New Zealand’s Te Araroa Trail By Lucy Clark When a friend from donkeys years ago gets in touch and tells you he knows a woman who’s running the length of New Zealand’s Te Araroa trail, what do you do? When you’re an editor of an adventure magazine, the answer is you start following them on social media. The Adventure She team was so impressed with Luc Clark’s effort, we had to approach her and ask if she’d write an article .

She didn’t just say yes. She wrote it promptly and brilliantly, at least we think so. Subsequently, she answered two lots of questions we sent her, as well, we think she’s amazing and we wanted to know more.

So sit back and relax, we think you’re in for a treat.

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The sky was dark, and the waves crashed over cragged rocks, spraying salty water everywhere. I was clinging to the side of a rock, waiting for a break in the waves.

“Lucy! No! Come back.”

I turned to see Tommy, fear etched across his face. I retreated quickly and immediately started bawling my eyes out… again.

It’s day one. I’m three kilometres into my 3,000km run across New Zealand and I have already cried six times. Geez, this is going to be a long trip.

Yes. You read that right.

A 3,000km run across New Zealand. My route followed the Te Araroa, which means “the long pathway”, and runs from Cape Reinga at the tip of New Zealand’s North Island down to Bluff at the bottom of the South Island. It takes in some of New Zealand’s most beautiful but rugged terrain, including the Tararua Ranges, Queen Charlotte Track and the Southern Alps. Some of the trail is manicured but a lot is unformed and way off the beaten track. And if it doesn’t already sound hard enough, the total elevation is equivalent to summitting Everest nine times. Yikes.

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The TA is a popular throughhike. However, there are a handful of crazy folk, like myself, who run it instead.

My plan was to set the female Fastest Known Time (FKT) by completing it in under 70 days. That averages to a marathon.

Every. Single. Day. But due to the varying terrain, my schedule had me running between 20 to 70kms a day. To put into perspective how big, hairy and audacious this goal was, the furthest I had ever run was 56km. I did this once, in a race, and I didn’t have to back it up the next day.

Double yikes.

But I wouldn’t be doing it on my own. My husband, Tommy, would be my support crew. He would follow me the entire way in a small campervan which was our home for three months.

Most nights I would spend in the van and there would be times when the trail was too remote and I would have to stay in backcountry huts.

So back to day one.

How did I fare? I would love to say it was triumphant, but it was the opposite. I was a ball of nervous energy who burst into tears an embarrassing number of times. The problem was I was thinking about the entire

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3,000kms; the enormity of it overwhelmed me. Anxiety, something from which I had suffered since I was 18, started to rear its ugly head. I was scared of failing. But standing on the start line, there was no other option but to get on with it. After some gentle encouragement from Tommy, I was on my way.

Like any good story, there were a few more mishaps on day one. First, Tommy wasn’t able to access our first meet point at the 40km mark. I arrived at the empty campsite and, just as my stress levels skyrocketed, I got one bar of reception and a text message popped up.

Keep running along the beach. I will meet you in 10km or so. It’s ok.

I kept running along the beach, towards the haze of nothingness. After what felt like a lifetime, I saw a lone figure running towards me with his arms open. Tommy had driven to the end point, hitched a lift 10kms up the beach and then run another 10kms to meet me.

After feeding me a croissant, we regrouped to complete the final 20kms. There was now a massive headwind, so I cowered behind Tommy the whole way.

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This continued for the whole first week.

Every morning started with tears.

I struggled to eat. I stressed about getting lost, about the upcoming estuary crossings.

I felt lonely. I was worried I would fail. After planning and training for years, I wasn’t enjoying my epic adventure.

But as the days went on, I started to have moments of joy. Running through the muddy Raetea Forest.

Seeing the beautiful Rainbow Falls on the Kerikeri River trail. Wading through the peaceful Papakauri Stream in the Russel Forest and meeting Natalie Gallant, who was running the trail selfsupported.

On day eight, something changed.

We reached the campsite at 5:30pm. I had run 69kms – the longest I had ever run in a day. I was totally wrecked.

Despite not getting a single blister in my 11 months of training, I had developed three blisters on the first day.

How the hell was I going to keep this up for 70 days?

Day two was no better. I ran 30km along the beach followed by 26km on a state highway. With no verge or barriers, I spent the entire time running in the gutter.

But the terrain wasn’t the worse thing; I simply was not having fun.

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I ran 57kms and I felt strong.

It wasn’t an easy day by any means – I started off on another energy-draining beach followed by sealed roads and undulating, sunexposed fire trails. But I powered along the trail.

Running along the beautiful Mangawhai Coastal Track towards the day’s finish line, I whooped with joy. I was having fun.

My mum gave me a quote: Eat the elephant one bite at

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a time. It was just what I needed to change my mindset. I stopped focusing on the whole 3,000kms.

Instead I focused on just getting to the next meet point in 10, 20 or 30kms time.

Every step was one step closer to Bluff.

The days started to tick by.

Don’t get me wrong, there were still hard times – like the final 6kms into Te Kuiti where the route went over every single hill in the region, or getting zapped by an electric fence, when straddling it, on my youknow-where. But I was able to cope better with these moments knowing they were temporary.

Another gamechanger?

People started joining me on the trail. The first were Paul and Tracey in Owera, then Stu in Silverdale who accompanied me across the Okura Estuary, Rusty, Mary and Brendan in Hamilton and Jenny in Auckland. Sharing the trail with these new friends made the kilometres fly by.

Shared experiences are better experiences I had been counting the days until Day 19, when my friend, Caz, arrived from Australia.

We ran 44kms along the Timber Trail, chatting,

laughing and taking in the amazing suspension bridges.

We drank beers and ate burritos in the evening sun, and for four days, I felt like I was on holiday. Even our drizzly hike over the Tongariro Crossing – complete with gale-force winds and fog – was fun with

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someone else to share the experience with.

The day Caz left, I had a mini meltdown. The only consolation was that, after running 54kms, Tommy and I would kayak along the Whanganui River together for three days. This was a much-needed mental break

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Tommy who’d done literally everything for me for the past 23 days.

There was no reception. No logistics to worry about. Just floating down the river. It was like taking a deep breath.

(Though my pencil arms were dead by the end!)

A wrong turn Our next support crew landed on Day 28. For five days, Ez and Steve took on the responsibility of cooking, driving and generally mothering me, with no complaints. Ez joined me on the trail while Steve kept Tommy company. Having a second driver also freed up Tommy to do some running, including in the dreaded Tararua Ranges.

The Tararua Ranges are notorious. Steep, muddy, and rooty, with weather that deteriorates in a heartbeat.

Thankfully, the weather gods were looking down on us and the forecast promised three sunny days.

Packing for three days in the mountains took longer than we anticipated, so we didn’t hit the trail until 10am. That was our first mistake. We carried everything on our backs: sleeping bags and mats, wet weather gear, spare clothes, first aid and food. Lots and lots of food.

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Bidding farewell to our legend crew, we were greeted by lovely shady forest with shallow stream crossings, which we leapt across trying to keep our feet dry. Then it was 5km of road before officially entering the Ranges.

As we ran, a car pulled up.

The owner of the local outdoor centre asked where we were headed and we told him we were aiming for Te Matawai Hut. Visibly surprised, he advised it was normally an eight-hour hike.

It was already 4pm. We didn’t have a tent and there were no other shelters on the way. We could tell he wanted to strongly advise us against it.

We put the foot down and hit the base of the main climb at 5pm and started heading up, confident we would be in the cosy hut by at least 9:30pm.

At 6:30pm, I checked the map. We were off the trail.

Uh oh. The trail notes had warned about going up the wrong path, towards a hut on the old TA trail. We had done exactly that.

I started to panic but Tommy stayed calm. We bombed back down, reaching the bottom at 7:30pm. We had lost 2.5hrs, but without a tent, our only real option was to push on.

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So, off we trudged up the correct track.

Dark was descending but a full moon meant we didn’t have to pull out our head torches until 9pm. Then, all the trees dropped away and we ran along a ridgeline with views all the way to the coast. It was peaceful and beautiful and, despite our desperation for the hut, we took a moment to enjoy it.

It was almost midnight when we finally found the hut. After a quick baby wipe shower on the veranda, we snuck inside and clambered onto the only two empty beds. As I laid down my aching body, the guy next to me let out a huge snore.

Despite being dead tired, the following day was one of the most memorable.

The trail was hard – only 20kms – but it took 11 hours.

However, it was heartachingly spectacular as it primarily ran along ridge lines with vast views. We arrived at the wonderful Waitewaewae Hut at 7:30pm, jumped in the river to wash off, and ate salami and cheese wraps for dinner.

We reunited with Ez, Steve and the van, and the final few days on the North Island were fun. Ez and I ran the spectacular Escarpment

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Track and took in windy Colonial Knob as we edged every closer to Wellington.

There, I met and ran with Mina Holder, the previous FKT holder. Mina and I first connected over two years ago, and she was a major source of inspiration and help when planning the trip.

Mina and her hubby, James, welcomed Tommy and I into their home, fed us bangers and mash, and even gave me a massage.

One island down. One to go.

The South Island You’d think that after running the entire North Island in 34 days, I would have some confidence going into the South Island, right? Wrong.

We boarded the Interisland Ferry a few hours after completing the North Island.

And I instantly unravelled. I got super stressed out about the next section. About the mountains. About the river crossings.

Tommy tried to console me without success. I talked to a friend back home, who pointed out that I seemed to have these meltdowns only when stationary. My mind would run away when it had too much time to think.

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But before I could get too deep into my own head, the first day of South Island started out with a bang.

Tommy chaperoned me to a small tourist transfer boat, which ferried me to the start of the stunning Queen Charlotte Track.

It is also here where I joyfully picked up our friends, Nicki and Mat. Having these two close friends from back home was an amazing boost.

But even then, at the very back of my mind, I knew that having them around would make it even harder when they left. But that was a while off yet so I just got on with having as much fun as I could.

Richmond Ranges With Nicki and Mat by my side, I ventured into the infamous Richmond Ranges.

They are known for very steep and technical terrain – arguably the hardest in the whole country. Just as we were getting ready, the sky opened up and we got torrential rain. Rivers rose, roads flooded.

We talked through what we should do – wait or go – but all agreed it was a no brainer to wait. I got some comfort in making a smart call, but it also highlighted one of my biggest fears: rising rivers.

Instead of heading into the

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mountains, we ran 12km to the trailhead and spent the afternoon hanging around the tiny village of Havelock, drinking coffee and the odd beer. It was a good tonic for my nerves and another great unplanned memory.

The following day we went for it. Lucky for us, this terrain was similar to what we have back home – mountains, mountains and more mountains – so we felt like we were in our element.

The only difference was that we would be staying in huts for three nights, so we had to carry all our kit and food with us.

Day 1 was a breeze.

Day 2 featured three big climbs including going up the screen covered Little Rintoul (which was not little) and Mt Rintoul. These were slow but the views made up for it.

Day 3 was memorable for good and bad reasons. Bad because we had to do seven crossings of the Wairo River, which was flowing incredibly fast. These crossings are mentally taxing and we were all exhausted by the end of the day. Good because we had absolutely stunning views that stretched right to the coast from the top of Red Hill.

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Day 4 was a death march.

We just wanted to get to the van.

Nelson Lakes Next up was Nelson Lakes, including the mighty Waiau Pass. Unfortunately, Mat succumbed to shin splints, so it was just Nicki and I heading out for two nights.

We were on a mission. My schedule dictated four days but we agreed to try for three so we could have Christmas Day off.

Day 1 was easy and we made it to West Sabine Hut in good time.

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and keep going to Anne Hut, which was 22km away.

We ran-walked our way to Anne Hut under the dying evening sun and arrived at 9:45pm. We had been on our feet for nearly 16 hours. But our exhaustion was shortlived – the next day was only 30kms to Boyle Village, where the boys would meet us and we would have a rest day on Christmas Day! We arrived at 2:30pm and had a beer in hand by 3:30pm at the campsite. Bliss.

Christmas Day was lovely. I slept in to 10:30am and basically ate for the rest of

Day 2 was hard. Really hard.

Huge chunks of the trail up to Blue Lake had collapsed into the river which sent us bushbashing around them. It took us over three hours to get through a section which would normally take half that.

We were literally crashing our way through walls of bushes.

Then we took on the Waiau Pass, a huge scree slope.

After a slow climb, we took an equally slow, boulder hopping descent down to the river, which we followed all the way to Waiau Hut. We arrived at 4:30pm but all the bunks were taken. Would we push on or sleep on the floor? We decided to risk it

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the day. But inevitably, by late afternoon I started to get distracted, thinking about the days ahead.

Rock bottom Nicki and Mat left on Boxing Day and I headed out for three days alone. I was a total mess. There were tears that morning – the type of crying that sounds more like you are hyperventilating. I didn’t want to go. I was scared of being alone. I was stressed out about the river crossings. I was hugely anxious. This was my lowest point of the trip.

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Thankfully Tommy accompanied me for the first 12km, which included two river crossings, which were, of course, totally fine. Then I was on my own. To be honest, the three days are a blur. I just put my foot down and legged it from hut to hut.

I didn’t stop to enjoy the scenery or take anything in. I simply wanted to get it done.

To get to the next hut where I would hopefully meet another hiker, so I had someone to talk to.

Thankfully I teamed up with one, Mark, to do the final river crossing. Again, it was totally fine. Talk about making a mountain out of a mole hill, Lucy!

Getting my mojo back Gradually things got better.

The next day, I teamed up with some local runners to take on the mighty Goat Pass. It was brilliant. I began to realise that, whilst I was physically alone on the trail at times, I wasn’t really alone at all. I had friends and family all rooting for me. In fact, there were people I didn’t even know supporting me, like these runners who drove for two hours to run with me.

I summitted the highest point of the trail. I tackled the Two Thumb Range by myself and ran along the most beautiful

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single track drinking in view over the crystal blue Lake Tekapo and Mount Cook. In other words, I got my mojo back.

Of course, there were still difficult moments.

Like when my worst nightmare came true – I fell when crossing Bush Stream.

As I went to take a step forward, I lost my footing and before I knew it, I was submerged in the river. I managed to instinctively lunge forward onto a shallow bed of rocks. I stripped off my pack and jacket, and sat on the riverbank for five minutes, completely shaken.

I ate a sandwich, put my pack back on and went on to tackle four more crossings.

I also ran what was possibly the worst trail of the trip: the Mararoa River Track. Don’t let the name deceive you– it was not a track. I was pushing my way through should high grass, falling into thigh deep boggy marshes and bashing my way through gorse bushes, which are basically giant prickle bushes. It was poorly marked so I was constantly second guessing if I was going the right way. Oh, and it started pissing down with rain. This went on for 18kms. I was completely drenched and

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frustrated. A cup of tea has never tasted so good as it did when I finally got to the van!

In the final weeks we also had an influx of friends and family join from Australia and the UK. They made the whole experience super positive. There was no room to get worried about anything.

We also covered some of the most beautiful sections of the trail – Breast Hill, Motatapu Ranges, Arrowtown. The overnights became something I looked forward to because I was sharing it with friends. It was fun.

Super fun.

Day 63 was one of my favourite days. It was through the Longwood Forest. We had been warned of knee-high mud and bogs.

Tommy joined me for the day and we had a ball – jumping over puddles and traversing our way around muddy pits.

It was like a game and I felt like a big kid. The 56km flew by.

I can honestly say, the final day was one of the best in my life.

I had run 20kms extra the day before to make sure my

last day was just a cruisy marathon.

Okay, the terrain wasn’t inspiring, but Tommy joined me for the entire journey. It felt so fitting that he was by my side for the final day.

First up was 9kms on a busy road. Then 10kms on a gravel walkway with our friend, Laura. We took photos and chinked champagne glasses filled with lemonade.

Then it was 16kms on a state highway, which happened to be very popular with logging trucks.

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We leapt off the road every few minutes to avoid being mown down.

Finally, it was 7km across farmland onto a coastal track to the Bluff signpost. We took our time, taking in the scenery, chatting about the

trip, video calling my parents in Australia.

The very last kilometre was brilliant. Friends laid out signs for me with silly quotes which made me laugh. As I rounded the final bend, I was emotional for a second but

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then I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. A group of Girl Guides lined up along the path and I gave them all high fives. I hugged my crew. I hugged Tommy.

66 days. 7 hours. 8 minutes.

I had beaten the previous

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record by over 11 days. It was one of hardest things I had ever done, but in ways I could never have imagined.

I had expected it to be physically tough. But while it was, after the first week, I knew my body could handle it. I never expected it to be so mentally tough. I never expected to feel so lonely on the trail. I never expected for my anxiety to come back with such vengeance. I thought I was stronger.

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What I learned is that having anxiety doesn’t make me weak. And that my anxiety will always be there, but I am now much better equipped to overcome it. I’ll no longer expend energy stressing about things that might happen. Instead I will stay present and know I can problem solve when things pop up.

go on. What else I can achieve.

So, what’s next?

Watch this space.

All of this makes me excited.

Excited to think about what other crazy adventures I can

A Big Thank You Lucy would like to give a big thank you to each of her sponsors, Clifbar, Hoka One One, Nathan Sports, Bright Brewery, Bright Physiotherapy and Soek Sunglasses.

How To Follow Lucy Clark On Social Media You can follow Lucy on the following social media channels: Instagram:

@adventurous_lucy

Facebook page:

Adventurous Lucy

Website:

www.adventurouslucy.com

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Q&A with Lucy Clark What kit including food did you carry when running for 1 day and staying in the van?

Top tips for trail running?

I wore a Nathan Vaporhowe 12L vest and would carry waterproof jacket and trousers, buff, gloves, first aid, spot tracker, phone, back up battery, Clifbars and bloks, lollies, 2 x peanut butter and honey sandwiches, crisps, 1.6L of water. If I didn't see the van for the entire day, I would take extra food.

This is a hard one, but I would say that trail running is very different to road running. On the trail, you should forget about pace and focus more on your perceived effort. Due to varying terrain, your pace is likely to be all over the place. Also invest in a good pair of trail shoes to make sure you have good grip which will give you confidence!

How much did that weight?

Top tips for multiday trail running?

Never weighed it but would guess 3kgs

My two priorities were getting 9-10 hours of sleep a night and making sure I get enough calories in. This meant my body was able to keep going day after day. My other top tip is to break the trip down into smaller, bitesize pieces. Just focus on getting from check point to check point (vs looking at the entire trip).

Did you have your own compulsory kit list like waterproofs, first aid kit, x amount of calories?

Yes, we had lists for when I was going out for a day vs going out overnight.

Did you hire / buy a van? How many did it sleep?

Did you change shoes / type of shoes for various sections?

We hired a campervan which slept 4 people.

For most of the time, when friends visited, they slept in a tent to just allow some extra room, but we did have one night when there was torrential rain so 4 of us slept in the van. It was VERY cost!

I rotated between 4 different models of shoes.

They were: Hoka Rincon for the road; Hoka Torrent for majority of the off road sections; Hoka Evo Mafate for the really rooty and muddy forests; Hoka Challengers for fire road or days when I would run both on and off road and am not able to change shoes;

What did you eat for breakfast, on the trail, for dinner when in the van?

How did you keep sand out of your shoes?

Breaky on trail: Muesli with powdered milk, followed by some chocolate! Breaky in the van: Porridge with sultanas and cream. Coffee.

I wore shoe gaiters which help, but aren’t 100% so sand still gets in!

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What did you eat for dinner, on the trail, for dinner when on multiday sections?

2) Falling over when crossing a river. That was insanely scary!

What would you do differently?

Usually it was wraps with salami and cheese or boiled potatoes with packet tuna. This was followed by some crisps, a bowl of cereal and at least half a block of chocolate.

I spent a lot of time and energy stressing out about things that were coming up (like river crossings) and about things that might happen (like falling when crossing a river or not being able to cross). 99% of these things never came true so this was wasted energy. I think I will be a lot more relaxed and present in future adventures, and simple problem solve when things come up (vs worrying about them ahead of time)

How much did your pack weigh on multiday sections and what pack did you use?

Again, we never weighed it but I would say probably 8-10kgs. Macpac Fiord 28L.

What speed were you going at in different places?

Tips on planning for an epic adventure? Similar to tips for doing multi day trail running, break down all the things that you need to do into little chunks. Sometimes it can be overwhelming when you look at all the things you need to organise, but if you break down, it is more achievable. Order things in priority and start ticking them off one by one. Also don't be afraid to ask others for help - you will be surprised by the number of people who will happily support you!

Varies hugely depending on the terrain. If I was running on the flat section/road with just my day pack, then 5:30 - 6mins per km. If I was in the mountains with my overnight pack on, then I could be doing 30mins per km!

Highlights?

1) The Tararua Ranges in the North Island which I did with my hubby Tommy. This is included in the article I wrote.

What made you do this journey?

2) Running the trail with people - both my amazing friends who came over from Aus to support me but also with local NZ trail runners who joined me. It was awesome experiencing with others and making new friends.

I was working in a corporate job, sitting at a desk all day, and was looking for an adventure.

I was researching through hikes and stumbled upon the TA. Then I found out that a few crazy folk had run the trail, and that even fewer were female. That made me think "I want to be one of them....and I want to do it faster than any other female before". Once I got the idea, there was no going back!

Lowlights?

1) The three days when I had to go out by myself - It was boxing day and my friends, Nicki & Mat, had just left. There were riving crossings and I was really anxious. The whole section is a blur to be honest - I just wanted to get it over and done with! This is also included in the article

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when I didn't want to train or the conditions were not ideal (i.e. headwind, rain, cold), but I always told myself this is perfect training for NZ because there would be days I wouldn't want to run over there.

Can you share a little bit about your background?

I ran my first marathon when I was 25 and then ran consistently on the road for the next 6 years. During this time I did another 5 marathons! I then transitioned to doing some trail runs to mix things up and I loved it.

Letting go: Some days I trained or ran really well. Other days I was way off my paces but I never got hung up on it. I always did my best and was happy with that. I also recognised that whilst I might have a bad session one day (which could be due to a variety of reasons e.g. lack of sleep, menstruation, having a fight with my hubby!), that doesn't mean the next session is going to be bad or that I was suddenly "unfit".

Before I headed to NZ, I had run a half, marathon and 50+ km races with some pretty good results. Having said that, the furthest I had ever run before heading to NZ was 56kms - I did that once, in a race.

Did you hear about the Welsh woman Menna Evans, who was running the length of New Zealand, when you were out there?

In NZ, I was planning to run between 20 70kms a day....so further than I had ever run before so it was a very big goal for me. In fact, the first day of NZ, I ran 69kms...so 13kms further than I had ever run before.

I heard about here in the final couple of days of my trip. I can't remember where I heard about her. I think it would have probably been from someone I met along the way!

What was your training like?

I trained under the guidance of Andy Dubois from Mile 27. There were two phase of our training - Apr: Ran 5 days a week, averaging 70kms a week. I would do an interval session, a hill session, a long run and then lots of easy running. I also did 2 x strength sessions a week plus 1 x cycling session.

Do you know if she was also doing the Te Araroa trail like you, or was she doing a different route?

She didn't run the TA as she was aiming to set the world record for running from top to bottom, so took more direct roads. I think the total kms she ran was about 2000km.

May - Oct: Ran 6-7 days a week, averaging 100 - 130kms a week. Would consist of an interval session, a hill session, a long run and then lots of easy running. I continued to do 2 x strength sessions a week and I would try to do 1 x yoga. From June - Oct, I ran every single day!

How did you feel on learning about her?

Good on her! It is awesome seeing other women achieving amazing things. I think we need to support and encourage one another!

Although I do think she is more crazy than me.

Running on the roads all day, every day would smash the legs!!

What were key to your successful training?

Consistency! I didn't miss a single session regardless of the weather or how I felt, I always completed the session. There were lots of days

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Books Reviews This time around, we’ve reviewed two very different adventure books, both of which we heard about from the adventure grapevine. So please, if you’ve written a book, or know someone who has, let us know. You never know, we might include a review of that book in one of our future issues.

Two Wheels to Chamonix

By Ali Mahoney Reviewed by Jane Harries Now this is a book with a difference. As Ali told me, it’s “a quick read” and she was right. It’s not going to test your intellectual capability at all. But what it will do, is far more important than that, in these uncertain and troubling times. For hidden away in this book, are absolute gems.

What are these gems? Strategies for coping, that’s what. For riding hundreds of miles on a bike is, for most of us including Ali, hard work. After all, it involves a lot of effort, and when time is constrained, that effort needs to be sustained for hour after hour. The choice is to grind away, or to give up, for there is no leeway when you have a hard deadline. .

So if you’re interested in going cycle touring and learning how Ali did this, or, if you are interested in learning coping strategies such as visualisation, selftalk, and how to avoid catastrophising mode, or if you simply want a quick light hearted read in these difficult times, hopefully you’ll think this book deliver.

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The Hound From Hanoi

give you a kind of friendship and loyalty that humans simply cannot.

The Hound of Hanoi was a joy to read and it made me look forward to my journey to and from work. This book made me realise that in saving a rescue animal, you are not only changing their life for the better but they are also changing yours and filling a void that you never knew was there. This book restores your faith in people, if we cannot find it in ourselves be kind to one another, we can always find it in ourselves to be kind to our animals.

By Moire O’Sullivan Reviewed by Bethany Hughes I wouldn’t normally pick up a book like The Hound of Hanoi and at first, I was sceptical as to whether it would grab my attention at all.

However, once I’d made a start on the book during my morning commute to work, it was safe to say that I was hooked. After reading this book, I will think twice before passing up a book about travelling the world, especially if an adorable rescue dog is involved!

The narrative voice of Moire is so relatable and easy to read, it’s as if you are hearing the story of Moire, Pete and Tom from a good friend.

For someone who has never travelled, it was fascinating to read about the different cultures Moire experienced. I appreciate how Moire doesn't bombard the reader with cultural facts but that she interweaves culture into the story so seamlessly that it doesn’t feel just like a book on travel, but a book on relationships, the struggles of moving away from home and living with animals.

Tom reads as a wonderful dog and a brilliant companion. I laughed along with the relatable moments of Tom peeing on the floor or leaving hair everywhere and I was nervous for Moire and Pete as they did everything they could to transport their favourite furry friend from country to country.

This book reminds readers that people will do anything for their animals and that animals

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From the Archives Oxfam Hong Kong’s 1998 Trailwalker – Part 2 By Jane Harries

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This is part two of a story, the first part of which appeared in our December 2019 issue.

In part one, our editor wrote about how moving to Hong Kong way back in 1998 changed her life, for it was in Hong Kong that she first heard of challenges such as the 100 kms Hong Kong Trailwalker, and it is in Hong Kong she took that leap of faith to seize the moment, and to train up for the event.

Here in part 2 of the story, she writes about the event itself. In case you missed part 1, it’s a team event, where all four team members attempt to complete 100 kms over the old Maclehose Trail, in Hong Kong’s New Territories. 100kms, with supposedly over 14,000 feet of climbing, on often rough trains and up some incredibly steep inclines. 100 kms at a time when technical clothing and hydration packs were in their infancy. So yes, you might have a bit of a laugh when you see some of the clothing worn by participants, our editor included.

Unfortunately, with Hong Kong suffering turbulent times in November 2019, the event which is a major fundraiser for Oxfam, was cancelled. The Adventure She team very much hope the Coronavirus situation will be settled soon and the 2020 event will be able to go ahead.

to be, for my faithful hiking boots had developed a big fat hole just a couple of weeks earlier. I’d bought replacement boots, but they weren’t properly worn in, as I’d been tapering.

So what to wear? New boots, boots with a hole in them, or running shoes?

The day dawns The months of training were finally over, for this wasn’t just another Friday morning in November, this was Trailwalker day.

With luck 100 kms lay ahead of me and my teammates, before we’d see our beds again, hopefully sometime in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Rather than risk blisters from new boots, as the weather was perfect and there was no danger of muddy trails, I opted for my runners. After all, at least I’d worn my runners on some long trail runs, whereas the boots were an unknown.

(Turned out to be a very wise decision, for those new boots of my caused me a lot of blisters until I eventually gave up on them and donated them to a charity shop. They were simply not right for my feet. Had I attempted to wear them, I doubt I would have made it beyond 30 kms).

It was a beautiful blue sky day with the most perfect temperature. No danger of overheating during the day, no danger of hypothermia at night and no danger of rain. It was weather perfection.

What wasn’t perfect was the state of my hiking boots. They say never use something new or different on race day. But if I was to wear hiking boots I had no choice, new it would have

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Friday – waiting for the start

anything like this before, and I’d never trained like this before, but I knew I’d given it my all.

All 8 of us, the fast team and the slower team of which I was part, met up at the start at Pak Tam Chung, in the New Territories. With time to spare, we enjoyed ourselves hanging out, catching up and posing for photos. The smiles on our faces clear evidence of the thrill we felt to have made it this far. The sense of anticipation was palpable. After all, none of us knew what lay in store for us, either team wise or individually. Would we all finish? Would any of us finish? At least we’d all made it to the start line.

What silently bothered me was illness. Not of me, but one of my teammates. She'd been ill a few weeks back and of course had of necessity missed a lot of training. On her comeback hike, a long one, she'd struggled, announcing afterwards she was going to withdraw. Then she changed her mind and decided to give it her best.

I had to admire her determination and her tenacity. It would be great to have her finish. But the reality was, because she’d be ill and unable to train as necessary, finishing 100km just after illness, would be a very hard task, not just for her, but for anyone. Would she be ok?

I felt good, really good. Yes there was the unknown as to whether I could or could not do it. But there at the start I knew I’d put in the hard work during training. I’d never attempted

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For now though, all thoughts of illness, recovery, and rebuilding vanished from my mind, for we were all there, happy, smiling, together, at the start.

Friday –the start Looking back, was our failure to finish as a team, born from our failure to walk together to the first checkpoint? I’ll never know. It wasn’t something I considered at the time, I was too enraptured with being there in the throng, one of the Trailwalkers of 1998. I was feeling strong, I was with friends, I was basking in the warm, though not hot rays of the sun on this amazing blue sky day. I was in my element.

I’d assumed all 4 of us would be walking together, for that’s how we’d trained. But somehow, whether it was the thrill of the atmosphere or what, I’ll never know, we didn’t.

Our start time had been in the afternoon. By the time I reached checkpoint one, at Sai Wan, a tiny simple café more reminiscent of what you’d expect to find on a tranquil Caribbean Island than a mere few miles from the skyscrapers of Hong Kong (note, of course it might no longer by tiny), dusk was falling.

There I caught up with one of the team who’d ran ahead. We waited a while for the others, then checked in and out as a team, before heading off on the second leg of ten, but this time, as a team.

Friday night It was dark by now. I’d never hiked before in the dark. It was an amazing atmosphere, with all those tiny reflective logos on the back of running shoes, and all those headtorches and hand torches, glistening away. Really surreal.

Is that the word?

All seemed good with the world. As for the sunset, it had been magnificent.

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It was Friday night by the time we made it to Checkpoint 2. Here the trail crossed a road. It was also one of the checkpoints where support teams were allowed to meet us. Friends of our team’s co-captains raced from work to meet us there. They fed, watered and generally tended to us. It was bliss. After around 25kms their kindness and generosity was most wonderful and definitely very much appreciated.

The co-captains had been great to me. They’d put this whole thing together, so that for once it wasn’t just guys at work who did Trailwalker, but us women too. They’d embraced me into the training and the team. Now one was missing.

Checkpoint 2 stood at the base of a very steep climb, with steps built into the mountainside.

Rest time over, it was time to hit that climb. As a team it was decided it would be far easier for each one of us to climb it at our own natural pace and regroup at the top, rather than climb it at the pace of the slowest. What a big fat mistake that turned out to be. As the saying goes, there is no “I” in a team. We hadn’t realised it, but we were in danger of turning into four individuals.

More trouble lay ahead. A few weeks earlier the other co-captain and I had done a short taper hike together. Out of nowhere, she’d got ill. It was as if someone removed the batteries from a battery pack. Something had clearly gone wrong with her that day. She was fit, really fit, there was no reason for her to have flagged like that.

After 45 minutes we decided we must have missed her and got moving.

Now it happened again. She wasn't well. We stayed together. Together, we hiked onwards to Checkpoint 3 and an assumed rendezvous with our two teammates and support crew.

I was first up the top. Second up was our ringer, the sister of a workmate’s colleague, who said she'd continue on. Third up (or did I get second and third mixed up) was one of our co-captains. She and I stayed there. We waited and waited. We waited some more. We waited longer.

Only, the other co-captain wasn't there! About 30 minutes later she showed up and unsurprisingly, after we’d all agreed to reconvene at the top of that big climb, wasn't her usual happy self. She’d done that entire stage alone, and in the dark! That was a brilliant piece of hiking on her part, to keep going like that.

We knew the other co-captain had been ill, that she’d lost training because of that, that she’d be slower than us on this hideously steep climb. But where was she? We wondered if we’d missed her in the black of the night?

Surely not. She’d have spotted us, me white, the other of Indian ethnicity, for with our combination of colouring, we definitely stood out amongst the others waiting for teammates, for they were predominantly ethnic Chinese.

But it had been such a long time? What had happened to her? Of course, a mobile phone call could have solved the quandary, but we didn’t all have them, and we couldn’t get in touch.

Two hours we were there at Checkpoint 3. It must have been around 2 or 3am by now.

Whilst others had chatted, eaten, rested, whatever, I’d crawled into my sleeping bag which the support team had, and went to sleep on the pavement.

A new plan I woke to learn our co-captains suggesting we check out as a team, but the other woman and I should go ahead, hiking as fast as we wanted to, so long as we stayed together. Then on

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reaching checkpoint 4 we could sleep some more, whilst waiting for the others to arrive.

pulled on my thermal top, lay down and slept awhile. Cat nap over, on we went.

As far as I went, that plan was ideal for me, for I like my sleep. As required by Oxfam we checked out as a team and then ringer and a minute or so later, two by two, we set off at our different hiking paces.

At some point as we hiked, I spotted way far away in the distance, Hong Kong Observatory’s weather radar station. Thing is, that was atop Hong Kong’s highest mountain – Tai Mo Shan, standing at 957m. We were now hiking towards Checkpoint 4. That observatory was en route to checkpoint 8. It really brought home how long a 100 km hike really is.

We hiked on in the dark on a narrow, winding, dirt trail. After a while the black sky showed traces of purple, navy blue, orange, blue, orange and blue stripes. Together we hiked into the most beautiful of dawns.

What’s more, after passing that observatory we’d still have more than 20 km to go. It seemed unfathomable. But there was nothing for it, we kept hiking.

A while later, my teammate wanted a sleep. No complaint from me! We saw a concrete structure with a concrete patio. Perfect. I

Saturday - Day

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Then they broke the bad news “the others turned back just after checking out of Checkpoint 3.”

As we approached Checkpoint 4 my teammate pulled out her mobile phone (yes, some people did have them) and we called the support team.

It was a bolt out of the blue. First though, before processing anything, we had to sort out logistics. We arranged to meet the support team somewhere on route. That done, we were free to roamed around the checkpoint in a rather dazed state, as we gradually registered the impact of this news.

"Where are you"?

"Just outside checkpoint 4". " What did you run"?

"No".

For safety reasons teams are only allowed to continue if they have three members, any less, they must travel with another team. What on earth would happen to us now?

"How were you so fast, we're nowhere near".

“That’s ok, we’re fine”.

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We checked in, wandered around some more, realised we were wasting time and checked out.

team had fallen apart that week. She was fit, eager and wanted to come along for the hike.

Step by step my remaining teammate, Linda and I hiked on to Checkpoint 5 and Checkpoint 6. With Linda there, no one quizzed us, no one seemed to care there were only two official teammates. We had no need to fear of being thrown out for being just two, for we were effectively, at least from a safety and organisational risk management perspective, a team of three.

At checkout, we were told to walk with another team, but promptly lost them. We walked on and on. We walked down a narrow road where Trailwalkers slept on camp beds. On and on until we came to a road crossing where our support crew – some work, some others, greeted us.

Linda Off we went towards the infamous Needle Hill.

Only by now were so fit after months of training, we could practically trot up it despite having already hiked 65 kms.

This new support crew, work friends of mine plus partners, had been supplemented just a day or so earlier, by one of my friends, Linda.

For some reason her intended Trailwalker

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Saturday – night

Summiting Tai Mo Shan meant our last big climb was over. I couldn’t believe it, the hard part was done and it had felt so ‘easy’.

Darkness fell for the second time as we climbed up Hong Kong’s highest mountain – Tai Mo Shan, standing at 957m. Kind of ironic really, how shortly after daybreak, I’d seen the mountain and its observatory from afar, Now the sun had set. I’d spent all day walking from that viewpoint to the place itself.

Oh how wrong was I. For the hard part for me was about to begin.

My brain screamed for sleep. Linda tried her best to keep me awake, but I couldn’t hold out any longer. As we walked down the tarmac lane to Checkpoint 8, I lay down on the road and fell asleep. As I dozed off, I heard Linda say, “ok just 10 minutes”. She stood there, guarding me, ensuring I wasn’t driven over by a lone car, then woke me.

With darkness I became tired. I want ed to sleep, like really wanted to sleep, right now. Linda tried to keep me awake by entertaining me with the most scandalous of stories.

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I managed a few minutes of hiking before wanting to sleep again, only she wouldn’t let me sleep. She insisted the checkpoint was just around the corner, that my teammate could see it ahead. I wasn’t so sure. A few people were walking towards us. I asked them. They confirmed the truth of Linda’s words.

Here at Checkpoint 8 we were due to meet our support crew. Only they’d got lost! For me, that was bliss, for all I wanted to do, was, yes you guessed it, sleep. I put on my stripy purple and green thermals, lay down on the ground in the middle of the car park and slept.

At least I would have slept rather than just lied there with my eyes closed, had the officials not insisted I move. Linda and they argued "can't you see she's tired, she wants to sleep, she's just walked 80 kilometres". A truce was called. Linda agreed to stop playing the protective Rottweiler (I wonder if she’d picked up that skill from her then boyfriend, an US marine), in return for the officials offering us camp beds in the first aid area. Now I could really sleep, not just me, but all three of us.

The support crew were two hours late. Trevor offered me his last beer and asked if I wanted him to walk with us. Vicky was being Vicky, ensuring we were revved up for the last 20 or do kilometres. She was so proud of us, so happy for us, so supportive of us not just there and then, but all through our training.

Sunday For me, the last 20 kms was a blur. We kept having to stop and sleep. By now it wasn’t just me who wanted to sleep. At various points we all needed it. Whenever someone couldn’t keep going, they’d call out

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Reflections

sleep and we’d sleep. I have no idea for how long, I just know we did that quite a few times.

We finished in the morning sometime after a sun rise that I was too sleepy to notice.

Looking back, I am 100% aware how Trailwalker changed my life. It showed me how with hard work, effort, tenacity, we can do so much more than what we have done before.

Two of the four of us had done it. We’d both hiked our first 100 kms, plus Linda had hiked over 40 kms through evening, night and dawn, just to keep me company. What a friend.

Trailwalker opened up a world of possibilities, for Trailwalker hadn’t just taken me way out of my comfort zone, it had extended my comfort zone.

Finishing as a team would have been so much more. I know that, for a few years later I put together teams for the Sydney and Melbourne Trailwalkers and those times, we all finished. Finishing as I did was good, but finishing as a full team is so much more meaningful, so much better. Finishing without the team brought more like relief, a sense of accomplishment, but it wasn’t a joyous occasion, for there was that loss there, that feeling of missing two special teammates.

Without Trailwalker, perhaps I wouldn’t have gone on to more endurance hiking, adventure racing and triathlons. Trailwalker made me realise that yes, I can do stuff. It doesn’t matter that I was a fat, spotty, geek of a teenager who developed a couple of eating disorders. The past doesn’t matter like that.

What matters is what we want for our future

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and how we apply ourselves now, to achieve our future goals.

us we may by now live on three continents, but what’s a little bit of land and water between friends.

It also made me realised the importance of seizing the moment, for a few weeks after Trailwalker, I developed a bout of bronchitis that was so bad, the doctor told me “leave Hong Kong, your lungs can’t cope with the pollution”.

Unfortunately, I lost touch with the rest. If you happen to be reading this, thank you so much for those days, for the camaraderie, the sense of belonging to something so amazing, and for helping me to achieve a goal I never knew I had. Definitely please do get in touch, it would be lovely to hear from you.

It took a while, but leave I did, taking up a visa I had to work in New Zealand. So if I hadn’t done Trailwalker when I did, I probably would never have done it. What’s more, I wouldn’t have made the friendships that I made. For two of the faster team (yes they all finished which is brilliant) Caroline and Jenny, plus Linda and I all became firm friends. Between

Trailwalker didn't just give me a good time, an escape from the craziness of what expat life can in in Hong King. It didn't just broaden my sense of ability and adventure and what can be done. It actually gave me some of my dearest friends.

About Jane Harries A former tax lawyer, Jane who also has a post graduate qualification in professional development and education, now pursues her passion for helping others be the best they can be.

She does this by helping organisations with their training sessions, running presentation skills workshops, and by founding and now editing Adventure She magazine which aims to empower, educate and entertain its readers, via adventure stories.

You can follow Jane and Adventure She magazine on the following social media channels: Instagram:

@adventure_she @adventurebyjane

Twitter:

@adventure_she

Facebook page:

Adventure She

Facebook group:

Adventure She – adventure and travel magazine

Website:

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Postscript Six years later, in 2004, I visited Tanzania. One day I took a day hike to a waterfall. My guide was no more than in his early teens. I was wearing an Oxfam Trailwalker hat. The boy remarked “you see how you drink water out of the bottle? I don’t need a bottle, I drink from the water pumps. Oxfam put them in.”

About Oxfam Trailwalker According to the website http://www.oxfamtrailwalker.org.hk/oxfam-history/ “Oxfam Trailwalker”, formerly called “Trailwalker”, was an endurance training exercise for soldiers. In 1986, Oxfam Hong Kong was invited to co-organise the event and in the same year the event was open to the public. Along with the retreat of Gurkhas in 1997, Oxfam Hong Kong took over the event. Through the years, Oxfam Trailwalker has become one of the largest fundraising sports events in Hong Kong.

The 760-team quota was full in 15 minutes. The first person at the queue was already there at 8:00pm the night before the registration day.

760 teams raised over HK$12 million despite the economic downturn - an all-time record.

Chief Secretary Mrs. Anson Chan and Mr Albert Chang officiated the Starting Ceremony.

80% of the walkers finished the trail”.

About Oxfam If you would like to know more about some of the work Oxfam carries, out, the following link might be of value: https://www.oxfam.org.uk/what-we-do/issues-we-work-on

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Wendy Searle What A Woman

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any kind and no vehicle assistance or kites. All the kit was dragged in a pulk, or sledge, including a tent, rations and comprehensive medical kit. She ‘man-hauled’ 86kg of food, fuel and supplies – much as Scott and Shackleton had done – finishing the last 30 nautical miles to Pole in a 25-hour stint. By the time she reached the Pole, Wendy had ‘one meal and a whisper of fuel’ left. Living on dried rations, rehydrated with melted snow, Wendy was around 2,000 calories in deficit each day and lost 12kg.

Mum of Four, 42 year old Wendy Searle, recently skied ski solo from the coastline of Antarctica (it’s hidden under lots of ice) to the South Pole.

Undertaking this journey meant Wendy faced crevasses, temperatures down to -35 and being completely alone on the 715-mile route, which she completed in just 42 days.

Wendy’s expedition aimed to inspire women and girls to take on long-term goals and to overcome challenges. Wendy had never skied before training for this expedition, which took five years to plan and train for. Yes five years!

Only the seventh woman in history to complete the journey, from Hercules Inlet to 90 Degrees South – the geographic South Pole – Wendy said: “Yes, it was a physical challenge – skiing 11 or 12 hours every single day with no rest days. It was an even greater mental challenge – I wanted to give up so often. There was a lot of crying in my tent, especially in the mornings, at the prospect of another day in those conditions. But I got out of the tent regardless and got on with it.”

Wendy, a civil servant from Salisbury, Wiltshire, completed the journey solo, unsupported and unassisted, which means she had no resupply of 88

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The polar journey itself though wasn’t the only challenge Wendy faced, for the challenges came long before she reached the polar start line. They included raising the funds to get to Antarctica, fitting training around a full-time job, family commitments, and negotiating time off work.

To stick her plan for five years, is why we admire Wendy so much. For training and planning took so much, time, effort and dedication.

As well at countless hours training at home, she also did specific cold weather, expedition type training in Norway, Iceland, and Greenland. You can read about her Greenland traverse in the December 2018 issue of Adventure She magazine.

As she says: “I wasn’t a professional athlete, I don’t have lots of money and I have a busy job. I wanted to show that anyone can make things happen with enough fortitude. I was turned down for funding by so many potential sponsors. You need to have a thick skin and be prepared to put everything into an expedition like this to make it happen.”

So how did Wendy find her ski to the South Pole? Wendy sad of her journey “Every day is quite simple in one way – you just have to ski South. The purity of purpose and the simplicity of the existence on Polar journeys is addictive.

I was making plans to return to Antarctica within days of returning to the UK.”

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This is a lesson we can all learn from. For seldom is life easy. Most of us will face incredible challenges during our lifetime. The thing is, how to we arise to those challenges?

Do we stay in our comfort zone and lament challenging times, or, do we accept the challenges that come our way by extending our comfort zone, until we can deal with those challenges in whatever way is appropriate for us.

How to follow Wendy Searle on social media Website (and for donations too) www.southpole2020.com

If you would like to donate to the ABF, The Soldiers’ Charity and The Youth Adventure Trust, for which Wendy was raising money, you can do so through Wendy’s website.

Instagram: @betweensnowandsky

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Wendy Searle Congratulations on being our March 2020 What A Woman 91

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Triathlon Training Dubai Style By Angharad Hodgson

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Have you ever contemplated moving overseas for work?

That’s exactly what Angharad Hodgson did when she swapped the rain, hills and cold of wonderful Wales for Dubai’s sun, desert and heat. What would triathlon lover Angharad, encounter in Dubai?

“Dubai?! Isn’t it really dangerous for women there?!”. …

Such was the attitude of a huge amount of people when my husband and I decided to move to the Middle East in 2017.

Despite the naysayers, the move to the Middle East has proved to be one of the best moves we have ever made. I work in a school with incredibly hardworking and culturally aware kids, I (now) live in a beautiful apartment overlooking a golf course, and I have the hub of Dubai airport on my doorstep.

However, what has really surprised me has been the regularity with which I can enjoy the outdoors.

To put my move to the sprawling, glitz and glam city in the desert into context, I am a Welsh girl from a very, very tiny hamlet in the

Pembrokeshire National Park. And by hamlet, I mean I could just about see my neighbour’s house (note – singular house) if I craned my neck out of my bedroom window.

My father grew up in the Lake District and did everything he could to ensure that my brother and I had the ‘wildest’ upbringing possible in the fast paced nineties. I had no interest in ballet, sewing or Brownies, opting instead for the muddiest, messiest hobbies possible.

So I climbed, created mudslides in the garden and generally went on ‘adventures’ with my little brother in the fields and woods near our home. I knew every sheep track, every tumbledown dry stone wall and every stream like the back of my hand.

I discovered running in my final year at university. A few years later I ran the Edinburgh Marathon with an ITB injury and decided that running just wasn’t for me. And so began my 93

love/hate relationship with long distance triathlon.

At the point at which we moved to the Middle East, I had just completed my first Middle Distance Tri (1.9km swim, 90km bike, 21 km run) and somehow nabbed myself a spot on the GB Age Group Team for the European Championship!

And then we moved. How would I, a mud loving triathlete from a tiny hamlet, cope amongst the glitz, glamour and sparkle of Dubai?

The answer, I don’t really ‘do’ the whole Dubai scene. Don’t get me wrong, I love the occasional boozy brunch with views of the Burj al Arab; who doesn’t?! But the posing, the beach clubs and the ever Instagram worthy life just isn’t for me.

The side of Dubai I see still involves being awake at 3.30 or 4am on a Friday morning, not because I’m returning from some party,

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but because I’m up, grimly clutching a coffee and a banana, ready for a hundredodd kilometre cycle ride in the desert.

What I’ve discovered is training for long distance triathlon in Dubai requires a total shift in mind set to training in the UK. The most obvious, and perhaps the most debilitating factor is the weather.

Whilst during winter months we enjoy balmy days of around 23C, the summer temperatures can top 50C by ten in the morning. So from late April to early November, training outside would be utterly hellish. So summer bike rides involve 3:30am alarms in order to get in a decent long ride in the desert before the sun comes up at around half seven.

The cycling scene is in fact massive. If I told you that out in the desert there’s over 300 kilometres of cycle specific, silky tarmacked roads running through the desert, you’d be hard pushed to imagine it.

I know I was. But it’s true and it’s become my norm on the weekends.

We also have access to the Hajjar mountains, which form the natural border between the UAE and Oman.

These towering pinnacles of black rock and spiky shrubbery make for some pretty epic climbs, and with hardly anyone living out in this part of the country, it’s the one place where we can ride safely on the roads. The locals think we are all utterly bonkers, but there’s something quite nice about having a bunch of teenagers in a Nissan Patrol cheering you on like a complete celebrity when you summit Generator Hill!

The winter sees some huge bike races and challenges, including the masochistic

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Spinneys 92, where riders from all over the region come and race guts-out on one of the flattest courses around.

Then there’s the beastly Urban Ultra Coast to Coast, where a bunch of idiots (myself included, this year), rode 215km across the entire country for a key ring and an admittedly fantastic BBQ at the Le Meridien Al Aqah in Fujairah.

The running is a bit more of a challenge for me. I used to train with a wonderful running club in South Wales, but here I haven’t managed to settle in or gel with a club here.

The other thing with Dubai is that it is HUGE, and nothing is connected by public transport. So, you have to drive or get a taxi to get anywhere. Until recently, I could only safely run one 5km loop from my apartment, so long distance training really did get rather dull.

We now live in a far more athlete/normalhuman-being friendly environment, and I can run from home. Despite the old necessity of having to drive to the start point most weekends, some of my winter training has been pretty incredible. I had the option to park my car at one end of the beach to run the entire length of the city (around 25km), then hop in a cheap-aschips taxi back to my car.

I didn’t actually choose to do this, but the point is I could have! And all this on one of those spongy, bouncy running tracks that everyone seems to love. Personally, I find that they make me lethargic, so I tend to run beside them… but that’s not the point!

I’ve also just started dabbling in trail running and have discovered a number of tracks and paths through the desert near

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I’d come home so drenched I dripped entire puddles as soon as I stood still. It becomes the norm to lose 3-4kg over the course of a 10km run. During the summer, all of my training kit has to be washed as soon as I finish a session lest it fester in the laundry basket and walk itself out through the door.

us which provide a really nice change to pounding the pavements of the compound where I live. More sand and dust than muddy puddles, but a welcome change nevertheless!

Running in summer though is utter hell. Last summer, in trying to regain some semblance of fitness, I was regularly taking over an hour to walk/jog an 8km loop.

Swimming is the easiest of the three here, as I’m sure you can imagine.

We have three pools at my school and when we arrived, I quickly

That’s because in the extreme the heart rate rockets through the roof.

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proceeded to befriend the swim coach and the lifeguards, ensuring easy access to the pool for free!

Also, despite my childhood love of surfing, kayaking, cliff diving and all things beach, I absolutely detest swimming in the sea. Any sea. Give me a lake swim any day

There is also a huge swimming complex with two 50m pools attached to the bike track (cue transition practise).

You see I’m petrified of jellyfish, and there are a lot of jellyfish in the waters off Dubai. Hundreds of the things, all different shapes, sizes and potencies. Now, I know the big blue ones aren’t actually that poisonous, but that doesn’t mean I want to swim with them when they’ve brought a thousand or so mates along for the party. No thanks.

You might wonder why I don’t swim in the Arabian Gulf. Two reason, temperature and jellyfish.

The sea temperatures in the summer are so high that the water provides no relief from the sun. It’s like swimming in your own sweat. So we are confined to the pool for at least six months of the year.

So, despite the almost daily sea swim training sessions put on by the

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Various swim clubs and Tri Dubai, I have very limited experience of the sea here.

True I swam in it for 1.9km during the Dubai Ironman 70.3 in 2018, (and did so again this year, though that’s jumping ahead in my story), but anything between, can take a flying leap.

Despite the fact that specific training for the iconic hills of Ironman Wales when living here in the Middle East is almost impossible, I would say my training is going pretty well. No, there is absolutely no way of replicating Heartbreak Hill in Saundersfoot out in the Al Qudra desert.

Yes, the overwhelming likelihood is that the weather in September in Tenby will be wet and windy, and we have had a total of four days of rain here this winter. Yes, the sea here is calm, warm and buoyantly salty, a description which certainly doesn’t describe North Bay Beach.

Now, all of the above should have been to be taken into consideration in September when I somewhat spontaneously, after years of saying ‘absolutely never’, tried my luck for a spot in Tenby IRONMAN 2020.

I’ve no idea how I got in as entries sold out in three minutes flat – beginner’s luck maybe. I had 12 months to prepare for the biggest race of my life. A race which takes place on a notoriously hilly course, whilst here in Dubai I currently have to drive 50km to see even the hint of a hill. A race which can be potentially rainy, windy and cold, whilst I live in the desert heat. A race which can even have jellyfish and as you know, I’m petrified of jellyfish.

But really, what am I actually training when I spend six or seven hours on a bike? I think it’s my mind.

Of course, I’m getting fitter but I am certainly more likely to DNF at Ironman because I talk myself out of it, not because I physically cannot finish. A few years ago, those negative races in Oman and Fujairah would have been DNFs. Something has changed my attitude towards racing.

However, despite the negativity I’m giving off, I’ve come to enjoy training out here.

And so, hour by hour over the last few months, my training for Ironman Wales has progressed.

I’m no longer the super-fit triathlete I was when I arrived here in Dubai, but I actually think I’m a better racer.

My mind set is something I can now shape, as opposed to something I am shaped by.

Whether this is age, perspective or a resilience built from countless hours of sweating under the Middle Eastern sun, I now know that I can finish. I can push through to go a bit faster, a bit harder, a bit longer. Good thing really, as IMW will certainly be a very long, very hard day. It just won’t be very fast!

I have taken on a few races in the early months of the year, including Dubai and Oman Ironman 70.3. Dubai went spectacularly, and Oman went spectacularly badly. I mentioned the Urban Ultra Coast to Coast – a race which tested far more than fitness and pushed me in to a dark place which I have never entered – the true pain cave.

So, with negative races so far outweighing the positive, how do I think my training is going?

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About Angharad Hodgson Angharad is a 29 year old teacher living in Dubai with her husband and cat. Her first triathlon was a Go-Tri event in Pembrokeshire in 2015 on a hybrid bike. She claims her “obsession quickly grew”. She went on to join a phenomenally supportive triathlon club in Newport, South Wales (and says “if you’re in the area, NEWT is the best club you could ever wish to join!”), and competed in a few shorter distances before taking on her first middle distance in the Cotswolds 113 event in 2017.

Angharad’s finish time at that race qualified her for the GB Age-Group team for the European Championships, held in Ibiza in October 2018.

She’s now completed five middle distance races and has finally allowed herself to be persuaded by her old club mates, to do IRONMAN Wales, which is held in her home county.

You can follow Angharad on the following social media channels: Instagram: @not.a.triathlete Website: http://notatriathlete.com/

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Kilimanjaro Fatigue and M.E. By Sal Bolton

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There was an extra reason why I put in that effort. I was lucky enough to be able to travel to Tanzania and attempt Kilimanjaro.

This was not an option for my twin sister Helen, who could only imagine a world beyond her back garden.

Mount Kilimanjaro is the highest freestanding mountain in the world and the highest point in Africa. Standing at 5,895 metres, the iconic mountain solitary sits on the border of Tanzania, supremely overlooking the vast expanse of the Kenyan Serengeti plains from the north face of the mountain.

Age 19 Helen was hit with daily symptoms of prolonged tiredness, low energy, muscle pains, nausea and headaches. Her concentration too got worse.

Trekkers from all over the world routinely attempt to summit Kilimanjaro. But not all succeed. For Kilimanjaro is also known for inflicting altitude sickness upon many. Would Sal Bolton succeed and if so, what would drive her to make it to the summit.

For at age twenty-four, she was diagnosed with the presently incurable illness Myalgic Encephalomyetltis (M.E) otherwise known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Up until M.E. my sister like myself had led a very active, interesting lifestyle, coloured with many perceived dreams, ambitions and aspirations. Now M.E. had completely derailing her ability to continue living a normal, functioning life.

Kilimanjaro is a hike, not a climb, so it’s attainable without any mountaineering experience or equipment.

The key difficulty is in its altitude. But the hike too can be a grind.

Myalgic Encephalomyetltis (M.E) M.E. is a massively misunderstood longterm neurological condition that causes symptoms which affect many body systems, more commonly the nervous and immune systems. Over an estimated 250,000 people in the United Kingdom and around 17 million worldwide are affected by the trappings of M.E and like my sister, have had to endure the humiliation and neglect from ignorant views from society and misunderstood judgement from the medical profession.

I was not going to let that grind defeat me.

Six-months of strengthening and conditioning in the gym, local weekend training hikes at home in the UK and a summer walking holiday in the remote wilderness of the Lake District followed. By the time I set out for Tanzania, I was in the best shape of my life and ready as I'd ever be for what I knew would be the most relentless, gruelling physical and mental challenge of my life.

'The attitude of 'everyone gets tired ' needs to change. M.E needs to be recognised as a serious long-term illness' she would lament to me in many frustrated conversations during her short periods of wellness. 'It's how I feel most of the time, not how I look, its moment to moment symptoms and it can be very stressful to

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The Rains

live with when it causes you so much anxiety and mental health issues, as well as feeling neglected by society'.

I arrived in Tanzania in mid October, traditionally the 'second driest season' of the year, where African farmers begin planting seeds for the forthcoming rainy season to nurture prosperous crops. Being the last month of this 'dry season', there was meant to be less crowds, whilst still being dry enough to trek.

I decided that If I was going to invest so much physically and mentally into this tough expedition up Kilimanjaro, I should do it for the benefit of others who were not lucky enough to have the privilege of good health. I decided to try and raise ÂŁ1,500 for 'Action For M.E' who's mission is to tackle ignorance, injustice and neglect for people whose lives have been stolen and detained

by M.E. It also promotes funding for biomedical research and awareness programs to support sufferers of the condition.

The first day was a shocking surprise torrential rain. From the slate-grey sky of the rainy season thick, gloopy, unrelenting cannon balls consistently pelted us as we hid under the hoods of our saturated rain

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jackets and ponchos trudging through the dripping lush mountain forest.

As we climbed higher we encountered exotic biodiversity beyond my wildest imagination, biodiversity that stretched across five mountainous climate zones dense montane forest, scattered plains of heath and moorland, barren alpine desert, up the nerve-wracking scramble of the 'Barranco Wall' and into the bitterly hostile elements matching the arctic circle.

It didn’t matter if one wore expensive waterproofs, nothing proved to be 'Kilimanjaro- rain proof'.

The weather didn’t improve. Thick mist shrouded us as we ambled 'pole, pole' (Swahili for slowly, slowly) for 5 to 6 hours a day to each night’s camp. Whilst some wanted to groan, I focused on my deep seated philosophy of believing that part of the test of a challenge, is to take on whatever comes our way.

The weather though still remained freakishly wet for the time of year. We constantly prayed for some warmth to dry our wet gear, though only got short teasing periods of dryness before the heavens thrashed more heavy sheets of rain at us.

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Hypothermia The threat of hypothermia started to fester at the back of everyone's mind, thanks to anxiety over potentially harsher weather. For as we hiked higher, we left behind the alpine / high desert climate zone, and entered the sub zero temperatures of the arctic zone.

Our cooks tried to help, by hanging wet kit in the kitchen tent, in the hope the tent’s warmth would eek out the moisture on anything we wanted to take to the summit. But our gloves and clothing were still on the damp side.

By now we had one more day’s hiking from Karanga Camp to Barafu Camp, before heading off on our summit attempt. It was only 4km but meant ascending from 13,106 feet to 15, 331 feet. Being so high up now, the air felt different. The weather was wet too. But now as the rain swept in it turned into freezing sleet and bit at our faces, as we hiked along the bleak alpine desert over boulders and shattered rocks.

Barafu base camp at 4,673 metres lay at the end of a valley after a short scramble up the cliff face. There the sleet began to turn to soft flakes of snow as we plodded through the many clusters of tents to find our team’s 'spot' in an almost bleak Russian cold war camp atmosphere. A camp with no comfort and a camp with no escape. The sleet forced us to huddle like a tin of sardines in our mess tent.

The ground sloped, making it pretty tricky to sit upright on chairs and many of us resorted to standing for an early dinner.

All our walking boots were still absolutely soaking wet again on the inside, having it

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near impossible to get them even remotely dry over the course of the perpetual drizzling week. But our guides had a plan...

oxygen level and heart rate. At Barafu camp, my numbers were off. My blood oxygen level was fine at 85% for the altitude, but my heart rate was 130 beats per minute. This couldn't be right, I thought.

I felt fine. I had trained for six months with a breathing mask limiting my oxygen intake so my heart should be used to it.

10pm and we were awake ‘again’. No one had really slept since we’d been sent to bed at 7pm. I’d tried, but I couldn’t. All I managed was a rest. It was a worried rest though with a concoction of conflicting emotions swirling around my head, for whilst my headache had subsided, my readings weren’t good.

Alarm Calls I knew I had it in me to finish, my body was fine and was just excited and nervous for the final push of the expedition. I was not letting my novice experience at altitude beat me down after overcoming so much

Our group had twice daily health checks, one each morning and evening. These were to monitor our wellbeing, blood

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trepidation, punishing cold, sleep deprivation and pain on my route to the last camp. My heart rate readings might lead to the guides saying I couldn’t go on, but I was not going to give up.

Dressed in pre-summit attire of multiple layers of thermals, fleeces, hiking pants and my bobble hat, I wriggled down into my four seasons sleeping bag and whispered a prayer to myself in the near silence of the camp, bar the soft braying of the porters clattering and crashing in the kitchen tent nearby.

I prayed for the opportunity to attempt this final chapter of my journey and for my heart not to fail me, and not to fail my fundraising efforts for M.E. I thought about all those M.E. sufferers like my sister, who I was striving to finish for. I thought how she and so many others are imprisoned by the

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condition and can only imagine the world beyond their back garden, who could only dream of seeing Kilimanjaro, let alone being now so close to reaching 'The Roof of Africa'.

When my ten o'clock alarm finally beeped, I called out “Arnold, Jambo Arnold!� I unzipped the frozen front of my tent and stick my head out. The night was strangely still, no rain, no sleet, no falling snow. I was overjoyed to look up to the abyss of a blank deep purple sky speckled with the glint of tiny stars. After all that rain it was clear for our summit night!

Arnold, one of our friendly cooks, appeared.

Lit up like a firefly thanks to his bouncing headtorch, he came over to my tent, holding a roll of cling film. For cling film was the secret weapon the team had to help us deal with our soaking wet boats and

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to stop our feet developing frostbite in the below freezing temperatures.

No risk, no reward. I was going to go out there, give it my best shot and see what happens. This was the incredible challenge of Kilimanjaro - it wasn't going to be comfortable or easy to reach the ultimate height of 5,895 metres, but I just hoped my body was going to as strong as my mind to see me through to the finish.

After he found the end of the roll, he wrapped cling film around my puffy feet a few times. 'You feel the warmth? he smiled, 'Will keep you dry'.

Up, Up and Away Having now travelled 39 miles, everyone in the team was nervous with what lay ahead and how we were going to tackle the attempt of ascending the last intimidating glacial 1,222 metres of the expedition. It was only 5km. At sea level, this distance for a fairly fit healthy person seems nothing, considering you can run it in half an hour and even a lot faster for many. But at altitude, it's completely different, even for an

At 11 o'clock we were off, to give overselves a chance to ascend slowly and be near the summit for the sunrise, and to still having enough daylight for recuperation and the long descent to the final Mweka Camp at 3,000 metres. Ahead of me lay the seven or more arduous hours of trekking, which it would take to do the remaining five kilometres. Just seven more hours or so and we'd have done it.

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athletic type with six-months training under my belt.

Our lead guide had instructed Kotalieb, an assistant guide, to accompany and keep an eye on me, piloting me though this harsh frozen world of glittering ice and snow. I could already feel a spot on my thumb starting to go numb from a bit of wet soaking through my outer gloves, proving how moisture on your skin at this environment can be dangerous. It was soon relieved as we began trudging through to the start of the trail, panting and sweltering like a roasting Christmas turkey -- an inevitable effect of my exaggerative eight layers!

I remember thinking, ‘this I can do’. I believed it. It was like I’d unlocked a primal instinct that wanted to survive the challenge ahead. This was now a mental journey, the only great challenge I'd ever really wanted to attempt and had worked so hard for.

Throughout my life I’ve often been heavily criticised for my 'slow approach' to life and how I operate. But I knew on this occasion it was being this 'slow and steady' that might win me the prize of Kilimanjaro. I would not change my game plan for summit night and chose to go at my own low speed, relaxed pace and let the group go ahead. I placed myself at the back of the group.

With the distinct chill in the air biting at my face, I breathed deeply through my nose with each measured step.

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Determination, Tenacity, Resilience

By 2am, I started to become anxious again when the creeping throb of a returning altitude headache began to manifest, seeing how far my tolerance could stretch before resorting to the medical aid of Diamox and painkillers to beat it down. My heavy eyes, still stinging with intense drowsiness from my lack of sleep, forced me to close them restfully every few strained moments to cope with the persistent furious pounding in my head -almost sleepwalking in the escapism of a dream.

The altitude and its increasingly thin and air, was getting to me though. This was the time to draw out the power of positivity. It was tough, but I’d known it would be tough, my research had told me that. I’d chosen a challenge, but to summit Kilimanjaro, the so called ‘Roof of Africa’ that wasn’t just a challenge, that would be a dream come true. I was in the process of living that dream, I was on my way up to the top of Kilimanjaro! I locked into a downward gaze and focused on Kotelieb's boots and told myself 'One step at a time', 'pole, pole' (slowly, slowly) 'breathing and believing',

Image courtesy of David Swierczek

Image courtesy of David Swierczek

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'hakuna matata' I kept repeating whatever mantras I could recite.

six year old body, imprisoned by my copious layers of arctic-fighting apparel, ached and weighed heavily down on me like a solid suit of lead.

It was by 6.30am that the seemingly neverending steep incline of perpetual glittering snow began transforming into a soothing shade of blue before quickly glowing into a honey yellow swathe. Now as the sun approached it made me think how hard it was going to be to pee, without exposing my backside in full clear view of everyone coming up the mountain behind me!

'How much further to the summit?' I panted to Kotalieb, my breath threatening to stick in the back of my dry throat with each ragged gasp. I needed to sit down to recover as my heart rapidly pounded, working hard to maintain the oxygen in my tissues.

After eight and a half hours Kotelieb and I made it to Kilimanjaro’s volcanic rim, Stella Point at 5,756m. Every fibre in my thirty-

Image courtesy of David Swierczek

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'About an hour away' Kotelieb replied. 'You can see the sign of the summit there' he pointed.

I opposed. My Kilimanjaro challenge was about reaching the top, not Stella Point.

Uhuru Peak was the 'true summit' of Kilimanjaro and I was not going to give up the fight, now I was just being 139 metres away from fulfilling a long-held dream.

I turned. A faint sign the size of my thumb stood on the end of the ridge. There congregated the minute bright coloured figures of other hikers. Kilimanjaro’s 5,865 metre peak, Uhuru, was in my sight. It seemed so close, but yet still felt so far away.

I was tired, like an incapacitated tiredness I'd never known. But I was not going to quit.

It was one last leg of pure mental grit and dogged determination to get myself to the summit. I didn't care if I had to stagger another hour in the rarefied air that made each step so tough. I knew I had the stubbornness to do it. It was just one more hour and it would be over. This overwhelming fatigue, slowing my body up

'But we can finish here if you want to' he suggested, slipping my backpack off his chest and sending it thudding into the snow, flakes flaying up on its impact.

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there on that mighty mountain, would eventually come to an end for me. This reinforced an extra personal motive to keep going. For I wanted to honour the thousands of people who cope with the debilitating fatigue of M.E. every single day, and I wanted to use my temporary struggle to help them. IN a way the tiredness was good, for it gave me a small insight to how people with severe M.E suffer.

my glacial pace with words of encouragement 'well done, nearly there'.

I couldn't help but feel I was being given false hopes. But I knew, with each step I was closer to the summit.

When I finally made it, I realised how persistently tough I can be. I had dealt with the torrential rain, the damp cold, the freezing hail, the altitude, the pain, and kept going. My sister couldn’t be here, M.E. had seen to that. But I could and I did. It wasn’t easy, I had to push, but I pushed and I did it, for me, for my sister and for M.E.

We kept going. 'Pole, Pole.' Kotelieb repeated gently.

As we pressed on, it wasn't too long before we were approached by the striding figures of summiteers retracing their steps back down the crater rim. They marched passed

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About Sal Bolton I've been a film actor in London, a tennis coach in Africa, studied art in Italy, done a health check on an elephant, sailed on a Pirate Ship, run in an Olympic Stadium, felt the mist of Niagara Falls, reared baby dingo's and kangaroos, danced at a Native American ceremony, cured by a shaman in the Amazon, travelled with a circus, taught desert painting by Aborigines, sat on a canal boat full of cats in Amsterdam, blessed by a Buddhist Monk in Cambodia, sailed with New Zealand Maori's.....and the list goes on (out of breath) What can I say, I have a penchant for a life of adventure and variety...a passionate curiosity about the world and just needed to be part of the abundance of adventure stories that were going on out there on the horizon.

How To Follow Sal Bolton On Social Media Twitter:

: SalBoltonAuthor

Instagram:

@salboltontravel

Website:

www.insalsfootsteps.com

How To Access More Information On M.E. Action For M.E. has an excellent website with a lot of useful resources on M.E. Please however remember, whilst the internet can be a great tool, if you have any medical concerns either about yourself or a loved one, get yourself or your loved one to a doctor for an examination and diagnosis. https://www.actionforme.org.uk/what-is-me/symptoms/

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Volunteering with the Coastguard By Charlie Francis 118

HM Coastguard is the national maritime 999 service for search and rescue. When someone’s in trouble, one of the control rooms will coordinate the response, which might include sending coastguard rescue teams, helicopters or lifeboats.

It’s a voluntary service made up of men and women of all ages and from all walks of life, making it a diverse and inclusive service and something to be really proud of.

Charlotte Francis is by day a Warehouse Manager for ‘Fourth Element’ – A diving company based in Helston, Cornwall.

Here she shares about her experience volunteering with the Falmouth Coastguard. You can follow her on Instagram using @charlie_fal12

I've been a Coastguard Rescue Officer with the Falmouth Team for the past two years. I have attended hundreds of shouts since joining. ‘Shouts’ are what we call the incidents we attend.

We normally get a text message sent to our mobile phone requesting our attendance. This will outline what the incident is, location, and any other relevant information that we might require.

Until we are on scene we normally only have the information provided in the text message, so the journey to the incident often gives you the time to go through different scenarios in your head as to what you will be attending.

I work about 20 minutes away from the Falmouth Coastguard Station, so the majority of the time I go straight to the scene of the incidents. Others, who work nearer to the Coastguard Station will make their way and collect the Coastguard Vehicle and then proceed to the scene.

I’m really lucky to have an understanding employer.

They are really understanding and supportive of my additional role within the Coastguard especially when the phone

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goes off, I drop everything and go.

I have always loved being in or around the water and from a very young age enjoyed sea kayaking, surfing and swimming there is no better place if you are an ocean lover than Cornwall.

Especially in the summer!

From climbing and diving I have always loved being outdoors and happy in any weather.

I joined the Coastguard as it gave me the ability to do something different and help people. A friend sent me over the advent on Facebook about the recruitment campaign and I thought why not let’s give it a go! And I haven’t looked back since.

To become a Coastguard Rescue Officer, you have to be over 18, have a good level of fitness, pass a medical and have a full driving licence. Ideally live or work within 30 mins of your local station, be good at communicating and following instructions.

When I joined the Coastguard Rescue Service, I had to attend the various weekend training courses.

This involved a three-day Foundation Course which covered a wide range of topics, but to name a few:

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• • • • • • •

the role of the Coastguard, radio training (VHF), knots, helicopter operations, tides, rigging, and map and compass.

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Plus, there were: •

a one-day Water Safety and Rescue Operator course which involved how to use throw lines, entering the water,

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and how to operate in flowing water; a two-day Coastguard Emergency Responder Casualty Care Course - first aid is a big thing for us from spinal injuries, to catastrophic bleeding; the course covers how to use tourniquets, maintaining airways oral and nasal, and CPR; and a two-day Rope Rescue Course which enables us to work safely on the cliff

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using different set ups for a Technical Rope Rescue, ensuring we as the Rescuers are safe as well as the Casualty.

Once I had completed the courses and signed off that was it, I was in!

Yes, there is a lot to learn, from the rope kit, water rescue, mud rescue, first aid especially the trauma side of things and it takes time to learn everything.

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On the Falmouth Team we train every Monday evening so we can go over different scenarios and setting up equipment in different places.

Switching from work mode to Coastguard mode and vice versa is a skill in itself. But it’s really important to be able to differentiate your day job and your role as a Coastguard Rescue Officer.

Incidents we attend can often be challenging.

Whether it’s the conditions we are working in from bad

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weather or at night and sometimes both! Or that the Casualty is in a tricky location for extraction.

Helicopter. You can spend minutes or even hours with them and we don’t always know the outcome.

It’s physically and mentally demanding and at times upsetting, some of the incidents can be to recover bodies or unfortunately with all the best efforts the Casualty dies.

I’m a dog lover so attending incidents with dogs is hard for me.

Sometimes the hardest thing is not knowing what happened to the Casualty once we’ve hand them over to the Ambulance, Air Ambulance or Coastguard

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Mental resilience is a big thing! Yes, at the end of the day we are only human and situations affect us all at one time or another.

However, when attending incidents our main focus is to look after the Casualty and ensure the safety of

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ourselves and members of the public. Often people are panicked, upset, in pain and don’t want to be in the situation they are in.

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Sometimes family or friends of the casualty may even be at the scene so it’s important to keep them calm and safe as well.

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We are on call 24hrs a day 365 days of the year unless we book off. Obviously, you can’t pick and choose when incidents occur, its normally when you have something

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planned like going out for a meal, just as you’re getting ready the phone goes!

As a Coastguard Rescue Officer, you could attend anything from people trapped on the coast, for example on cliffs, stuck in mud, or in the water.

Searching for missing people. Report and deal with pollution and other hazards or attending medical emergencies alongside our local Ambulance Service.

We work closely with the other Emergency Services too.

One notable incident was the Russian Cargo ship, KuzmaMinin that ranaground on Gyllyngvase Beach in Cornwall on the 18th December 2018 with 18 crew on board. This was a rather dramatic scene! It’s not every day you see a huge ship that close to the beach.

When I first got the text at 6am I was half asleep and just read ‘run-aground’ we often attend small boats or yachts that run-aground especially in bad weather, so I didn’t really think too much of it.

Arriving on scene to see the lights of the huge 180 metre ship on the shore, with the bag weather it definitely wasn’t what I was expecting.

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The Maritime and Coastguard Agency declared it a major incident so multi agency working with the Police, Lifeboat, Senior Coastal Operations Officers (SCOOs), and Coastguard Helicopter Rescue 924, as well as the local tugboats from Falmouth Harbour played a huge part in making this successful.

At the end of the day each individual, no matter what gender, all bring different skill sets and strengths, that's what makes a good team. We have the ability to utilise each other’s strengths to whatever situation we are attending.

I would probably say that I’m very calm under pressure.

I’ve always been a very levelheaded person who can deal with stressful and demanding situation in a very calm and collective way.

In terms of my other strengths I would say working as a team, communication this is obviously key in the role we do so goes without saying that you have to be able to communicate with those around you, not just to your team members but the general public.

The Coastguard gives you the ability to constantly evolve. Each incident we go

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to is different, the circumstances, who’s involved, the weather. I think it’s important to learn and develop. I’ve definitely learned new skills and I really enjoy the First Aid side of what we do and hopefully more opportunities will arise.

I have learnt so much since joining the Coastguard, I briefly knew about what they did before I joined but I’ve learnt more about the Maritime and Coastguard Agency as a whole. When I tell people I’m in the Coastguard they immediately say “it must be fun going out on the boats in bad weather” that’s the RNLI Lifeboats not the Coastguard.

I would say I have good mental resilience. However, it doesn’t matter how many incidents you attend that may be distressing like body recoveries. Depending on how you are feeling that day really depends on how you as an individual deal with it.

We are a close team and we all talk about the incidents we have been to and that’s the best way to handle it.

The Coastguard does provide extra support if we require it, so you are never just told to deal with it.

There is no physical test to pass before joining, but I would say if someone is

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who you are if you are passionate about something then nothing should stop you! Being a female Coastguard Rescue Officer helps continue to pave the way for young girls especially in Cornwall and I’m proud to be part of that.

Last year we attended 111 ‘shouts’, this was the busiest year on record and the busiest month of that year (and on record for us) was May 2019 with 24 incidents.

thinking about joining they should definitely have a good base level of fitness. This is a voluntary role, so they are not expecting Superman or Wonder Woman, however keeping your fitness up helps to make it easier. Like in any team you use each other’s strengths.

I'm really proud to be part of the Coastguard and especially proud to be on the Falmouth team. I’m proud to be part of something that matters. Only recently with Strom Dennis, as part of local resilience plans four Coastguard Rescue Officers from the Falmouth team including myself were tasked to deploy the ‘Area’ water rescue equipment to support partner agencies across the border in Devon.

Team members, along with a 4x4 vehicle and ‘Operational Support’ trailer were deployed to Exmouth and Teignmouth to bolster equipment and personnel in the areas, while being equipped and available, supporting the ongoing operation across the country.

This was a long day we set off at 1400 and eventually got back to our own station at 0200 the following morning. We work so closely together sometime for hours upon hours like in the situation, in terrible weather conditions and sometimes dealing with harrowing situations so you could say it’s like having another family.

I have never seen gender as a limitation and no matter

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We cover quite a few different disciplines from Technical Rope Rescue, rescuing people stuck on cliffs. Mud Rescue, people/ boats getting stuck in the mud or sand. This is the most physically demanding thing we do. Water Rescue, from using a throwline on the shore side to physically entering the water to affect the rescue of a casualty.

Medical assistance / Casualty Care.

With the storms over the recent weeks it’s made for dramatic waves hitting harbours/ sea walls and often this makes people want to go storm watching.

However, it takes only 15cm of water for you to be potentially swept off your feet.

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With strong currents and rip tides it takes seconds for something to happen and quickly escalate.

The danger of debris being thrown from the sea also poses a threat to people standing on the shore or being in the water.

This also applies to flood water and rivers, with the huge amount of rain fall, rivers will be flowing fast, and you have to remember that fast flowing currents also flow underneath the surface.

Submerged trees or other items can cause entrapment and/or injury.

It’s really important that people listen to advice or warnings that are put in place.

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•

•

•

Scuba divers: familiarise yourself with new or different gear before planning deep dives and dive within your limits. Never dive alone.

In more remote locations, carry a Personal Locator Beacon.

Carry a VHF marine band radio (fitted with DSC if possible) and learn how to use it. In an emergency call the Coastguard on channel 16

In terms of the summer months we find that holiday makers come from far and wide, including locals to enjoy the stunning scenery Cornwall has to offer and not forgetting the incredible beaches we have!

Everyone wants to have a safe and enjoyable time when in and around the sea.

For all you swimming, surfing, kayaking, boating, paddle boarding; there are many ways to enjoy your time in the sea. But whatever your activity, always think about the following: •

Boat users: wear a lifejacket, carry the correct means of communication, use a kill cord and kill switch and know how to use them.

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It’s really important that you understand the beach you are swimming on.

Most of the beaches around Cornwall in the summer months and school holidays will have Lifeguards on, they will indicate the safe swim zones by flags. If in doubt always speak to them!

Beaches can change on each tide, especially when we have bad weather and rip currents are very common.

Rips are strong currents running out to sea, which can quickly drag people and debris away from the shallows of the shoreline and out to deeper water.

They tend to flow very quickly and can reach 4– 5mph.

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Rips are especially powerful in larger surf, but never underestimate the power of any water. They are also found around river mouths, estuaries and man-made structures like piers and groynes.

Rip currents can be difficult to spot, but are sometimes identified by a channel of churning, choppy water on the sea's surface.

Even the most experienced swimmer or surfer can be caught out by rips, so don’t

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be afraid to ask lifeguards for advice. The best way to avoid rips is to choose a lifeguarded beach and always swim between the red and yellow flags.

If you do find yourself caught in a rip • • •

Don’t try to swim against it or you’ll get exhausted.

If you can stand, wade don’t swim.

If you can, swim parallel to the shore

•

until free of the rip and then head for shore.

Always raise your hand and shout for help.

If you see someone in trouble on the coast or in the sea always call 999 and ask for the Coastguard. It’s amazing how many people I speak to don't know you call 999 for the Coastguard.

Be safe and enjoy the stunning costal scenery the UK has to offer.

For more information and for advice, do visit the following websites: Coastguard https://coastguardsafety.campaign.gov.uk/

Royal National Lifeboat Institiute (RNLI) https://rnli.org/

Royal Yachting Association https://www.rya.org.uk

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Incidents we attended in 2019 7x Technical Rope Rescues (Cliff rescue) 20x Water Rescues (Using throwline on the shore side to physically entering the water) 9x Mud Rescues (Persons or vessels stuck in mud/sand) 10x Search (Searching for lost or missing persons) 8x First Aid 5x 'TEP' (Time Expired Pyrotechnics- anything from flares/washed up devices such as grenades) 5x Casualty Evacuation 19x HLS (Helicopter Landing Sites) 12x Investigation (Vessel aground from broken mooring etc) 10x Safety Advice (Meeting Casualty vessel etc) 6x 'Other' (Mammal stranding etc)

Following Falmouth Coast Guard On Social Media Instagram:

@falmouth.crt

Facebook:

Falmouth Coastguard Rescue Team

Following Charlie On Social Media Instagram: @charlie_fal12

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My First Triathlon By Mary Tuely, age 70 128

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Mary Tuely is an active 70 year old. She runs, swims, goes to the gym and gardens. She’s also a cancer survivor and 18 months before this story took place, had a new hip.

Then one day her daughter Whizz phoned her and suggested she do a triathlon.

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When your daughter rings and says, “Mum what about the Super Sprint Triathlon at Blenheim Palace, at the beginning of June?” You sign up, don’t you?

“But mum, you don’t know the distance”.

Middle, often known as IRONMAN 70.3 1900m swim, 90 km cycle, 21 km run.

Olympic 1500m swim, 40 km cycle, 10km run.

Sprint 750m swim, 19.8 km cycle, 5.4km; and

Um, yes, that’s a thought?

I’ve now learned there’s lots of different distances. The main ones are: Long, often known as IRONMAN 3800m swim, 180 km cycle, 42 km run.

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Super Sprint, 400m swim, 13.2 km bike and 2.5km run.

Fortunately, Whizz was suggesting I do the super sprint.

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Looking at the separate chunks, it seemed achievable. But putting all sections together and running on legs which so many say feel like jelly after the swim and the cycle, would be something of a challenge…for a 70 year old!

Ah well as a cancer survivor with a new hip 18 months ago – why not?

Training Up till then I’d been doing an hour’s gym ‘n’ swim twice a week and ran about 40 minutes with our two terriers every other day, except the weekend when we usually walked. So I wasn’t totally unfit.

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I started to train in earnest after Easter, so had six weeks until the Triathlon on the 1st June.

quite a bit taller “don’t worry it will stretch, mum.” But will it stretch enough?

The swim This is my diary.

Clothing I have a wet suit and trainers but no Tri suit. Tri suit?

This is a skin tight item of clothing, usually one piece so that you do not have to change clothes between swimming and cycling.

It is utterly hideous, unless you are a 20 year old bean pole. Daughter, Whizz said she has a spare, but I am

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I love swimming but prefer crystal clear Mediterranean water to murky Blenheim lake where you cannot see your hand in front of you. In theory a 400m swim should not be bad as I have already done 750m in the lake as part of a family triathlon relay.

The cycle For me this will be the key challenge. My bike is for cross country with something

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like tractor tyres and gears that do not work well.

Apparently, I need a road bike. I am lent one by a friend in the village who wants it returned at the weekends. When I collect it, I find it has toe holds.

There’s a huge amount of wobbling around as I try and get my toes in, also I cannot make head nor tail of the gears.

We have good hills in and out of the village, but I cannot do any of them without getting off! Does not bode well. Also make a note not to cycle anywhere near rush hour, far too scary.

The run I ran a half marathon at Blenheim in 2017. 13.5 miles or 20k as I prefer because it sounds longer!

The Park is so beautiful with stunning trees, glimpses of follies and the Palace, what a setting. Whizz ran with me as my pacemaker. By the time I finished, I almost needed the other type of pacemaker, the one they insert inside you.

At least after that, 2.5k sounds no distance at all, but after the swim and cycle…who knows?

23rd April

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Started concentrating on the run. Whizz suggests I have a metronome to regulate my ‘cadence’ (the number of steps you take per minute, the tri is full of new words.)

My only metronome is rather bulky and sits on the piano, but she patiently explained that I can get an app for my phone.

The point of it is to improve one’s technique, just what my running needs, by keeping at a constant rate per minute. The sound helps to synchronise your leg movement.

Everyday runners are usually at 160 – 170 steps per minute with the elite striking the ground at 180, some getting above 200.

Technical eh? Feel a little weak with it all. I decided to set off at 163.

29th April Confident to up the metronome to 166…am aiming for 180!

1st May Ran up to the village, collected the bike, cycled then the heavens opened and got completely drenched. As I returned the bike, husband arrived in the village having guessed where I would be, scooped me up to a hot bath and

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huge mug of coffee. What a great support team!! Whizz says “Proper triathlete now…”

2nd May Gym ‘n’ Swim and dropped in at the village hall to vote in the General Election. If only there was an “Encourage to Exercise Party “?

More training - a run, gradually increasing the metronome, cycle and gym ‘n’ swim, interspersed with the Trio Lunch.

This is a monthly lunch where about 20 people come from surrounding villages for a delicious lunch – main course, lots of vegetables, choice of desert, wine, juice and coffee for a very small sum. It is a brilliant social event which I help to cook for and do the flowers which are auctioned afterwards. I think many villages do this – it is so popular.

15th May Cycle/Run. Slightly beginning to get to grips with the gears but still do not totally understand them.

Can now get up the village hills out of sheer determination. Husband explained again, about ‘high’

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With her family team mates after doing a previous triathlon relay event

hand, that is, not the appointment!

24th May All fine with the hand. Tried 180 on the run, only spasmodic because of opening a broken gate but got the feel of it.

27th May

and ‘low’ gears. Just want to get up the hills!

17th May Ran metronome 176. Rang Whizz and say can’t think why I feel sleepy midmorning and mid-afternoon, as that is not usually how I feel.

Symptoms are being tired yes, washed out a little bit, lack of energy…mmm. I see where this is going. So put the training plan on the calendar and will now stick to it. Not forgetting the days off my body needs to recuperate.

20th May

She said let’s “go through your training”, did that then she goes “whoa! Stop, stop!

You are wildly overtraining!”

Husband and I escape to Exbury to look at wonderful trees and forget about triathlons.

Not again! I did that with the Blenheim Half Marathon. I find it quite easy to up the training as I want to make sure I can finish, but overtraining has its risks.

22nd May Ran. Tripped and fell on my hand. So nearly there, I don’t need this now. Had to drive to an appointment with our delightful Irish dentist, which was quite sore - the

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Calming down week and sorting out bits and bobs.

First the water bottle cradle on the bike…it is too small, until husband realised it was screwed onto the bike upside down. The forecast is very hot for Saturday so hydration is hugely important - must practise getting the water bottle out of the cradle.

Wetsuit removal: Whizz gives me some advice and I look at a You tube clip. Out of the lake, I’ll need to get goggles on my head, unzip wetsuit, ease arms out one at a time and pull the wetsuit down to my waist before taking off goggles, cap and earplugs (I wear earplugs when swimming to minimise the risk of ear infection).

Once in transition (T1), it’ll be goggles etc into the box by my bike, suit down to ankles, tread on each leg and pull off.

Sounds simple doesn’t it? I was going to get into the

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pool and try out this method but suddenly it was raining (at last) and cold, and I couldn’t face trying it out in the bath, so just visualised it.

Looked at the You Tube ‘First Triathlon’ which was quite a hoot and useful.

30th

May

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that matches the borrowed bike!

Relaxing supper at home.

I usually sleep very well but I find that I am waking up in the night. Anxiety?

1st June – Race day

Had been quite tired all week, not from Tri exercise, but gardening! Felt fine today and did a reduced gym ‘n’ swim.

Amazingly didn’t feel too nervous perhaps because there was a lot to think about, also my start was not until 15.50 which almost felt like the next day.

I am now absolutely buzzing.

Can I bottle that for Saturday? Bought a shoehorn in Chippy on the way home for £1! I hope that will help me in the transitions and I won’t be hopping around on one foot, like the novice I am.

We’re so fortunate to live a mere 10 minute drive from Blenheim Palace. In fact, we often walk from home, across the A44 into the Park round and back in a couple of hours. This time drove with husband and terriers, Whizz cycles.

Tried extracting the water bottle on the bike up the drive. 3 out of 4 times it worked without too much wobbling. Dropped it once!

Reckon that if I am really thirsty it will work.

Felt unable to concentrate on the Tri so didn’t. Had a leg massage with the massage company Whizz has worked for.

Lounged all afternoon reading my book - what a treat.

31st May Whizz arrived at home from London this afternoon. I tried on her tri suit. It is very tight and weirdly pink and grey

Didn’t know what to do about eating, so had a small breakfast thinking that I might have the other half later, which I don’t.

Grandson suggested I have lunch at 10 am, which I didn’t. Whizz said adrenalin would take over, which it did, so no need for food. I ate a banana (I don’t particularly like them) at midday.

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Whizz started at 11 and already finished by lunch - so envious. I fell asleep by the car while others had their lunch.

Almost time for me to race.

Had a double expresso, apparently Mo (Farrah) has that, then headed down to the lake start.

Having swam 750m in a relay here in the past, I thought the 400m would be a doddle. No, annoyingly it wasn’t! Whizz said that’s because I was thinking about all the rest to come.

Once out of the lake. Made it a point of honour to run up the hill to Transition.

At Blenheim, both transitions – swim to bike and bike to run, are in the Great Courtyard – what a sight.

Whizz was there at T1, helped me out of the wetsuit and onto the bike making sure I had my helmet on before leaving T1.

Still didn’t really understand the gears but managed to do all the hills without getting off and walking. Two circuits then back to Transition 2. I enjoyed the cycling as Blenheim is so beautiful with wonderful trees, but it was a relief to be on the last leg.

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finished with me. I tried very hard to sprint! Medal!

At the start of the swim leg

Yes enjoyed it, might even do it again next year.

Improvements I felt my swim was slow because of sighting (lifting your head to see where you are going) and I guess I would feel more confident with my own bike.

Tri Tips Put number and Wave number on your hand with indelible pen to avoid panic when finding one’s station.

Only one circuit for the run.

Started off over a manmade bridge with cyclists pedalling underneath.

The pull up to the Vanburgh Bridge seemed longer than I remember from the 20k run I did here with Whizz.

Left turn then a gentle downhill towards the Woodstock Arch. If you are going to do a triathlon Blenheim is the best, so many wonderful views.

There was a woman beside me who kept passing me then walking, so I passed her and she’d pass me again and so on until the finish, found it rather annoying!

At the water station at the bottom by the burnt out cottage stopped and had a proper drink.

Eventually the finish was in sight. Whizz and terriers climbed the barrier and

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When racking the bike set up towel, running shoes (well talcum powdered!), shoe horn? Helmet on bike with sunglasses/sun visor.

There are photographers everywhere…try and smile at them. Drop hands onto lower handlebars (which in my case creates a wobble), in the photos makes you look like you’re going faster!

On the run, pick your feet up when in sight of the photographers, otherwise it looks like you’re walking!

Forgot to say… I came first in my age group!!

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About Mary Tuely Asked to leave the art class at school, Mary has drawn and painted ever since under her maiden name of Stirling. She is mainly self-taught but has been helped by friends, some paid, some unpaid. Her recent paintings are mainly watercolours based on "the less is more" idea with space for imagination i.e. the opposite of mosaics.

She’s a keen gardener, married to Miles and mum to Will and Louisa, who are both very active, Will having completed the Marathon des Sables and Louisa being a seasoned triathlete.

Louisa already has plans to enter her mum into more races and has suggested the Ötillö swim run race in Switzerland.

For more on Mary’s art projects, go to www.marystirling.co.uk

Sport and Activity For All At various times in our life, we all face challenges. With Coronavirus spreading, here in the UK, there’s talk of over 70’s going into isolation for possibly as long as 4 months!

We appreciate that not all 70 year olds, or people who’ve been through cancer, or people who’ve had a hip replacement, and certainly not all people who are in each of those categories are as fit as Mary Tuely. But we also appreciate that nowadays, many people do enjoy decent health at 70 and beyond, possibly even despite earlier health issues.

Whatever your age, we hope Mary’s story will inspire you to get out there and do stuff, though perhaps not right now what with Coronavirus. But: • • •

we encourage everyone to use this time to think about what it is you would like to achieve and do in life; we encourage everyone to get online and investigate what steps are needed to achieve your goals; and. we encourage you to start out on that process, so that once life returns to more normal times, you are already on the road to achieving your goals.

We very much hope that as well as being an enjoyable read, you will find Mary’s story to be inspiring and like us, you too are motivated by her grit, tenacity and love for life.

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Coming Up In Adventure She Magazine During 2020 Remember, please do send us your stories Researching Rubbish In India

Downhill Mountain Biking

Hiking Lewis To Harris

UTMB Week

Running The Everest Marathon

Exploring Indonesia 136

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Hiking The Grand Canyon

Exploring Kakadu National Park

Winter Hiking

New Zealand’s Coast To Coast

Kayaking With The Maoris

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