One Way of Life ...

We seem to be dominated by the negative and measuring a year by that and that alone. Nae doubts about it, if you chose to look for the bad in 2016, you didn’t need to look all that hard. Maybe it is that human instinct to be fearful and aware but I am not sure that serves us well all the time. Despite that, this beautiful wee film by Billy Yang says it all for me …

On a personal level, 2016  was a good year – big bag of adventures, gigs with pals, races, #brawtimes with Katie and seeing my daughter take a huge leap to live over in Paris and following her own heart and dreams.

Given that this space tends to be adventure focused some stand out moments included – the weekend back in February where a dump of snow turned the area around Glenmore and Abernethy into a scene reminiscent of Narnia, running the Fling, Romanian Bear Race and Jedburgh Ultras with Katie, the Tromso and Coe Skyline races, another Ben finish and possibly my favourite – fastpacking round the Tour du Mont Blanc route.

Much as I loved the big “event” stuff, I’ve decided that the main focus of racing in 2017 will be simply fell/hill racing ~ less glitz, cost and more mud, scree and an equal amount of fun. We are heading out to Yosemite for some exploring before heading down to Born to Run in May, hopefully a traverse of the GR20 route over in Corsica in August and the only ultra in the diary so far is the Lakes in a Day in October.

Excited about it all but also seriously looking forward to some smaller projects. Local lad and talented runner James Stewart introduced the idea of Mind Maps last year and I’ve been playing around with them to help visualise ideas …a raised dram to 2017 ~ make it a braw yin !