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Category: Outdoor

Font 2023

Font 2023

Another holiday in France, this time with added 36 degree weather! In the UK, we were protected mostly from the fierce weather happening on the continent. This meant we set of for France with temperatures of around 17 degrees, to driving past Paris in 36 degrees. Luckily for me, I was in a car with air conditioning, so barely noticed until we got out for lunch along the route. Scorchio! Poor old Jim, Lolly and Dave weren’t so lucky, having…

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Help! I’ve gone to Spain in winter and it’s lovely.

Help! I’ve gone to Spain in winter and it’s lovely.

So, when I was up in Scotland running that crazy crazy race, Rowan kept dropping a few hints about how he was going to Spain at the end of November for some winter climbing in the sun with his friend Simon. “Ha, that sound lovely” I thought to myself. Once I’d got back from the race, Anya started hassling me. Well, it turns out she really fancied going to Spain too, and if she was going, she really needed a…

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Once more into The Forest: Fontainebleau 2022

Once more into The Forest: Fontainebleau 2022

After an abortive attempt for Ed and I to on a ‘psyched’, two men on a bouldering mission to Font on the day France went into their first COVID19 lockdown (We went to Carrefour, cooked dinner, went to bed and the next day drove home 🙁 ) it’s our first Fontainebleau climbing holiday for a LOOONG time. This time, we went large, with 11 of us in a massive Gite up at the posh little village of Bois de Roi….

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Welcome to the 20s

Welcome to the 20s

What an odd year for running and climbing. Reflecting back on it, I feel like it’s been a bit of a crap year for my running. Running Reflections Except, it really hasn’t: One of my targets at the start of the year post was like the past 2 years, to run the year again in km. Yep, did it: 2023km in 2019. Then, in mid June, I destroyed my 5k time while testing the new Loxley Lash 5k course with…

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Fontainebleau 2019

Fontainebleau 2019

Aaah! Holiday time! Yeah, I’m well overdue a blog update, but I’m still not in a blogging mood. It would be a shame however not to capture some notes of how the climbing went while in sunny République française. Day 1: Beauvais Nainville We’ve never made it to Beauvais before, despite it being on Liz’s hit list for a while. It’s a littler further north than we usually head to based on where we’ve been staying, but being in the…

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Overdue update! Some Curbar bouldering

Overdue update! Some Curbar bouldering

I’ve got a bit slack with updating here recently. I’m not sure I’ll get back in track soon but let’s try and get something up about the tiny bit of outdoor bouldering we’ve managed this year. We’ve made it out twice so far this year, which is frankly pathetic! We’ve just been too busy, or the weather has been bad. Must try and remedy this! Both times we made it out though we decided to go to Curbar. Although Curbar…

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Easter Higgar Tor time

Easter Higgar Tor time

The group decided to take advantage of the lovely weather and go climbing, this time up to Higgar Tor. I decided that at about 15km from home, it would make a nice morning run, even if it is nearly a solid 450m climb all the way. I set off a bit later than planned due to being out for a meal the night before and the necessary couple of glasses of red made getting up harder. Consequently, the first 6-7k…

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EMBRACE! Track day

EMBRACE! Track day

Yay! It’s track day. I do love a good speedy track session. Today’s plan after an additional 30mins lie in, was to head to the Lagos running track and after a 1 mile warm up, do 4 sets of 800m/400m/200m intervals, each with 70secs recovery between and a slow 200m walk between sets. Ugh 800ms! Checking out my track stats from my last Embrace trip, we’d done 12x400m with the 400m intervals at about 3:45mins/km, so I had a rough…

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EMBRACE! Woodland Trail Run

EMBRACE! Woodland Trail Run

After a 5kish recovery run last night down the hill to the Lagos Marina (and back up the hill again through the old town!), we stuffed our faces with beef bourguignon, mash, beer and red wine and then headed to bed earlyish (10pm OMG!) so we could be up and ready for today. Monday was the Woodland Trail Endurance run. This is probably my favourite run of the weekend; 1-4 laps of a 5ish mile woodland trail under the soothing…

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(Don’t) follow the leader. Spring Trail Series – Bakewell

(Don’t) follow the leader. Spring Trail Series – Bakewell

This year I managed to sign up for the full Spring Trail Series hosted by Dark and White Events. This is three 15k-ish up and down the hills in the Peak District during the spring. I’ve run a couple of their events before, and was really looking forward do this. Last year, I ran the last event in the series at Low Bradfield and came well into the “Gold” pace bracket, setting me up for what I hoped would be…

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