Challenge Stu

I hope everybody had a fantastic bank holiday weekend. I was lucky enough to spend it on the West coast of Scotland with Lorna and my Mum and Dad. We were in a place called Tayvallich, a little village on an inlet of Loch Sween. A mile's walk takes you to the other side of the peninsula, where from the even littler village of Carsaig you have a direct view across to Jura. It's a stunning place. Tayvallich Bay. After a monster 10 hour drive north (though a stop at Mungrisdale was well worth an extra hour or so), we arrived and set about preparing ourselves for a weekend of adventure. The first step was to inflate my funny old blow-up kayak. I bought it originally to practice for using inflatables at WARC 2013 in Costa Rica, but it has far outlasted my predictions and has been great. There are numerous patches, the non-return valves have died, and it's short fat shape means it waddles around the sea rather than carving swiftly through the waves as a fibreglass boat migh...

A combination of work and adventures in plasterboard means it's taken me longer than intended to get round to writing this, but I wanted to write a quick piece on one of the best skiing holidays I've had in a long time. The season didn't start well. Even compared to last year, when it didn't really snow till mid-January, the start to the season was bad. A March trip sounded like a bad idea, but frankly we needed as long as possible to save up, so March it was! The Daily Mail - for all the best celebrity weight and skiing stories In fact, the snow was not a problem. We stayed at Le Praz, in the Courchevel valley at about 1300m. This worked brilliantly for me, as there was snow above us and sunny valley below us. I skied on Sunday but on Monday decided to take advantage of the weather and headed out for a  long ru n. It was a great adventure, like the long runs I used to do on days off last winter. As then, the speed was low but the climb pretty high! I clock...