Petestack Blog

Six blogless months since the world I knew was shattered by the sudden death of my mother and three more since my last blog before that, a tangible sense of loss finally compels me to write here again. But this isn’t about losing my sprightly and seemingly-immortal 85-year-old mother when I’m not sure I’ll ever want to write about that, but rather about my good friend John Kynaston, who was much closer to my own age at just 61… (more…)

Some people will say they’ve heard it all before. But let’s look at the (sarcasm alert!) packed totality of my ultra racing career since the 2011 West Highland Way Race PB that saw me write ‘I’m done with competing in this race and comfortable with that where I wasn’t last time’… (more…)

I was looking for a long trail run yesterday and nearly went for a double Lairig Mòr thinking I could probably squeeze that out to 30 miles by running right into town rather than stopping at the Leisure Centre. But then I thought of something more interesting… (more…)

Last Monday (22 May) my after-school plans needed some rethinking when I drove over the hill from Strontian to Polloch, got changed for a run up the side of Loch Shiel, then discovered I’d forgotten my shoes! So that run had been doomed from the moment I’d left home at 7:25am and, even as I’d looked forward to it (despite the rain) through a school day some miles and a ferry crossing from home, my shoes were sitting smugly on the kitchen floor waiting to greet me where I’d taken them off the previous day. (more…)

Let’s get mushy for a moment… I bashed my head and fractured a metacarpal in my hand, but supported Alicia Hudelson’s Ramsay Round with my (undamaged) heart! I could have been doing a longer, flatter trail run than the 23 miles I contributed to the cause, but it’s what I wanted to do and I’m proud to have helped her achieve that cherished goal and become no.100 on Charlie’s list. (more…)

Now here’s a tale of clag-enveloped peaks, complex terrain, contact lenses and the absence of reading glasses or lens-on-a-string combining to lead me astray and seek consolation/justification in a statement of the blindingly obvious. Which is quite simply that you’ll go wrong if you can’t see what you need to see (in this case not just the hills but the map and GPS as well)! (more…)

While I could tell you I enjoyed the good trail through the flat-floored, almost ‘secret’, hanging valley of Coire an t-Suidhe so much I had to run it three times (once northwards and twice southwards), I’d be lying when the ugly truth behind that third visit to such a delightful place is that I simply made one of the most inexplicably bad navigational mistakes of my life… (more…)

Today’s run was not 100% what I had in mind, but close enough… (more…)

Two Mondays a fortnight apart, and two evening runs after a day’s work in Strontian. Hard now to believe the first was snatched from an iffy late April day with periodic snow showers, but tonight (perhaps registering the continuously sunny start to May?) I finally rolled up my sleeves and carried the unworn hat and gloves I could probably also have left off on Saturday! (more…)