FionaOutdoors

What is your skiing “type”? Are you happiest on long and flattering blue and red runs, whiling your days away enjoying the scenery and staying within your comfort zone? Are you a journey skier? The kind who spends delightfully long and frequently adventurous days discovering new ski runs and interconnecting valleys while making lots of [...]

I have a massive fondness for rucksacks. There, I’ve outed myself as a Rucksack Lover. If I’m going to be absolutely truthful I own a wardrobe of rucksacks and not a single handbag. I have rucksacks for almost every occasion, from a short run to a multi-day hike, to a two-week holiday and back to [...]

Running uphill without any flat sections for 5k on a gorgeously sunny, but breezy and chilly, day in the Bavarian Alps with two top French bloggers and runners, Greg-Runner and Mountain Goat Sylvain, makes me sweat. Of course it does! It’s faster than my usual pace, steeper than my usual hills, at higher altitude than [...]

To buy or not to buy ski and snowboarding equipment Last year’s snowboarding holiday saw me ditching my snowboard of 10 years (bought from top snowboarder Lesley McKenna after I was lucky enough to be given a few first lessons on the board) to try another, more modern board. But within 30 minutes I realised [...]

It’s raining, it’s windy, it looks like the summer (if you could call it summer) is over and we’re heading full tilt into winter. But this doesn’t mean us outdoorsy folk do not have something to look forward to. I’m not thinking about the forthcoming skiing and snowboarding season. Wooohoo! For the past decade or [...]

I “met” Peter Syme on LinkedIn. He started a discussion thread on Social Media: My next start-up has no search volume so there is no need to work the SEO. The number of potential clients and geographical location of them make print advertising a waste of money so that leaves SM as the route to [...]

I met Marianne on the Marmot Tour of the Pyrenees. She’s a keen cyclist and takes part in the odd sportive event with the “aim of completing rather than competing”. She admitted feeling a little intimidated by the cycling trip, but she was determined to enjoy herself. She also confessed to being 38 but sometimes [...]

Poring over the maps and graphs of the day’s cycling, our group digests both a huge breakfast and the statistics. Four magnificent mountains in the French Pyrenees. Four long, and often steep, ascents up four famous Tour de France cols. Four superbly fast but tricky descents.  A total distance of 107km. A total ascent of 3215m [...]

Holidays aren’t always the easiest times for keep-fit motivation. Hot sun, too many sangrias and an abundance of addictive yet trashy novels can mean that a week or two fly by in foreign climes without so much as a light jog. But I have the answer. Well, actually, I have two answers! 1) Book a [...]

Everything is relative and so the high and the low featured in this blog– and the next – might not seem that dramatic in the grand scale of ordinary life! In fact there were too many highs to recount during my fab week on the sports heaven isle of Lanzarote but this one high is [...]