~ Curator’s Field Notes ~
How can we make adventure more sustainable?
I understand the benefits of adventure, increased social mobility by widening your social circle and professional network, education, life skills, increased resilience – the list goes on. However, how can we access these huge opportunities knowing that we’re contributing to an unsustainable way of living.
How slow adventures can be good for your career and mental health.
When you’re so intensely focussed on your career or family, your attention to where you are in life can go unchecked. For some people, this lack of checking-in with yourself can last years or even decades. For others, they check in too often and it stops progression forward and upwards. I think this ‘analysis paralysis’ can be a cause of unhappiness for some.
Taking a sabbatical to row across an ocean, cycle across a country (or continent), or run across a desert, might seem like unhelpful to some, but I think it can be useful in ways we don’t really consider.
The 7 principles I follow for taking on physical challenges that intimidate me
82 years old and completing an Ironman triathlon. That’s a 2.4-mile (3.8-km) swim, followed by a 112-mile (180-km) cycle, and finishing with a 26.2-mile (42.2-km) run. Just think about that for a second longer.
It’s stories like hers that motivate me to keep going when the journey ahead seems impossible to move forward.
In the next few years, I'll be aiming to complete the Silk Road Mountain race, a 1700-kilometre continuous bikepacking race in Kyrgyzstan, and one of my biggest personal challenges since a mountaineering accident in 2019 almost permanently stopped me from doing things I love altogether.
There are the 7 principles that I use to fit training to previous adventures that I’ll use to get myself to the finishing line.