A health-inducing lockdown loop from downtown Crosby to the roof of the world, or the top of Marown, which is pretty much the same thing. Pack the picnic blanket and Compeed, this one’s gonna be good.
Hiking
Hiking Lhargee Ruy from Crosby
Fitness
Smashed my Half Marathon PB
Hardly a groundbreaking update, but finally some black-on-white evidence that the fitness regime is paying off. Yep – I smashed my personal half marathon record, and also bagged my longest ever run. Very pleased with this.
Hiking
Step Count when Hiking with Poles
A while back I saw a post on Reddit questioning the accuracy of step tracking when using hiking poles. This made me think. I use poles now and then for longer / steeper hikes – was I missing out on some tracked calories which could later be exchanged for beer? Time to find out!
Hiking
Hiking Cronk Ny Arrey Laa from Dalby
Another hastily clobbered together route that turned out all right, on the hottest day of the year, and it’s only May. This one sees us getting sunburnt over 4 hours and 715 sweaty meters of elevation, bagging one of the island’s highest peaks and visiting an ancient hermitage. Welcome to the Dalby circuit.
Cycling, Photography
Springtime comes to Cringle Plantation
I spent a couple of hours on the Stumpjumper yesterday exploring Cringle Plantation, one of the more technical mountain bike areas on the Isle of Man. Towards the end of the blue dot community trail I was transported into a magical woodland of mature, moss-covered larch, planted just wide enough to allow a carpet of wild clover to conceal the entire forest floor, and that carpet was now in full bloom.
Fitness
CooSpo Heart Rate Monitor Review
I finally ended a 2 week period of iffy training stats by replacing the Garmin HR chest strap that died on me, and here’s a few words on the replacement product I’ve chosen as my daily activity heart rate monitor: cheap, accurate, compatible.
Fitness
Garmin Fenix Optical Heart Rate Test
My Garmin chest strap finally died. Originally bundled with the 920XT I purchased back in August 2015, I’ve been using the HRM-RUN on average three or four times a week without issues, but after two intermittent failures during road rides…
Misc
iPad’s problem wasn’t the keyboard
Apple have released a new iPad together with a Magic Keyboard. But does it solve a problem that doesn’t exist? I share some thoughts on a year spent with the previous model, and why the new Magic Keyboard is likely to be just as frustrating as the old Smart Keyboard.
Photography
Three Months with Fujifilm X-T3
In the never-ending quest to try something new, I’m revisiting one of the brands which started me out in digital photography at the turn of the millennium: Fujifilm. This post contains a few thoughts and impressions of Fuji’s X-T3 mirrorless camera, written from the point of view of a long-term Nikon full-frame and Olympus Micro Four Thirds shooter.
Hiking, Misc, Outdoor Stuff
Open-source Mapping on Garmin
Availability of open-source map data has been eroding sales of Garmin’s proprietary maps for some time now, and in this short post I’m going to share my approach for getting several countries worth of routable maps onto my handheld device and my laptop.