I am serious about wanting to qualify and compete at powerlifting but that didn’t stop me from having a holiday last week.
What were we doing?
We were cycle touring round the far North East of Scotland.
When I say far North East I really do mean far North East. We drove for nine hours to reach Inverness, which is halfway up the Highlands (and on a scale of driving in England, a nine hour journey is covering serious ground). We then carried on North for another hour until we reached the small town of Dornoch. By the end of the week we had put over 1,000 miles on the car just getting to Dornoch and back.
After leaving the car at Dornoch we spent 5 days doing a clockwise loop up the centre of the Highlands, along the north coast to John O’Groats and then back down the East coast to Dornoch.
Was it really a holiday?
I use the term “holiday” with caution. It was a rest from work and it was certainly mentally relaxing. From a physical perspective though, it was really tough in places. While it was a break from the usual powerlifting and strongman workouts but it was in no way an opportunity for our muscles to atrophy. However, a change is as good as a rest when it comes to muscles and, while I wouldn’t necessarily put this in the category of “active rest”, my upper body certainly had a break!
The weather was mostly unwelcoming (as befits an outdoor holiday in the UK planned 12 months in advance) with one blue sky day and the rest a mix of frequent hailstorms, rain and headwinds. The headwinds in particular left us working even harder than usual and I’m sure I’ll do a blog post in the next few weeks about the subsequent muscle gain and side effects from all of that.
However, despite the unwelcoming weather, Scotland was looking beautiful as it always does at this time of year. Plenty of yellow gorse, lush green grass and dark green pine forests contrasting with looming grey rocks, dustings of snow on the tops of the higher hills and mountains and, when it wasn’t raining and hailing at us, deep clear blue skies.
What did we eat?
We had a few minor food issues, in particular on the first couple of days.
By starting on a Sunday we struggled to find an open shop, though we caught a village shop just as it was closing at midday and managed to find couple of tins of tuna. After that we didn’t see any significant civilisation from when we finished going west to Lairg and turned north to go up the country until we reached the north coast at Bettyhill in the middle of Monday afternoon.
Fortunately we had anticipated this and had a base quantity of food with us in the form of nuts and dark chocolate. Interestingly we found that, while creating a slight calorie deficit for the first day, this was sufficient food (along with a bit of body fat) to keep us going until we could raid the village store at Bettyhill.
I love being adapted to run off fat for fuel – those of you who follow me on Twitter will have found that out halfway through last week when I was singing its praises. I’ll do a post tomorrow that goes into a bit more detail about the benefits of fat adaption on this holiday.
Picture time
To save you all from anymore holiday stories I’ll satisfy myself with a montage of some of the better shots from the holiday (taken in between hailstorms).
Flowering gorse
The blue sky belies the fact that it was blowing hard
The perfect bivvy spot for night one
"Hairy" dunes
See those clouds? They just dumped a load of hail onto us.
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