Running the Christmas Pudding run at Merthyr Mawr. Sand dunes, mud, streams and hills. Great fun. It’d be even more fun if I could run fast.
Fideo
As you may have seen, I started making videos and putting them up on the YouTubes regularly. I’m putting up a new anatomy video and a new family vlog type thing every week. There were a couple of spurs for this.
I’ve spent a lot of time planning and preparing (and now teaching) new anatomy courses, which has taken up far more of my time and energy than expected, with less of the support that I had expected. This means that I’ve had no time to do the other stuff that I like doing in teaching – the geeky stuff. 3D printing, augmented reality projects, NFC and QR tagging, and all the other things have been dumped. Hopefully just for a year or so, but I like creating stuff. Rhiannon and I had started to move from podcasts to YouTube many years ago, but when she left Swansea no-one else wanted to make stuff with me. But I’ve been playing with video recently and YouTube is now huge, so I reckoned that I could bang out some form of anatomy teaching video and be time effective about it. I can record a video on my phone while wandering around, talking off the top of my head and produce a useful 10 minute video, for example.
The other spur is my brother. He’s been living and working in Dubai for a while now, and I’ve got a bunch of bits of video that I’d like to share. I tried putting some videos with story together and it was fun and worked quite well. I shared a few with him, and then thought I might as well share them more widely. It doesn’t really matter whether many people watch them or not. The process itself is pleasing and makes the whole family think about something fun to do each weekend. It’s normally hard to get one of the kids out of the door to do something. It’s less difficult if they’ve been thinking about what to put in the video.
It feels good to be creative. It feels useful.
Hunting for a Christmas Tree
Kim wanted to find a tree still connected to the ground this year. To cut down and move into our living room.
Walk, Run, Burn
Walking the dog, running the hill, and burning the bonfire the other weekend in Cheltenham.
Coed Y Brenin (4)
Rounding out our visit to Coed Y Brenin Forest Park with a black route on the mountain bike and a walk to the waterfalls. With the occasional geocache.
Coed Y Brenin (3)
Long run, Jack on a full blue mountain biking trail, and a night hunt for geocaches!
Coed Y Brenin (2)
Running, biking, & walking in Coed Y Brenin.
Coed Y Brenin (1)
Here’s some video from the drive up and the first day of fun at Coed Y Brenin Forest Park.
Coed Y Brenin
I managed to sneak 2 days of leave from work last week during the kids’ half term to get away to Coed Y Brenin Forest Park in North Wales to do some mountain biking and trail running. It’s an excellent place to visit and I’ve been meaning to go for years, often driving past on the way to somewhere else. There are 8 mountain biking trails from green for the kids to longer black routes needing a bit of skill and fitness. The running routes are also great, and let me switch my brain off for a bit, following sign posts to get a tour around the forest on footpaths and logging roads.
It was a great few days away, and the kids got some mtb skills going on green and blue routes. The autumnal colours of the forest made all the riding and running even more beautiful, and we sneaked in some geocaching. I even got everyone out on a night hike for caches with the nights drawing in.
My main aim this year was to try to take all my leave this year and I’ve failed miserably. I’ve been working too much again, becoming more like the salmon, even though I’m not striving to get anywhere (I’d like to strive to get outdoors to play more). We’ve been asked to teach two new courses and have not yet had any new staff, so we’ve had to get the preparation work done ourselves to make sure it all runs smoothly. Damn my work ethic.
I didn’t record an anatomy video last week because I was away, but I have a couple of ideas for videos so I might do 2 this week. I’ll edit the Coed Y Brenin videos and get them up on the YouTubes too.
Family mountain biking at Afan
I was planning to go for a quick ride at Afan Forest Park on Sunday morning, but as we’re planning to visit Coed Y Brenin in the half term week the rest of the family wanted to come too.