Rosie Stancer is the embodiment of the idea that with self-belief, motivation and application, anyone can push themselves beyond their perceived limitations and achieve the extraordinary.
Bog Standard Blog
August 14th, 2011Stolen a week of ‘summer’ holiday up on North Uist, the wild and natural habitat of my cousin Fergus. The weather is filthy, of course, with a biting wind and that very wet rain peculiar to the Western Isles. I feel for the locals who must yearn for a bit of summer sun after the long dark winters. This one must be like living in a car wash.
I send a bleating text to Jock’s Venezulan Godfather in London but feel sheepish hearing his reply that ‘London’s burning’.Time to buy a newspaper from the North Uist co-op. All the ugly violence of the London riots seems so hard to grasp up here, where the only riot is of the surprisingly vivid summer colours: white sand dunes, carpets of bright wild flowers and the azore blue sea, whose tropical colours belie its goose-bump inducing temperatures.
It’s been a while since I braved a swim here, not so much on account of the temperatures in and out of the sea, as the flotillas of jellies that lurk. I should, as a gesture of steeliness in anticipation of future icy swims in the Arctic Ocean.
A brisk walk up a windswept 3 mile long, white beach, put paid to such heady notions as I gave up counting the colourful, elaborately patterned jellyfish laid out along the sand like a dinner service.
The turquoise waters here are teeming with unlikely maritime residents, as a warm tentacle of the gulf stream stretches up into them.
I can remember on one of countless fishing trips with my resident Aunt and Uncle, landing (them not I) a huge skate that weighed more than me then at 100lbs. And that was without its tail which appeared to have been snatched by a shark. It had doe eyes and looked like a very frightened Audrey Hepburn. I was five years old, and I was upset. As it was hauled over the side of the rather precariously rocking little boat, Aunt Doon (not Dune) remarked “It’s sadder than you think; skates mate for life”. So we fished on, long into the summer evening, in the hope of catching her mate and not leaving it to a lonely fate. No success, maybe the shark had got there first and I like to think that we rescued the otherwise love-lorn partner.
Went for a windy (as in weather), windy (as in bendy) run, up and up to the top of a hill offering a rewarding view of St Kilda and the Monarch islands. Then down the other side getting bogged down in, well, a peat bog. I can see the novelty of bog-running might wear thin shortly, very shortly, so I’m thankful that in anticipation of lending another dimension to maintaining some sort of training, other than chancing it with the dinner plates, I have brought with me my new training toy, a TRX. This is a training system made up of a neat suspension system of ropes and pulleys, much favoured by the boys out in the Middle East etc. The only other element you need is an anchor point such as a beam or even a tree. The croft houses here do not have beams. North Uist is legendary for having not one fully grown tree. But I’m not stumped…maybe one of those docile highland cattle that barely move would do…..?