Wow - what a weekend

Last Tuesday saw the last of my exams for this year - it's now sit back, relax and wait for the results and fingers crossed. I say, sit back and relax, well I'm not really doing that, certainly not if last weekend is anything to go by.

Firstly on Friday, I made an appearance on local television, this was in support of the White Wood Project we've up here in Huntly. It's an art based community project encouraging and commemorating peace and I've been involved with it over the past couple of years with the school.

Saturday was the first of the Scottish races in the GB roller ski series for the year. This year's was extremely tight. The result is calculated by the combined timings of 2 races on the day and points awarded for your placing. Well, I almost planted my face on tarmac on the first race and it cost me 1 or 2 seconds in that race. Whilst I made up for it in the 2nd race and managed to make up time, I ended up 1 second behind the winner. What made it worse was that 3 people in front of me all tied on their timings so I ended up 4th overall in the U18s.

I have to say well done to my teammates Oliver, Fergus and Jack who had a great weekend racing, finishing joint first on Saturday. We've been training together for years now and we feed well off each other for training and racing.

There was another race on Sunday but I decided to try something different and entered the "Color Me RAD" 5k race in Aberdeen. A friend of mine had done it the previous year and said it was just great fun. So teaming up with a couple of friends and also my mum joined the squad, we had such a blast. Basically, for those who don't know, you go around the course and teams of volunteers get to cover you in liquid and powered dyes.

There must have been a couple of thousand people there - great atmosphere and I'm still finding bits of dye behind my ears.

Back to training this week as keen to make up my points in the next few races in the GB Championships - my next focus is the sprints and hill climb in Aviemore in 3 weeks time. The hill climb is a particular tough challenge as you basically have to ski UP the road up to the top of the Cairngorm mountains - it's energy sapping and you certainly know you've completed a race after this one.