Tuesday 6 December 2016

Winter West Highland Way Interview with Caroline Mckay

To help put something back into the West Highland Way Race I will be doing a series of podcasts contributions to the official West Highland Way Race Podcast that is put together by John Kynaston. My plan is to do interviews with runners, organizers, volunteers as well as experts in various fields, and also provide my own thoughts on training and racing ultras.

As soon as I heard that Caroline Mckay was planning to run a Winter's West Highland Way for a worthy charity, I knew immediately that it would be of interest to wider community and very kindly she agreed to be interviewed.

Running the West Highland Way is tough mid-summer when we have a best weather and longest hours of daylight, a Winter's run along the same route is wholly different type of adventure, challenging weather and long hours of darkness make the task a step up.  I've wondered about whether one day I would have the skills and fitness to tackle it so it's fascinating to talk to Caroline about her plans and her motivation for taking on the challenge - raising money for supporting education in Africa.

I haven't attempted doing my own podcasts before so it's a bit of experiment, both with the technology for reordering the interview and human skill of conducting an interview. We did the interview over Skype so the audio quality is a bit tinny, and there was a recording glitch when my computers screen saver came on. I'm sure what Caroline had to say will more than make up for my shaky first steps into the world of podcasts. 

My thanks to Caroline for her time and to John Kynaston for his intro and editing the final podcast together.