WATCH: A LAND FOR EVERYONE
It’s a story that could go down in old School Careers Adviser lore, getting twisted and diluted as it travels from staff room to staff room until nobody can really say if it happened or not: two teenage girls, from Scotland, dreaming of careers in… skateboarding?! In videographer Rachel Sarah’s 11-minute stunner, adventure and skateboard photographer Hannah Bailey, and Neighbourhood Skate Club founder and ACM Account Director Lyndsay McLaren return to the Scottish Highlands to roll through the wild and winding roads of their youth, proving that access to skateboarding isn’t defined by its stereotypes, and that careers advisers are usually full of shit, too.
READ: THE VETERAN AIMING TO BE THE FIRST DOUBLE ABOVE-KNEE AMPUTEE TO SUMMIT EVEREST
Cover your ears: further beating of the drum for our team’s off-duty projects is imminent. In his latest for MPORA, ACM Senior Copywriter Chris Sayer meets Hari Budha Magar, British Army veteran and first double above-knee amputee to reach a 6,000m summit, to explore his ambitions to scale Everest, how he manages the physical and emotional pain of simply moving at altitude, and what disability means in the outdoor adventure culture. It’s probably the only interview you’ll read today about a mountaineer who was born in a cow shed during a civil war, too.
WATCH: ARC’TERYX PRESENTS: NOT ALONE
Battling through the remorse, regret, and self-hatred that she encountered after witnessing an avalanche claim the life of her close friend, ice climbing idol Sarah Hueniken has had to find a way to reassemble the shards of her shattered state in order to manage and process her immense trauma. Emotional, affecting, and relatable for anyone who’s suffered loss, Not Alone pushes grief into the spotlight to show how helping others can assist even the most lost in the search for the right answers, and how it pulled Sarah up from a very lonely spiral to rock bottom.
READ: THE SECOND EDITION OF THE DIVERSITY IN CYCLING REPORT
It’s tough to overstate the impact that the first edition of the Diversity In Cycling report had on the sport it so successfully scrutinised. Its practical recommendations, written by cyclists, helped cycling clubs, teams, shops, and media act on the embarrassing lack of diversity their culture suffers from; for example, it was a catalyst in the creation of British Cycling’s first-ever Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy in 2021. This newly published second edition tackles these issues in a more global, pan-discipline context, and will one-hundred percent lay down more pathways into cycling for men and women of all backgrounds - if we all take note.
WATCH: AN ULTRAMARATHONER’S HUNDRED-MILE RUN FOR MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS
We’ve long been yelling about the short- and long-term mental health benefits of being outdoors, and if you’re reading this, it’s likely we’d be preaching to the converted if we climbed up to our pulpit now. The Runner explores what we all already know, but in a far more beautiful way than our wide-eyed, over excited, breathy preaching could: Amar Chebib’s low-light and brooding cinematic telling of 20-year-old Darius Sam’s 100-mile run for his own depression, and mental health awareness, is something else entirely.