Bold tracks and Bagpacks

  If a stranger stood in front of my bookshelf for ten minutes, they would know me better than my CV ever could. A CV lists what you have done. A shelf shows what you keep coming back to: the questions you can't put down. So I stood back and read my own spines the way a stranger would. First, a word of thanks. These shelves owe a great deal to my a friend of the hills, Mr. Frank, who generously donated books from his wonderful library. Here is what the shelf says about me, whether I like it or not. Thread one: how the money machine breaks The loudest thread on my shelf is money. Not how to make it, but how it goes wrong. Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan argues that the events that change everything are the ones nobody saw coming, and that we only explain them neatly afterwards. Beside it sits Den of Thieves , James B. Stewart's account of the 1980s Wall Street insider-trading scandals. Then Bust , on Greece, the euro and the sovereign debt crisis. Michael Lewis appears three ...

  Five Days, One Bed and a Very Loud Wind For the first time in my adult life, I have spent five whole days at home, mostly in bed. Not a sick day where you still reply to emails. Five real days, with two more to go before my first review with the doc. Adulthood, I have discovered, is a simple game. Wake up, leave, come back. Repeat until December, then survive the long January. Outside, the wind has been howling like it has a personal grudge against our roof. I am not a meteorologist, so I have been doing what every Kenyan does when the weather misbehaves. been blaming El Niño. It is strong, yet strangely soothing. My only prayer is that it is carrying blessings. And healing. Mostly healing. A few months ago, It was prescribed, need do a corrective laser eye surgery. Through every test and every booking, I was sure. I have a job that allows me leave days to recover, and a spirit that is a little too fond of risky things. Ecclesiastes says that to every thing there is a season. App...

We Came for a Race. We Left as Something Else. Mercy Gitari Mudathon · Mt.Kenya · KESAL team unannounced The morning after There is a cockroach in the hotel room. I see it before I see the glorious sunrise. I am lying in bundu's, this gloriously silent, wonderfully little hotel somewhere between yesterday and a fever dream, and the first living creature that greets me on this earth, the morning after the Mudathon, is a cockroach doing casual laps near the skirting board. Like it too survived an obstacle course yesterday. Like it is simply cooling down. I do not scream. I do not call reception. I lie very still, stare at the ceiling, and I smile. Fair enough, mate. You earned your rest too. Outside, through a window I am too gloriously boneless to open, the green goes on forever. Kirinyaga green. Ungovernable. The kind of colour that makes Nairobi's manicured roundabout shrubs look like they need therapy. Mount Kenya sits in the middle distance not doing anything in particular e...

Awake? Very. Not because of peace, but because clarity has a way of disrupting comfort. Heartbroken? Not quite. This feels less like heartbreak and more like consequence. Self-authored. Fully owned. I misstepped. I acknowledge that without decoration. But I also left, and leaving was not a mistake. There is a quiet violence in stagnation. A space where nothing grows, nothing stretches, nothing challenges. No love, no conflict, no evolution. Just a dull, persistent nothing. The kind that exhausts you without movement. The kind that makes your body feel like it is slowly shutting down. I have come to respect that feeling. It is a signal, not a weakness. I found myself in a connection that demanded neither my mind, nor my spirit, nor my softness. No exchange, social, intellectual, or even basic care. Just presence without substance. And presence without substance is erosion. At some point, I stopped participating and started observing. The questions became louder than the conne...

  I haven’t climbed the big mountains lately. But I have been climbing. For the past few months, hiking has stretched me in ways I didn’t expect not just trails and ridgelines, but perspective. The gym followed. A few consistent sessions. A handful of runs. Spin classes that humbled my quads. A Hyrox Challenger Doubles with three fierce friends intense, wobbly, almost catastrophic, wildly alive. I have called myself strong this year. And I have also remembered that I am weak. Strangely, holding both truths at once has made me gentler. Strength without humility becomes noise. Weakness without courage becomes fear. Training the body has been training the ego too. Now I am resting. Not by choice, muscle wear insists. No workouts for a couple of weeks. The days feel longer. The evenings quieter. I do not like it. But I respect it. Because even hikers must pause. I may not have stood on dramatic peaks recently, but I have staged my own summits, in spin rooms, on gym floors, along mild...

  It’s been a minute😄 That’s how I wish to begin my writing from now on...because life doesn’t announce itself when it shifts. One moment you’re counting months, the next you’re standing at the edge of a year, wondering how it moved so fast and yet carried so much. Lately, I’ve found myself back where the old souls live...in the aisles of hardcore literature . Montaigne’s essays. Shakespeare’s tragedies. Gibran’s quiet, piercing wisdom and having a background excitement of Clarissa Pikola's Women who Run with the Wolves. Words that have survived centuries and still know exactly where to touch you. Call me old school, but there is something sacred about literature that refuses to be rushed. And somehow, in between English poems, essays, hip-hop debates, and Spotify wrapped surprises, my soul remembered itself. This season has taught me one gentle truth: Slowness is not a vice. In a world addicted to urgency, choosing to slow down is a radical act. To sip your tea withou...