This weekend I’ve been on a first aid course at Tollymore Mountain Centre and had a really good time. I’m hoping to do the Mountain Leader training at some point this year and I also would like to do a kayak coaching award so this particular course is useful for all that kind of stuff especially as I haven’t done any first aid stuff since my teens. TMC is a great spot, really great facilities and excellent cooking (I might have to go on rations for a few days having had two cooked breakfasts this weekend!) and the forest was looking quite picturesque today with the snowfall this morning. The course was very good with a good balance between theoretical and practical stuff so we regularly got split into 3s to do practical scenarios – one person playing the role of the casualty, another the main first aider and the third person the assistant first aider. It’s pretty scary walking into an unknown situation with a casualty on the ground before you and I found it difficult to keep a clear head and remember all the protocols. I think it’s the kind of thing that the more you practice the better you get. I hope I never have to use it in real-life but I’m glad I’ve got some training under my belt now. There were 12 of us on the course and the craic was good. I had good fun pretending to be a ‘combative casualty’ giving dog’s abuse to my first aiders about the stick which had supposedly impaled my hand after a fall. The other participants were all outdoor enthusiasts from a variety of backgrounds. One of the guys whom I estimated to be in his 50s was an avid fell-runner who described a local 10 mile route as a nice ‘wee’ run and tried to get us to sign up for the next Mournes Seven Sevens (a walking and fell-running race taking in the 7 highest summits in the Mournes) event! I’d consider walking it but never running it!