Did you know that you can listen to many of your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds?

Like Desert Island Discs, where you can hear castaways like Cher, Gareth Southgate and Nick Cave,

and enjoy longer versions of the music they've picked.

Good things come to those who don't wait.

Listen to your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds.

The Scotland Outdoors podcast from BBC Radio Scotland.

When you're climbing well, you're just in this zone and you're completely occupied in that present moment where you're focusing on the rock, you've got your mind on your gear, you're concentrating on your body and how it's moving around those forms and where you're going next. There's a lot of intensity.

I wonder how often in our daily lives we feel that intensity of concentration to a particular task, in both a mental and a physical way, a complete flow which results in time

passing differently. I get that sometimes when I'm practicing yoga and in a mental sense when I'm

editing these podcasts. I also have a bit of experience of rock climbing and it seems to me that this is amongst one of the most mindful and absorbing of outdoor activities.

I'm Helen Needham and in this edition of Scotland Outdoors I'm in conversation with Anna Fleming.

Anna is a very experienced rock climber. She loves to climb, but she also loves the rock she commons with.

She's recently published a book called Time on Rock describing her climbing journey.

I met up with her on a very blustery day in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh,

not somewhere renowned for its climbing, but the very spot where she had the idea

for the book. We began by discussing how she came to the rock in the first place.

So I grew up in Mid Wales, right on the board with England, and it was a very outdoorsy childhood so we spent a lot of time

running around the fields and avoiding the river don't fall in the river was the big talk and

climbing trees and my parents were very into going for walks but they weren't really rock climbers

at all and so my climbing started when I moved away from

there to Liverpool to study at university and was a bit of a fish out of water I was so used to just

roaming around you know the countryside and yeah the city life suddenly yeah city life was really fun, like great nights out. But yeah,

...