You are listening to the Hiking Radio Network, where we taught the walk with shows by hikers

about hikers for everybody. Mighty Blue on the Appalachian Trail, the ultimate midlife crisis, joined Stephen his guests every week as he staggers from Georgia to Maine.

Hey guys, and before I forget, I want to wish you all the happiest of New Year's.. I don't know about you but 2025 has gone so quickly for me that I keep thinking I'm in 2024. The fact that this episode of the Mighty Blue podcast is being released in 2026 just blows my mind. Anyway, happy new year to you all even though I think I've missed out on 2025. My 2026 is going to be marked with another run at the Amplaction Trail, so I'm grateful to have that to look forward to. And in fact, if I should be lucky enough to finish the 80 this year, it will happen almost exactly on the 10th anniversary of the first Mighty Blue show back in September 2016. I actually only realised that this morning

and I think it's got some good karma about it so fingers crossed for a successful completion.

As we did last week for Christmas Day, it's just the main guest and the accountability

blog today. I have reconnected with Zem Bivie and Nemo and in fact I've set the recording with

Zem Bivie for next week,

so it will be in next week's show. After that and the Nemo interview, I'll have worked out most of the new gear that I want, so we'll then move on to the Hike the Good Hike cohort of Hikers for this year, starting in, I'd say, I don't know, two weeks' time. These interviews have been very moving at times and I've been grateful to the participants for their willingness to share

their thoughts with me. With so many different, time. These interviews have been very moving at times and I've been grateful to the participants

for their willingness to share their thoughts with me. With so many different trials represented,

I think you're going to enjoy meeting this disparate group of hikers in 2026. Our main guest

today is a fascinating bloke, Dr Rob Scanlan. Rob is a board-certified physician in practice for over 20 years. He's written a book

about and called Surviving the Trail Five Essential Skills to prepare every hiker for Adventure's

most common perils. It's a world research book with plenty of anecdotes illustrating Rob's

points and it is one that we can all learn from. I invited Rob on the show to go through those

five essential skills and we did it some justice, I thought. I hope you do too. I certainly learned that I didn't know as much as I thought I did, so I took something from it. Rob will be on shortly. Then what I thought would be a minimal accountability blog because there hasn't been too much new this week, but I realised I had more

to say than I thought I did.

So let's get to it and meet Dr Rob Scanlan.

Here he is.

Our guest today is Rob Scanlan, and he's written an interesting book that I'd like to

bring to your attention.

It's called Surviving the Trail and talks about five essential skills that hikers need to know about. Hey Rob, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me on, Steve. Well, I appreciate you being here. And being a doctor, I'm sure that you've got a bit of a head start on knowing most of the things in your day-to-day work. But how did you come to hiking in the first place? And what was your light bulb moment when you realized that these five issues, I suppose,

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