End-of-year special 2025!
It's that time of year again – days are so short, grey, and cold that I forget the sun even exists. At the same time, I'm grateful I don't live in an Arctic city like Tromsø, where the next sunrise isn't for weeks.
We've just passed the winter solstice, one of my favourite days of the festive period because the longest night feels like a natural marker between the end of one year and the beginning of the next. It also means it's time for me to sit down and write this fourth annual liftingstones.org end-of-year special, so here are a few notes from 2025.
The book
After a steady stream of emails from people asking how to incorporate stonelifting into their training, I decided to write an ebook. I started mapping out the book and its core concepts last year, but progress was slow, which is why I decided to make it my primary project for 2025. What I didn't yet realize is just how much it would dominate the year.
The core idea that became Stonelifting Sessions is that you don't need to have a rigid program designed specifically for stonelifting – you can incorporate stonelifts into your training in different ways, including as a training tool that carries over to your other lifts. So I took what I'd learned from my own training and distilled it.
For the first few months of the year, I focused almost entirely on the book's first draft, figuring out the structure of the book and how to guide readers through the concepts. At the same time I was designing and testing sessions in my own training.
Once I'd written the first messy draft and a pile of tested sessions, I hit the next stage: rewriting it into something more coherent and interesting to read as draft two, where it really started to feel like a book.
Around then, a different question kept nagging at me: how do I actually deliver the book? I could have used a third-party service, but they typically also handle payments, and I wanted to use the same checkout experience as the Dinnie Stones enamel pins. So I made the daft decision to build the delivery system myself in the background whenever I had a chance. It's a fairly simple system – and thankfully I could reuse some code I'd written before for something else – but even simple systems require ongoing work and maintenance. Will that decision come back to bite me in the backside in the future? Only time will tell.
By July, version 1 of the book was coming together nicely – I was happy with the content, the sessions, and the cover. There was still a lot I wanted to do (including a few sessions I had to cut), but I know from experience that you need to publish at some point because there are always more tweaks you can make. So once I'd found a good place to pause, I switched over to getting everything ready for the launch, like the product page on the site, final testing of the delivery system, and the newsletter.
I was nervous about publishing, possibly the most nervous I've been publishing anything for liftingstones.org. It was the first time I'd put something this substantial (130+ pages) into the world. But I needn't have worried. If you've been reading these newsletters for a while, you'll know I tend to make the things I wish existed, the things I would have wanted. That's exactly what Stonelifting Sessions is, and it turns out plenty of other people also wanted it.
Since publishing the book in August, feedback has been overwhelmingly positive with some great insights that informed three revisions throughout the rest of the year. I plan to keep iterating on the book until it's an essential read for any stonelifter.
I'm proud of Stonelifting Sessions. It's doing exactly what I'd hoped it would: help more people train with stones, become better stonelifters, and treat stones as a real training tool. If your New Year's resolution is to do more stonelifting, I think it's one of the best ways to get started.
Stonelifting Sessions ebook
Add natural stones into your training and become a stronger lifter using over 50 plug-and-play stonelifting sessions.
Articles
Since Stonelifting Sessions was taking so much focus, the year's first article arrived in the spring. At the time, I was reminiscing about my Japan trip from a few years back and a spontaneous trip to visit a massive stone said to have been lifted by the legendary Japanese strongwoman Ōiko. It was the perfect break from the book, and a wonderful example of some of the lifting stone stories out there in the world.
In summer, a surprise story arrived from Finland. While researching, Calum Stott connected with the youth center that looks after the Karperö Lifting Stone, and they kindly allowed me to republish Bernhard Fransholm’s 1986 story of the stone that appeared in a local book. Preserving pieces written decades ago at risk of being lost is exactly what liftingstones.org is for.
In the autumn, Daniel Kranzelbinder – the Ybrig Stone distance record holder – shared his guest article about his own first-hand experience with the stone, bringing together oral history, archives, local memories, and pictures to tell the stone's full story.
While guest articles are generally more work overall, they're often the ones I enjoy most because they let me experience reading about a stone's story for the first time and connect with like-minded people in the community.
Other work
Every time I do one of these retrospectives, it's easy to remember the larger things like articles and projects, but I'm always a bit surprised by the number of the smaller things I managed to get done throughout the year. While they're not huge, they're often some of the more satisfying things to do.
Between the book and the articles, I made a few updates to the site, including a new Documentary directory, a redesign of the Dinnie Stones weight calculator, and a new Nicol Stones weight calculator.
Shortly after publishing Stonelifting Sessions, I built another tool for the tools section of the site: the EMOM timer. I had been using EMOMs as part of my training (and testing for Stonelifting Sessions) but I didn't really like any of the other timers available, so I built my own. The liftingstones.org EMOM timer has since become one of the most popular free (and ad-free) EMOM timers out there, even outside of the stonelifting world. It's wonderful to see so many people finding it useful!
Of course, the usual stone directory and map updates made their way to the site throughout the year alongside some behind-the-scenes updates that you don't necessarily see, but should make your experience of the site much better.
As is tradition, I'll be working on the website over next few weeks, and I'll bring you the details in the new year; if you have any suggestions for anything, feel free to hit reply and let me know!
It's hard to believe I started writing about stones almost six years ago and that this retrospective wraps up the fourth year of newsletters. Of course, in geological terms, six years is a rounding error, and there are lifting stones that have waited hundreds of years for their next visitor. Viewed through that lens, liftingstones.org is still a fledgling project with many years ahead of it.
In past end-of-year specials, I've outlined goals for the following year. This time I'm not going to. Over the last few years I've found a cadence that works and lets me work on whatever I find interesting while still fitting alongside the rest of my life. Ultimately, liftingstones.org is a passion project, and I want my curiosity to pull me in whatever direction it chooses – I don't like feeling obligated to produce anything for its own sake.
So whether you started reading in the early days or just in the last few weeks, I want to finish by saying a massive thank you! And I'm especially grateful to everyone who supported liftingstones.org by buying a Dinnie Stones enamel pin, a copy of Stonelifting Sessions, a newsletter membership, or by making a donation. Your support genuinely means the world.
Finally, I want to wish you a Happy New Year!
Dave