This Is My Time | Rehna Yaseen On Her Outdoor Journey - Outdoors Magic

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This Is My Time | Rehna Yaseen On Her Outdoor Journey

We spent the day with Rehna Yaseen and left feeling totally inspired

The story of Rehna Yaseen’s journey to becoming an outdoor instructor isn’t your usual one. It all started when, as a 16-year-old, she attended a trip with a local youth project based near her home in Manchester. The aim was to climb a small hill in the Peak District near Dovestone Reservoir, a hill that wouldn’t really be of much significance to any regular outdoor enthusiasts. It was to Rehna, however. After all, this was to be the first proper outdoor experience of her life. 

And she hated it. 

“I complained all day and was swearing the whole way up,” she tells us. “On the summit, I threw my boots at the instructor and told him that I just wasn’t cut out for hiking.”

But a day or so after that trip “something clicked.” Rehna realised that actually, on reflection, the trip wasn’t so bad. Retrospective fun and all that, and the gaining of a sense of achievement and pride.

That led her to seek out more adventures. She completed the UK’s Three Peaks Challenge, journeyed to Morocco to climb Mount Toubkal and even progressed to the Himalayas where she took on the long hike up to Everest’s Basecamp. 

“No one in my family had done something like that and none of my friends had either”, she tells us. “It was a big deal, not just for me but for the wider (UK south Asian) community.”

Rehna admiring a morning inversion on the summit of Mam Tor. Photos: Giles Dean
Pictured: Keen's new NXIS Evo Mid WP shoes.

Today, she devotes her life to assisting young people in Britain, predominantly those with the same background as herself. Her aim is to help them to find their own way into the outdoors too. Working as a qualified outdoor instructor with the Lindley Educational Trust, she’s out there week-in-week-out widening horizons and showing people that there’s so much they can achieve and experience.

Head up to Mam Tor, above the outdoor centre Rehna works at, and you might just find her with a group there, passing on that infectious enthusiasm for the outdoors she has and helping to plant that seed of adventure within them.

DISCOVER MORE ABOUT THE KEEN NXIS EVO

This is part three in our series with KEEN highlighting inspiring journeys of personal development through time outdoors. Watch part one where we headed to a climbing adventure on the coarse sandstone crags of the Peak District with Jessie Leong. In part two we headed to the surprisingly green urban edge of London exploring Epping Forest with Dwayne Fields

OM x Keen
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