Consistency
Sometimes you can really outthink yourself. Given a number of factors - poor climbing yesterday, poor eating habits today, crazy day at work - I thought for sure it was going to be a poor climbing session. For whatever reason, maybe even the spectre of low expectations, it was as good a session as I've had in ages.
Guillaume and I lead a progression of routes, warming up on a 9 up front (pink), vertical with big reach over a small roof. We moved to a 10 (dark green) up the prow at front, with G doing a wild sequence of down and upclimbing variations to suss out the proper stance for the next to last clip - good endurance training, fer sure, and I benefited by the beta. Next we hit a number of 11s, starting with the 11b (blue/white) I worked the other day. Very sequence dependent, it's hard to recover from poor tactics heading up to the roof, but Guillaume ran to the end after figuring out the crux. I passed the troublesome start with Guillaume's beta, and surprised myself by running it to the end - knowledge of the right clipping stances helped immensely.
Next up was a long meandering 11 (blue camo). Awesome route - starts low on one side of the arch, heads straight up a slightly overhanging wall with a tricky undercling clip, travels under the roof to the apex with a wild swing across to reverse body direction, climbing to the face above and traversing way right to the anchors. Guillaume put in serious work at the first crux figuring out the sequence, and made it to juuust before the anchors. I felt strong in the first half, but fiddled with one of the last draws before plummeting down to Guillaume's oh-so-soft catch. Last climb of the night was a new 11 (yellow), lots of heel hooks and pulls up an overhanging arete with dicey falls. It follows with some tricky delicate stemming up an overhanging dihedral. We both put in some serious work on it, with G making it to to the anchors.
Welcome back to the Brazilian Girl herself: Joana returned from her world travels to shake the rust out, climbing with Chloe. Didn't catch much of what they did, though rumor has it Chloe sent her first 10. Big ups!
Goal today was to stay calm and smooth, and focus on not giving up. A big help was proper rests and shaking out. Some relevant info:
Climbing tech tip: rests
flash pump recovery
strength and endurance review from Dave MacLeod
some climbing workouts from Mountain Athlete
5 comments:
Nice! I can't wait to try some heel hooks on lead!
I think you would like this one, Brian. Powerful moves coupled with tricky body positioning.
BTW, great posts Kenway, enjoying the detail. Sounds like it was a great session.
Thanks, Brian. Writing it down helps me think through the moves, otherwise I'm not sure I would remember half the sequences...
Great session. My climbing was ugly, but I was happy I managed to push through.
Kenway was in great form, his sent of the white and blue was great. On the following one he was going strong until the fall, I though he could have sent it clean.
Looking forward to Wednesday.
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