Sunday 18 March 2012

18/03/2012 - Font 7c!

I had a session at Craig y longridge today. My plan was to first see if it was dry and then attempt to climb at least one 7c. After about a dozen goes on a problem called ' In Excess SDS' I finally managed to climb the problem, which is a mix of razor sharp crimps and wide pinches, you then have foot locks and egyptians to contend with to make it through the crux.

It was a great problem to finally climb and is very much my style. The problems goes up the line where this guys feet are, it's basically straight up and is hard to see in that photo, the holds are there, honest!




It's my first font7c of the year, so I'm happy!

Catch up and crushing!

I've been a bit busy lately and unfortunately haven't been recording my climbs as I had liked to. But here is a quick history of the past few weeks:

07/03/2012

Craggy island session: I went climbing with my friend Rob who is currently beasting through the SIBL comps and HSBC comps in London. We went and tried the new problems that have been put up at Craggy2 in the rock room. Overall it was a good session and lasted for about 3hours. I even managed to climb a few hard things!

08/03/2012-09/03/2012

I spent these days re-setting the Fridge at Westway with Slim and Tricky, this was quite a fun set due to us being allowed to set lots of harder problems above v6. We managed to get 30 problems up on the first day with 3 of us, and then a further 17 on the second day with 2 of us setting. There's quite a bit of harder stuff in their now and quite a lot of problems in the mid grades as well. Unfortunately due to the new revolution holds we were using, I ran out of skin by the morning of the second day! So testing the problems later on proved to be painful!

13/03/2012

I'm back home for a few days so managed to get outdoors to Trowbarrow in the south lakes, I was hoping to try and work a font8a up there, but the holds were very damp and so I only ended up spending an hour climbing there, and then decided to head home. A short but sweet session.

14/03/2012

Due to bad weather I headed indoors to Westview leisure centre where I tried out the new problems. The session started badly with me falling off a v3! After a little pep talk I managed to then on-sight all but 1 of the problems up to v8. I then attempted the v8+'s which were left over from the NIBL comp, one of the problems involves a weird horizontal hanging sequence which I find difficult with my height. So I tried a more direct variation skipping a foothold, which enabled me to get very high on the problem into the second crux, unfortunately I ran out of skin so decided it was time to head home.

Monday 5 March 2012

Catch up over the past few weeks.

24/02/12 Session

I had a session at Craggy2 about a week or so ago, which went terribly . It was one of those sessions where I had no energy to pull up on anything, so I reverted to slabs which I also failed at. Not a good session...

27/02/12 Session

Again I returned to Craggy2 and had a session which went surprisingly better! I managed to work out some new beta on the font7c+ which makes one of the moves a lot easier. So hopefully in the next few sessions I should be able to climb it.

29/02/12 Session

Again another Craggy2 session, this time I tried out the new problems that have been set for the comp. They were pretty good. One of the problems starts with a massive dyno to a thick edge, which you then heel hook and pop up for a small hold. I found this problem very hard due to me kneeing myself in the head because of cramped move up to the small hold. Being tall sometimes fails!

01/03/12 and 02/03/12 Setting

I ended up setting the new boulder wall at Westway and managed to stick up a few harder problems for once around the v8 mark, which is nice to have. Unfortunately I bruised my palm from too many press(y) problems!