Sunday 23 December 2012

Christmas Sessions...

On Thursday 20th I travelled up to Birmingham to stay at my Dad's over ther christmas period and this also gave me the opportunity to train at some different walls too. I arrived at Birmingham New Street train station, got in a taxi and went straight to Redpoint Climbing Centre, on Thursday I had a couple of hours to climb and did some nice font 7b+'s and some endurance training on the roof too.

The following day I was back at 9:00 for a long training session... I took a long time to get completely warmed up and got on a black circuit (font 6b-6c+), onsighted all of these and then got onto the barrell section of the wall and started to work through the problems on this wall. Soon after I had done a few font 7b+'s and some font 7c's. I then realised that there were graded problems on the roof and started to get working on a nice font 8a, I quickly got all the moves done but sadly my skin was hurting too much to go for the full link. So I decided to go for the font 7c+ but was too short to do the moves from the sit start but did it from standing which was maybe soft font 7c+/hard 7c. I attempted to onsight several font 7b+'s but fell from the last couple of moves on almost all of them! I then decided to do some fingerboard and power endurance training, after this I was ruined but did laps on some problems in the roof and the some easy problems to complete the session. After 8 hours of almost non-stop climbing my skin was ruined and my toes was in a lot of pain...

After a day of complete rest I travelled south towards Gloucester to compete in a BMC Leading Ladder round at The Warehouse Climbing Centre. I onsighted up to F7c (including F7c) and thought the F8a was very very hard, much harder than any other F8a's I have tried indoors. I finished off with an extremely pumpy F7b going through a roof and then a journey back to Birmingham.


Just starting the tough F8a at The Warehouse.
Photo by: Justin Barker

I will be having a short session tomorrow and then I'll be heading to Brean Down on Thursday 27th if the weather allows us too where I am hoping to try 'Black Snake Moan' F8a and then 'Brean Topping' F8b.
I have also found a partner who is keen to try some hard  Dartmoor trad in the new year, he is very experienced and has lead E8!


Merry Christmas and thank you for reading:)