BaseCubic and British Championships

After a good evening out with a friend on Wednesday 3^rd, I got home to another sponsorship deal… ‘BaseCubic’, a new bouldering company whom are soon to release their new boulder mat/pad. The pad has been designed over two years of hard work and a huge amount of dedication from David Cross. BaseCubic currently have a fantastic range of chalk bags and buckets, which also followed the same long and fierce testing process as the new bouldering pad which should be available for purchase within the next month. I am extremely pleased to be supported by BaseCubic and I look forward to building a relationship with them and using their high quality products.


BaseCubic Logo

At around 6:30 on Friday 5^th October I was awake and getting ready for my 9 hours of travelling to Edinburgh via train. I used the time on the train to watch ‘On the Circuit’ several times, catch up with college work, start editing a video of a friend of mine getting the fourth ascent of Paciencia plus some second ascents on some easier problems and I manages to get a small amount of sleep too. I got off in Edinburgh Station almost without fellow southern friends (Alex and Phil Waterhouse), whom almost missed the stop, we then travelled to the hotel where we were staying, had some food and got an early night for the following morning- BLCC’s (British Lead Climbing Championships).



College Work on the train...

 Another early start on Oct’ 6^th in time for British Championships at EICA (Edinburgh International Climbing Arena), saw us arriving at the competition venue at around 8:30 for registration. After registering I collected my comp vest and warmed up on the freestanding boulder which started off feeling like I was holding on to blocks of ice, I was absolutely freezing! Eventually the wall warmed up and I managed to on sight a V10 (more like V6 though), then did a few V6’s and V7’s which left me warm and feeling recruited for the hard routes which were about to follow.

Ready for my attempt on the first route I was a little anxious to whether I would get anywhere near the top or whether I’d drop the first couple of movements. As I started up the wall, I realised I was slowly getting higher than I first expected. Near the top and approaching the upper crux I heard somebody shout “speed it up”, which I then stupidly lost focus and rushed the next few moves. After a couple of hours of waiting for the next route I jumped on and did the sequence wrong in several places which lead me to reversing moves and wasting a lot of energy and time. I was soon off when going for a powerful move to a side-pull. I learnt a lot from my experience at the BLCC’s and have realised that my greatest weakness is probably the mental aspect to the sport and will be working on this a lot in order to get stronger in lead climbing competitions. I need to retain focus after a blunder on route and learn to efficiently deal with errors. Overall I came 15^th which I wasn’t too happy about but wasn’t expecting a great result as I’ve been training bouldering a lot recently in order to be on form in Fontainebleau. After the competition I had a good evening with everybody and was left feeling psyched to improve my lead climbing competition ability and overall aptitude in competitions.


EICA Competition Walls
Photo Credit: Phil Waterhouse

 The next day I spent another day of climbing, watching senior British Championships, Junior BSCC’s (British Speed Climbing Championships) and struggling up some routes with awfully sore skin. I managed to do some cool boulder problems and some really nice routes too, abit of finger boarding on the Beastmaker 2000 and ruin some more skin.

Now I am on the long train journey home feeling very happy after a brilliant weekend and looking forward to travelling to Birmingham next Friday to meet the BaseCubic owner, do some bouldering and compete in my first leading ladder round with Orrin Coley (British Speed Climbing Champion ’12). Then the following weekend I will be heading out to France for a week in Fontainebleau with Tom Wright.

Thanks for reading,

Ellis.