Saturday 5 December 2009

A tentative start to the winter


Ahhhh! Hot refreshed elbows after hot & cold treatment. Feels good.

Right now I'm in Spain, at Siurana. The purpose of the trip, apart from enjoying some outdoor climbing after the Lochaber perma-rain of autumn, is to recharge batteries and get ready for winter. As usual for late autumn, I'm strong from three months of solid bouldering, but my endurance is poor, and joints are complaining from the punishment.

Long routes are the answer for both, with a little more dedicated recovery time than I'd normally manage at home due to work. Rest days between attacking the hardest routes of Siurana are restful in one sense, but busy nonetheless. I've just spent four hours on rehab activities for my elbows. They are complaining after I overdid it with training during November. After one of these sessions the tendons feel great, going from a creaking mess to a steely strip of hot working collagen. I've posted more on this subject on my training blog here.

Yesterday was a little brutal on the body. First I narrowly avoided a long fall that may have involved contact with the ground. I went for a big link on a project I'm trying, and after skipping a bolt (they are spaced anyway!) my foot slipped just at the last move of the runout. I was holding an undercut with one hand, and a small intermediate edge with the other, but managed to stay on from that instantaneous hit of nervous tension you get from a slip at a bad moment in climbing. That might have been it over, except Michael thought I was off, exploded into a backwards run and fell over onto his back facing downslope. A comedy moment followed of me dangling desperately against a tight rope trying to replace my foot on a smear while Michael righted himself beetle style and resumed paying out rope. All was fine except I struggled on for a few more bolts until arms melted.

Later I dragged a wasted body up for a work session on a massive new 8b+ called Dogma. With two bat hangs and overhanging about 15 metres in it's 45 metre length it should be the kind of full body workout I'm needing just now. The short days of December mean I'll have to wait until tomorrow for more action on this.

BTW - More news on my book during next week.

5 comments:

  1. A little off topic, Guys... I have a question. Yesterday I looked at this site:
    [url=http://www.rivalspot.com]Rivalspot.com - Playstation tournaments[/url]
    They say you can play online Fight Night game tournaments on any console for cash... had anyone tried that before? Looks like a cool idea...
    Are there any other sites where you can play sports games for real moneys? I Googled and found only Bringit.com and Worldgaming.com but it looks these guys don't specialize in sport gamez. Any suggestions?

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  2. hi Dave,

    both this post and the corresponding OCC one are extremely frustrating to read for the zillion of us with ongoing elbow injuries who might be reading this - please share with us what you are actually doing?! Any glimpses of your rehab programme would be very helpful!

    Cheers,

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  3. Allan Taylor07 December, 2009

    Yeah I argee with what Mark said. Ive tried my fair share of recovery types. Perhaps everyone could outline some of the stuff they have done.

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  4. same here, I would love some insights into the actual rehab techniques.

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  5. Alan Russell08 December, 2009

    Hi Dave, you've mentioned in your OCC blog that you've found cold treatment to be more effective than alternating hot and cold but here your photo caption mentions hot and cold treatment. Is this a different treatment / evolution of the cold treatment? Thinking of trying it on a knee cartilage injury that I've had for most of this year.

    Cheers,

    Alan

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