While the rain falls

My house was still standing after Hurricane Bawbag and all is well as we settle into a long awaited full week at home and not on the road. Despite a million flattened trees in the glen around our house, everything except our TV signal (dodgy aerial down at the loch shore) survived. Our internet connection survived and that has been keeping us busy with Christmas orders from the webshop (thanks for those!!). We are dispatching every day as always by first class post. 

While the gales and sleet rage outside, I have been getting seriously into training. My finger joints are complaining about this mildly, but good sleep and food are keeping them keen for leaping between crimps on the board. 

Tonight I even managed a tweaked version of my model of Seven of Nine, a good notch harder than the original, which I completed once shortly before I did the real thing back in April. From my bouldering apprenticeship in Dumbarton I’ve been left with reasonably good openhanded strength on small positive edges and I’m good at getting weight on my feet when the climbing surface is fairly undulating and angled. My ever growing weakness was flat panel 45 degree angles and big pinches.

I’ve kind of neglected the pinch strength aspect since few of my rock projects rely on this, something I’ve now come to regret. However, It’s never too late to get strong and I’m attacking it now with some fine pinch problems. I reckon I’m still at least 2 full grades weaker on pinches than edges as recent indoor sessions around Scotland have reminded me. Let’s see what we can do about that.

The training part is easy though - It’s like eating pudding, I could just keep going and going. The hard bit is maintaining the discipline to rest properly and do all the supportive stuff to keep the body going (rehab exercises, basic strength work, flexibility and eating well). With Freida crawling about the house now tracking down anything dangerous she can get her little teeth into, it gets too tempting sometimes to take the opportunity to do some work while she sleeps. Resist! Rest up and train another day.

Following my session tonight I’ve just spent a couple of hours immersing myself in some fine training inspiration such as this: