Getting prepared

Linking Death is a Gift 7c+ into Ubuntu 8a to make a nice 8a+ for the Camel near Inverness (note the rain falling - another wet weather crag in Scotland is really wirth knowing about).

I’m fed up waiting for the weather to get ready to travel back to my project, so I’m just gonna go there in a few days and hope for the best. Preparing has been fun at times and a grind at others. I had about 30,000 words of writing work to do over the past 6 weeks. Sending off the last of it hopefully tomorrow afternoon. Ouch! The first of these were training programs and two of them seem to have already helped realise some long term climbing goals which is always really heartening and spurred me on to pile through the rest of the work. But it’s meant some long nights.

The writing has mostly been private training programs but There are also public features from me heading for Climb Magazine, Scottish Mountaineer, UKclimbing.com and others. If you haven’t looked lately there are also a couple of new articles posted on my climbing coach blog.

I’ve been trying to do a Redpath and hit my board after midnight when I finally can’t face another hour in front of the screen. But the other night I knew it was a lost cause when I kept dipping my hands in cup of tea instead of my chalkbag. A lie in later, I nipped out with Claire and got revenge on the Gift-Ubuntu linkup at the Camel I fell off due to wastedness the other week. The autumn’s training should be good because my board is so good I’ve been almost hoping for more rain so I can get more time on it! Scary eh?

I have thought much about how to achieve fighting weight for a serious try on my project; always one of the hardest parts of climbing for me. A new strategy has worked extremely well in minimising the psychological torment and shifted 1kg. Feeling a million times better for it.

Until project time, there is time for one more article to do and hopefully one more session on the Kentallen Traverse proj.