New white circuit for July in Three Wise Monkeys

3WM June 2016 White circuit from Dave MacLeod on Vimeo.

Yesterday I set a new white circuit (the hardest in the range of boulder circuits) in Three Wise Monkeys in Fort William. Most of them are pretty  steady in the V6/7 range. The easiest are roughly V5 and the hardest one maybe V8+ (the left hand death star one).

If you would like the beta, is some GoPro footage of all of them. Enjoy them Lochaber climbers and visitors! Great to be in there setting new boulders while the rain falls outside.

Relax, while you can

Resting in between circuits at Fort William bouldering wall tonight

Training is going reasonably well right now although I’ve had to skip a day again because of work. Now I’m feeling better and stronger in my sessions when I’m climbing every day than if I take more rest days. Five years ago doing these kinds of sessions every day would have floored me.

Another small advance in PB on the campus board tonight. The body is responding in the right direction, and a climbing trip is looming in the future. It’s great to be excited about completely new projects again.

Fort William bouldering wall opening

The team - Scott Muir, climbing wall builder. Alan Kimber, climbing wall owner. And the route setter...

Steven shows the rest how it is done.

Last night we enjoyed a gathering of climbing types at Fort William's new bouldering wall for its opening party. Claire took a pile of shots which are up on her blog here. But I got a couple too...

First hit for the muscles

Today it’s good to feel worked from training. I started back training last night at the new Fort William bouldering wall. Campusing felt really alien! I enjoyed it so much though. If I can achieve my goal of getting a proper run of training over the next few months it will feel pretty strange to be in good shape for the first time in ages. That feeling of being stronger than ever before on the rock is something magical and I’ve not felt it for a long time.

My strongest memory of this was when I was 17 and going to the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow to train Monday, Wednesday, Friday and then climbing at Dumbarton Rock all weekend. I used to warm up and do an hour and half bouldering, then head downstairs to the weights gym for 2.5 hours of seemingly endless sets of lat pull downs. It was a proper old school free weights gym. If I wasn’t psyched as a mad thing I would have been too scared to go in there. Everyone except me and Claire were massive scary powerlifter types. Maybe I soaked up some of the testosterone haze that floated freely in that place? After my arms were melted I headed back up for another 2 hours mileage bouldering and then 40 minutes on the track before closing time. I’ll never forget pulling back onto the autumns project ‘Pongo’ at Dumbarton the following spring. I just could not pull on the holds but now I could easily float up it like magic!

Right, I’m off back round to the boulder wall to attack that board again. Glynn from Scarpa passed by today to drop off Scarpa’s new Veroche shoe which I can’t wait to try out – they look amazing. I’ll post up a review asap. Anyway, here are a couple more beta hits from the new problems I set at the Fort William Wall. I’ll get some more filmed tonight hopefully.

New Fort William Bouldering Wall

I’m pretty psyched to announce that Fort William has a new indoor bouldering facility at Calluna (Alan Kimber’s place). Alan’s built a brand new building with accommodation for climbers and excellent bouldering walls. The wall was constructed over the winter by Scott Muir. Since late February, I have been setting the whole wall with over 60 problems from V0 to V11. It’s got a main area with a large steep wall (37degrees over) and vertical and slabbed walls with an excellent campus board and fingerboard. Upstairs there is a superb little circuits cave with surprisingly long circuit problems on walls and roofs to get fit on.

The ground floor area at Calluna

It’s great that the Fort has a great place to train again since the demise of the once excellent leisure centre wall. Full details on how to visit the wall will be on the Calluna site shortly, and the beta for some of the problems are on it’s very own you tube channel here.

The Mezzanine cave

I have written up the problems into soft, intermediate and hard circuits which are displayed on sheets at the wall so you can easily locate the problems of your chosen level and have a good session. Enjoy, and see you down there, if it ever starts raining in Lochaber again?!