Home in the winter wonderland

The highlands have given me a nice welcome home with much snow covering everything in sight. Hopefully I can go out and play in it later this week after the great catch up from my travels. Thanks to everyone who came out to see my talk in Dundee the other night.

Tonight I am kind of relieved after having my second training session since I’ve been back - I was kind of worried that a nasty elbow tweak I picked up in Spain was getting worse. But instead it seems to be getting better. I must not take my eye off the ball for a month or so, but fingers crossed it will calm down and allow full training to resume. I am very very psyched to train right now. I want to do 9a+!

This week I’m also going to be doing some marketing work on Claire’s Velvet Antlers site, buying some ads and helping her sort out all the last minute stuff with the hampers. In my shop we’ve got Committed 2 in as Claire said before - I was really excited to see it for the first time and get a look at the latest crop of nails hard trad routes from this year. It was brilliant. Got me well keen for a visit to the Peak to try Peter Whittaker’s E9. The most eye popping moment for me though was seeing Steve McClure on Rhapsody - going left to the jugs on the left arête two moves before the redpoint crux, a link I did in August 2005 and considered finishing the route this way and making an E10. It was contrived to carry on direct following the crack right to the top, probably daft on my part, but that’s what all the fuss was about, and for me what made it scrape into E11. I thought hard about it and eventually felt it would a shame to take the escape just before the culmination of the route, and also saw when I tried to link it going direct that this route had the opportunity to make a really tough route – that’s what I was after. I paid for that decision with several more falls from the final move, a winter of worry and many nights of training, all the time knowing I could just traverse left from the sidepull for an easy option and still get an E10 tick.

Only two last moves; but those are the moves that make you fall, as is obvious if you watch the film E11. It’s a shame that arête is there, and so the route I took has to have an eliminate rule. But at least the rule is super simple - don’t go to the left arête. I was glad Sonnie saw the significance of that. I got past that escape point on my second redpoint, same as Steve. I could have gone left, only had one small fall from the same place as Steve, and finished the project in 2005. But I wanted to make a hard route, so I went direct. All this is no problem in my mind, folk can and should climb whatever way they want on a cliff.

Work hard

Blair spies the foot sequence at Sky Pilot last week

Last week I found it hard not to get impatient with the poor weather – too cold or wet for Echo Wall sessions and trying to remind myself that a couple of weeks of hard endurance training is exactly what the doctor ordered anyway.

Nice rainbow from my window, but when will those clouds clear off the Ben again??

I’ve sussed out the sequence for the mammoth 30 metre traverse of Sky Pilot and feeling close to doing it in overlapping halves right now. It could hardly be more perfect endurance training for the big one – steep, powerful and totally sustained for 60 moves to a kneebar rest (I need to train knee endurance in the same knee for the kneebar on Echo wall too!) and then another 20 or so the end. The big link will probably be F8c+ or V13ish.

But some aches and pains coming from a tricep tendon have called for two much needed days off. I’ll be back up for there in the morning to get to work again after some TLC for my tricep in the gym and sauna. By night I have been working on this website to add more of the content I am frequently asked for in the articles pages. Right now I’m writing on everything to elbows to how to find good climbing in Scotland when it’s raining or when the mighty midge reigns proud. I should have all of this ready this week.

Dave Brown told me Steve McClure returned to complete the second repeat of Rhapsody at Dumbarton Rock today. Great to see the place getting some attention from the world’s best! I’m glad to see that Steve, like Sonnie, managed to avoid taking the bad fall (from the last couple of moves), only taking their falls from lower down which is more of a ‘bungy jump’ than wall slammer. I don’t like to dwell too much on routes from the past, but it has been a pleasure to watch two of my climbing heroes travel to and climb a route that I made. That’s cool.

Great news!

Last night Sonnie Trotter managed to climb Rhapsody at Dumbarton Rock. If you have been following his trip in Scotland you’ll see that the route held out Sonnie’s siege through 23 falls, 2 changed flights and many weeks of effort. But I knew as long as he was still here trying it, it would go down.

This is the difference between good athletes and world class athletes. Good athletes have talent, maybe training too and do impressive things. But when it comes to the big one – whatever it may be, they either quietly fold in the face of the obstacles, or keep on going right through them.

It’s obvious if you read Sonnie’s blog that he could go anywhere and repeat this performance on some other totally different hard route. It’s nothing to do with whether he did enough campusing, or whether a route suits his build or other such details. It’s because he was inspired to give himself a good challenge and because he can make himself fight harder than an armoured tank.

Not many people can do that. Good effort!

Flying visits all round

Dumbarton Rock this evening

Following on from my thinking in my last blog post, I decided to take a day to go back south and visit my parents. The old boy racer was still blowing up his pipes at 83, a fine sight! After wrestling with my mums overgrown hedges for an afternoon with much carnage with the trimmers I decided to stop off at Dumbarton Rock on the way home for a stint on my old black wall circuits for the daily pump.

Norman MacLeod terrorises the neighbours again

What a strange experience it was being back again. I was hoping I might catch up with the Canadians Sonnie Trotter (almost at the end of his month there working on my climb Rhapsody) and Cory. But as it was pouring with rain and thunder clouds rumbled, there was noone there but me. That was kind of nice in a way because it was exactly the same as when I lived there and hung out among the boulders in the morning, really late in the evening, or in the depth of winter when folks headed for the warmth of the climbing wall.

I’d deliberately forgotten the sequences for my old endurance circuits on the everdry wall, so I didn’t try to rescue them from my memory – my body remembered them instinctively and I just climbed. That was nice, it must be like that often for people who are naturally good at climbing. What a thought. It was also nice to feel the reference against old markers of fitness. I have improved. The improvement is down to lots of things to do with my training, but cannot be completely attributed to this. The other part is due to the flatter smoother walls of Lochaber rock and less opportunity to apply technique. After many years studying in the movement technique laboratory of the Dumbarton walls, I felt this is what my climbing needed to move to the next level. At Dumbarton, the routes do not tend to yield to raw power, even in some abundance. But they do yield (after serious application) to devious, subtle and high quality movement technique.

After this apprenticeship of 13 years, I can find as good a sequence as any man on a climb, but I’m still ‘weak as’. The rather more ‘basic’ and powerful moves I’ve been doing since then, on limestone and on the slaty flat walls of Glen Nevis have made a marked difference to my strength level. Happy days. So I have good energy to return to my project with.

I hope Sonnie and Cory have a good final day in Scotland. It’s been great to see them over here again enjoying the basalt. People get a little too hung up about the fact that Dumbarton is not visually representative of what Scotland has to offer. Sure, it’s setting is not the finest in a country of beauty. But they forget that the beauty of the place is in the moves on the basalt, it’s not a visual thing.

Talking of which, I read that folk have been disappointed that Rhapsody has an escape line at a couple of points. I was disappointed with this also when I was working on it, but hey sometimes you can’t have everything. It’s got good moves, good rock, good difficulty and good situation even if the line is not 100% perfect. What it really is, is a wee gem for locals with nice moves. It’s not important anyway – if it appeals to the climber, they will climb it or otherwise…

I guess my hope is that if people end up climbing the other lines, they see that they are different routes, not the climb I made; Rhapsody. The redpoint crux on my route is the last move. It’s possible even at the very end to traverse off to the left arête and avoid this. What a shame! I decided to climb the crack all the way to the end which for me was logical, and the most difficult option on the wall. But at least Rhapsody’s documentation in the film E11 makes it obvious where the route goes and that the very last moves are what provides the difficulty in ultimately getting to the top on the lead.

Falling from the redpoint crux of Rhapsody (going for the top of the crag). Unfortunately it’s possible to use the chalked holds to traverse left towards the photographer and some good holds on an arête. But where would be the fun in that!?