Fort William Mountain Festival reel

Fort William Mountain Festival 2016 showreel from Fort William Mountain Festival on Vimeo.

I just put together the reel for the Fort William Mountain Festival which is coming up in mid February. The showreel has just a fraction of the films and speakers involved in this year’s festival

I’ve been to the FWMF every year for a decade and I know I’m highly biased, but it is the best mountain festival I’ve ever been to. Why? The combination of location, great shows and especially great vibe. 

I remember being blown away at a previous festival when during a hill running night the MC asked the audience how many people in the room were active hill runners and I reckon over 250 people raised a hand. I don’t know anywhere else where you get such energy of like minded people coming together and sharing their keenness. The great thing about FWMF is that folk are always out on the hill or in a workshop during the day enjoying some climbing or other activity. So everyone shares the ‘glow’ as they head back to the Fort for the evening film and lecture sessions.

As always I’m doing quite a lot at this year’s festival. as well as putting together the showreel, mountain culture award films and various sponsors films, I’ve also entered my own film ‘Miles Away’ and will be premiering the film I’m making this year for the Nevis Landscape Partnership, which will feature characters old and new from the Nevis area.

I’m also running my climbing technique masterclasses. In previous years I’ve run them at the Ice Factor, but this year, I’m pleased to say I’m running them at my own climbing wall!! It will be the first time my wall will be open to the climbing world beyond my friends. The Saturday and Sunday sessions are sold out but there are a couple of spaces left on the rock climbing and also dry tooling/winter sessions on Friday 19th Feb.

Tickets for the festival nights are here. If you want to grab those remaining spaces on my climbing sessions, check out the details here. See you there in a handful of weeks.

Climbing Coaching workshops at the MacLeod wall, FWMF 2016

Sunday boarding from Dave MacLeod on Vimeo.

When I designed and built my climbing wall last year, I had two purposes in mind:

1. To get ridiculously strong.

2. To coach other climbers there, in a nice environment with everything I’d want to be able to give good coaching.

I was too busy writing Make or Break last year to start offering coaching again, and this year has been rather taken up with recovering from surgery and then going on climbing trips to make up for the lost time.

But finally I’m excited to say I have my first MacLeod wall climbing coaching sessions arranged. I’ll be running them over three days of the Fort William Mountain Festival in February 2016. I’ll run two days of sessions on rock climbing technique and one day focused on dry tooling/winter climbing technique. The content is aimed at any climbing ability level and there will be up to 6 climbers in each session so you can come with friends and partners as folk often do. In the video and pics you can get a taste of the wall.

Afterwards I hope you’ll join me at the excellent Fort William Mountain Festival for speakers and films which are always totally inspiring. All the workshop (and festival) details are on the festival site here. Best book a place soon, they do tend to sell out.

Lectures and masterclasses coming up

I’ll be talking about the Eiger among other adventures in various lectures this autumn. Photo: Alexandre Buisse

If you fancy coming to hear about my climbing adventures and how I do the climbs I do, come along to some of the lectures I’m doing this autumn. Maybe see you at one of these places:

Oct 26th Dundee: I’m speaking for Tiso and the Dundee Rucksack Club for their 90 anniversary celebration. Tickets and more details on that coming shortly on Tiso’s site.

Nov 3rd: I’m speaking at the Ice Factor’s Festival of Ice and running climbing masterclasses in both rock and mixed climbing. The Festival will be a mega event. You should check out all the things that are going on there. The technique classes will fill up quickly so you should call Claire on 07813060376 to book a place. I’ll be running the rock technique classes 10-noon and 4-6pm, the mixed/dry tooling class 2-4pm and giving a talk at lunchtime.  Cost is £40 for a place on one of my classes. The event is to raise money for Climber’s against cancer.

Nov 4th Aberdeen: I’m speaking at the Aberdeen Tiso store. Tickets available at the store, £5, although you can enquire online about tickets from here by clicking on the start time at the bottom.

Nov 28th London: I’m speaking at the Royal Geographical Society for their annual Porter’s Progress lecture. Tickets here.

Dec 13th Bozeman Ice Festival, USA. I’m speaking at the festival and running ice/mixed technique clinics on Dec 14th.

See you there!

Coaching at Big Rock

Some pics from my technique coaching sessions at the opening on Big Rock in Milton Keynes. Thanks to Tom George for these!

Big Rock opening, Milton Keynes Sept 18th

On September 18th myself and Tim Emmett will be at the opening day of the new Big Rock climbing centre in Milton Keynes. We’ll be running masterclasses in climbing during the day (my classes start at 10.30am). You’ll have to give the centre a ring (quickly!) to book these. 

In the evening, starting 7.30 we’ll be both be hosting an evening’s climbing entertainment talking about our respective backgrounds in climbing, BASE jumping and then telling you our stories from The Great Climb. It should be a fun day - see y’all there!

Big Rock’s site is here. And their facebook is here.

Working on the move

Coaching movement, in a hidden away corner of Dublin, Ireland Photo: Patricia Fox

Last week I re-set the climbing wall in Callander before heading off to Dublin. Confession: Three creme eggs, two bags of chips and a small porridge mountain were required to finish the job in the assigned two days.

Full of my third head cold of the last six months I headed over to Dublin early for coaching sessions with the Trinity College climbers. We had good fun working on endless problems for two days straight and thanks to the big crowd that came to my talk. It always strikes me when visiting Ireland for work or climbing the effects of being relatively isolated from the wider climbing spectrum. We have this a little in Scotland, but in Ireland it’s effect is multiplied. There is no sport climbing and although the small climbing walls around are pretty good, they don’t have the massive buzzing social scene I saw the week before in The Climbing Academy in Bristol. It has some downsides, because a big central meeting place of people with a shared interest inevitably makes good things happen. But I notice that the irish climbers are, generally speaking, some of the most hardcore lovers of outdoor, remote adventure climbing around, certainly in the UK. Everyone is a to a certain extent a product of their times. I was encouraged repeatedly to make it over again soon, but for climbing adventures next time on the many possibilities in the west of the island. I have a date with Orkney first, but I’m there!

I have a feeling that a major climbing centre in Dublin or Belfast is only a spark of inspiration away and would make a big change in the climbing community here.

As the hours in the bouldering wall passed I forgot about my head cold, for a while at least.

My book is off to the printers!

Phew! At long last, I finally uploaded the files of my finished book to our printer’s server this afternoon. For the last month I’ve done absolutely nothing except work on it 12 hours per day and then train. So both body and mind are feeling a little raw right now. Thankfully, some climbing outdoors is coming next week. Anyway, the lowdown is I might have stock of the book available by the second week in December if the printer runs on time. I’ll keep you posted of course, but I’ll put it up in the shop for pre-order as soon as we hear our stock is on the way.

It started out as an idea for a fairly small book centred around a theme in my head that formed throughout my study of sport science, my own attempts to get good at climbing and coaching others. That theme was that people get lost in details and settled in comfort. In doing so they lose the perspective needed to see much bigger areas to improve their level with less effort. This idea was certainly the biggest single piece of learning in my head after my education in sport science. So my book communicates that as clearly and directly as I can, with thorough explanation of all the ways this plays out and interferes with climbers’ progression.

But along the way I could see I would be able to add a lot of the detailed answers to the questions that climbers keep asking coaches and each other about how to improve. So there is a lot of detail too - information, instructions and help with just about all of what climbers need to know to improve or break out of a plateau in improvement. 

My approach has been to directly point out the mistakes that climbers make in each of these areas. I can see that there are quite a few books out there now that list all the possible exercises and activities that climbers could conceivably use to help themselves. But there is precious little to help them choose between all of this, and I hope my offering will be very useful here.

In fact, the subtitle of the book is ‘navigation through the maze of advice for the self-coached climber’.

More on this shortly. In the meantime, it’s a day off for me...

The race to get kids interested

First steps in climbing and a new life, Craigmore 1993. Note improvised self belay top rope technique. Photo by my mum (who drove me there - in one sense!)

Was just building the fire this morning and listening to Kelly Holmes (olympic gold winning runner) promoting a new system of encouraging competition through sport among kids at school. Seems quite a polarising issue, some feeling that competition is good for kids confidence and motivation, others feeling it was destructive to these aspects.

The defense of the latter view was that competition can be good for kids but it’s very dependent on how it’s presented. I agree with this, and I think they should be making this message the centre of their promotion rather than the simpler message that competition is good per se. When this idea reaches through schools, it’s delivery won’t always be optimal, so the messages that will make it work need to be super clear. And applied badly, I could see it seriously backfiring.

The atmosphere of competition at my school, especially in sport, left me demotivated, unhappy and ready to drop out of the system at 16. Discovering climbing transformed this for me over the course of a couple of years - the sport teaching me how to enjoy competition, how to handle failure and learning, and eventually becoming able to apply this in other fields.

The key to why climbing succeeded was that the nature of climbing mountains and rocks dictates a focus on personal improvement and effort rather than some public measure. The mountain doesn’t care whether you get to it’s top or not, so failure is not embarrassing and bragging to the mountain is kind of pointless. Also, it’s in the character of the places climbing takes you to (impressive landscapes I mean) to encourage humility even during the fiercest competition and effort.

The above transformation is clearly exactly what Kelly’s new ‘schools olympics’ promotion is aiming at. My contribution of ideas would be:

1. Take kids climbing. It would be a shame to stick to the bona-fide mainstream sports - it’s a fickle business trying to find that spark of a sport you connect with. The wider the net of sports tried, the more kids will find the one for them. Also, the fact that it’s a little outside the mainstream is a great leveller - everyone will be starting from square one. It’s a great motivator to see the kid that was always best at football, fighting and bullying can’t get off the ground on the climb you just flashed. Being light, skinny and thoughtful rather than big, brash and overconfident tends to do well in climbing.

2. Educate parents as much as kids - that making reward and praise linked too closely to public success is dangerous ground. Valuing effort, preparation, patience and critical thinking and leading by example rather than actively pushing will always work far better in the longer term.

3. Train teachers and politicians to better understand and pass on the true value and meaning of competition in sport. In many cases they are too focused on cold hard results, with the important bit - the learning and human performance - relegated to an afterthought.