Within a move

Holding the crux. A good feeling

Right now I’m totally locked on with my highball project in the glen. Progress has been superb and It’s gone from a distant prospect to feeling very possible in a short time, thanks to all that training. It’s really at my limit though, so I have to accept that every good session might be the best before I lose ground. It doesn’t matter - I’m enjoying trying, a lot.

It’s only when really committed in a die hard way to a project that the windows open up to learning new things. It surprises me that the learning doesn’t stop even though I’ve been here before - maximally motivated, maximally stretched and close to both success and failure all at the same time.

It’s good for me to experience this on a hard boulder line for the first time in a few years - the levers of progress are so different from what I’m used to. Over the past two years, I’ve not really been able to train as I’d like due to injury, so most of my climbs have been trad. I missed hard bouldering and hard boulder training intensely, and have relished the last four months of it. The past three sessions on the project have been the culmination of it. Last session, I held the crux sloper. Tonight, I touched the next hold. If I hold that, I’m on terrain where I would only fall If I made an stupid error, which is just as well as it’s getting into soloing territory up there!

On a boulder, so much extreme effort and focus is distilled into millisecond adjustments of movement and timing. There is very little room for finding what’s necessary during the climb itself. This is the land of the intuitive. Recording that you’ve made a movement decision only just keeps up with actually making the movement. Conscious thought is way too slow and clunky. But it’s not intuitive adjustment out of thin air. It’s adjustment of a model of how the move should go, and how the effort should be timed and focused that’s been refined hundreds of times in your mind. At the level where the real enjoyment comes, it’s a heuristic process of visualisation; you don’t always know why something is right, you just feel like it will be.

To illustrate this blog post, I scrolled through the video of the attempt, shot on my compact propped on a stone. Looking through it, frame by frame, it hit me that I have a record of several movement decisions in my mind’s recording of the move, for every frame of video. 30 frames/sec is too slow! How great is it that movement on rock is so subtle, and that the mind is so expertly geared up to analyse and refine it. You can see how it gets addictive eh?

Hopefully I have the program sussed for that final hard move, and weather, and muscles allow me to get back to it in a few days time.

Homing in

Best session yet on my highball project in Glen Nevis today. Wow it felt nice to be able to get up to that crux again, and this time have space to attack the move. Trouble was I think I need a session of getting used to falling from there so I can focus properly on sticking that sloper. Thankfully I seemed to be missing the boulder in the landing zone and rolling in the grass. 

It didn’t help that I left a mat stashed at the crag from yesterday but someone had nicked it. I think a backwards fall onto that boulder could be a rib breaker without at least 4 pads. It’s a bit too much of a trek for 2 trips or carrying that many from the road. It sucks that you can’t leave a pad overnight well covered with rocks without someone nicking it. You always hope climbers wouldn’t do it. They even took the foot towel out of it and left that behind.

Tomorrow I’ll have a day of prep for the next session. Come on!! Time to home in and get down to proper battle. Still no idea if it’s realistic for me. I’ll only know once I stick the sloper if the next move isn’t totally impossible on the link. It feels limit for me on the rope, just having pulled on at the crux. Soloing Sky Pilot next door I realised that falling on the British tech 6b territory above the crux is not an option. I’m not sure how I feel about going for it if I linked through the crux when there by myself. But then, you’d have to, wouldn’t you?

Afternoon on Stob Ban

Hours of sleep have been gradually increasing over the past couple of weeks as Freida settles into life in the outside world of day and night. So I was keen to get more than just training done and make it out onto the hills before I missed the snow completely. I headed out by myself as early starts are a little hard work just now and went for a nice afternoon climbing something new on Stob Ban. 

Sadly my intended route was in the process of falling down due to the warm spring winds, so I headed off up the buttress with no particular aim except to enjoy the movement on snow, rock and turf. I mostly soloed, which I enjoyed a lot. But the rock was quite loose and turf not completely solid, so my rope and the little red belayer came out for a pitch.

Would be nice, but not today in plus 2!

Getting my rope-solo system a little more slick. Long way to go there...

Back on the board, things have been going really good. I’ve managed to surpass my previous strength PB by a good margin and feeling highly excited for the coming rock season. The cumulative effect of simply clocking up the hours on the board all winter long seem to have prevailed. Excellent.

Too early to test it on projects just yet. I tried today but ended up taking my climbing gear for a nice walk in the rain. I did nearly run over an Otter on the way home which was the highlight of the day (seeing it, that is!).

Review: Racing Weight quick start guide

Matt Fitzgerald’s first text on weight optimisation for endurance athletes is a first in it’s field and understandably a best seller-  it’s a rather essential book to have if you are a runner, cyclist or triathlete. Because there is so little well written and scientifically based information on weight management in sport generally, it’s also pretty essential reading for climbers too.

There was only one snag - climbing is not an aerobic endurance sport. Some of the information in Racing Weight was directly applicable to climbers, but the bulk of it still needs some interpretation to shoehorn the principles onto a completely different activity.

On first glance I thought that Fitzgerald’s sequel  - the Racing Weight Quick Start Guide might be not much more than a commercially led follow up with recipes and plans that follow directly from the ideas in the first book. Actually I think it could be better titled, as it’s not just that at all. ‘Quick Start’ actually refers to his ideas for weight loss at the start of a training cycle for endurance athletes. The whole premise of Racing Weight was that endurance athletes who dieted hard to get to their fighting weight would end up offsetting gains by the consequent loss of training intensity. However, even endurance athletes have time in the foundation phase of the new macrocycle where they can afford to absorb this, and they can adopt a more rapid weight loss program. This means a very different strategy.

Conveniently, this fits in a lot better with the types of schedules climbers tend to do. This book answered many (still not all!) of the lingering questions I had on weight management for resistance/anaerobic athletes like ourselves. Taking advantage of some key research findings in the past couple of years, together with his clear and very well constructed writing, Matt has produced another essential piece of digest for everyone whom this subject concerns. 

Most of the really ‘juicy’ scientific information that it’s in the first book fits into about 30 or 40 pages. But It’s well worth it for that understanding in my opinion. The extensive section on foods and choosing them for different situations is really excellent too, and I’m fairly sure the same information cannot be found anywhere else in such complete form and so well tailored to the intended audience.

I got some copies ordered for the shop straight away! It's right here.

Must get light

Two frustrating but still good days on my highball Glen Nevis project lately. A persistent split tip is demanding a break from tiny sharp crimps, just when conditions are getting brilliant. Nevertheless, I worked out some more sequence tricks and feel my arms and fingers have reasonable power. There’s only one ingredient left really - must make my body lighter. It’s getting close to time to switch from training to performance mode.

Hey, I’m still nowhere near doing the thing. But I can see that I could be. Time to focus. For now, it’s laps on the board with split fingers taped. 

The moves feel brilliant - I can see they are starting to flow. I know I’m climbing them close to as well as I can, it’s just pure strength-weight ratio on the crux move now.

Review: The Players DVD

Been meaning to post this for a while...

The Players is as you might have guessed a classic American sport/bouldering flick - hard climbers, lovely places and lovely climbs. And that’s it. Cool - so what’s it like? Well there aren’t any groundbreaking first ascents on a world scale, but obviously a LOT of impressive climbing from Sharma, Graham, and Woods and Rands. The real highlight is that we get to see a few more characters that we in the UK don’t see much of in climbing DVDs.

Alex Puccio and Emily Harrington are two very contrasting but inspirational female climbers. It was great to see them included as there is still not so much footage of the living end of the female climbing elite. It was interesting to see footage of Joe Kinder on his repeats of the Tommy Caldwell 9a testpieces at the Fortress of Solitude. I was always intrigued by these routes as we haven't heard much about them outside the US, except that they sound hard. They looked hard too! Chris Linder deep water soloing in Vietnam and the machine that is Ethan Pringle walking up 5.14 trad headpoints are both entertaining. 

The shooting is not quite as grand as the Big Up blockbusters it will inevitably be compared to, but I felt I got to know the characters a little better without the larger than life sheen. I enjoyed watching a few times as I stretched out tight muscles before sessions on the board!

If you're keen for a copy, it's in the shop here.

Video: Climbing with Emmett in Pembroke by BD

Nice little video from Black Diamond of myself and Tim Emmett climbing in Pembroke last autumn. I just finished writing a little story about the trip which will be up on BD’s site here later.

Dave MacLeod & Tim Emmett climbing sea cliffs in Pembroke, UK from Black Diamond Equipment on Vimeo.

Bounceback

It’s funny when you are feeling wasted how the little hole you’re in seems much deeper than it actually is. Since Freida arrived last week, my non-climbing life has been fantastic. The best it’s ever been, despite the adjustments and sleep deprivation. But the importance of my climbing life doesn’t just go away. It doesn’t change at all, in fact.

I used to think it was psychologically dangerous to be dependent on my lifelong habits of the outdoors, exercise and training I do through my climbing. As time went on I realised this was silly. I think eventually it becomes a part of of you that is hardwired. And thats fine. It is amazing it takes 30 odd years to realise it’s ok to be yourself!

Naturally, I’ve put a lot of thought, work and planning into how to balance my climbing and non-climbing life. I’m certainly not perfect at it let me tell you. But I have been doing this all my adult life and it’s worked out well so far. Some of this is really practical basic stuff - having a top-notch climbing wall next door to the nursery, living in the heart of the places I want to climb and having a flexible work schedule to take advantage of good conditions. These are the key ingredients for sure, and maybe the hardest to secure - over a decade of hard work for me. The others are more subtle.

Yet despite the planning, I did get the fear last week after having several absolutely crap training sessions in a row. Sure, they were performed in a haze of sleepiness, but was tiredness really all it was? And even if so, is that it for the foreseeable? I could see, for about a nano second, while falling off a ridiculously easy circuit the other night, how someone could give in to tiredness and permanently lower their expectations in order to avoid such disappointment. I thought previous experiences might insulate me from this weakness. But it’s amazing how being knackered lowers your guard.

All very gloomy. Until it wasn’t... All that was needed was a little extra sleep. It’s being grabbed an hour here, an hour there. But add it up to a critical level and lo and behold, the performance returns. This week maybe I’m getting to grips with the new routine of snatched naps. And all of a sudden tonight the power returned to my arms like magic and I clawed my way up a couple of my hardest creations on the wall. I forgot how well the body adapts and bounces back to change. What a lift!

Yes Yes I know how silly this post might read to someone who doesn’t share the same addiction to training. And I know the challenges for me are nothing compared to Claire right now. But everyone has to have something to keep them keen. And for me it’s this. I’d rather go without food for a week than training. Since this is primarily a climber’s blog, I’m just going through the little ups and downs that go on while in the bubble of the climbing session. But once it’s done, I take off my rockshoes and go back to the important stuff - Claire and Freida!

Freida MacLeod arrives

On Tuesday, our daughter Freida MacLeod was born. Claire and I are over the moon. Last night, we came home from hospital after a rough week for Claire and all MacLeods promptly passed out for a much needed sleep, not that it lasted.

A healthy chubster at 8lb, 3 ounces, I wonder what adventures are coming her way in life, with a mum who jumps out of planes for fun and a dad who climbs cliffs and generally lives life in the elemental outdoors and mountains. I’m certainly happy that we’ve been able to get to where we are in time for her arrival - a house that is surrounded by nature to grow up in. It’s really lucky, for all of us. 

An extra cup of tea was certainly in order before the days training session today. But I don’t think I’ll ever suffer from lack of focus to fire off a bleary eyed training session. The highs of watching a new life arrive certainly reawaken the sense of need to get the most out it. Baby bouncer bolts are placed in the roof of the climbing wall for a bit of bouncing and swinging when Freida is ready for it.

Asgard Jamming review

While on a rest day on a trip recently I watched the Asgard Jamming DVD and liked it so much I’ve been meaning ever since to get some copies in from the Favresse bros for the webshop. I got round to it!

I think even if you have no intention of ever climbing a big wall never mind walking 600km in a single trip just to get to Mount Asgard, you’ll find this film very entertaining. It’s certainly the best piece of big wall filming I’ve seen. It follows Nico and Oliver Favresse, together with Sean Villanueva, Stephane Hanssens and Silvia Vidal on a brilliant adventure to Baffin Island and after their epic approach, 11 days of fine looking climbing on the wall.

It totally reminds you why you go climbing, how much fun it can be and how exciting things can get when you really go for it. Nico’s looong whipper that you see the first half of in the trailer is great viewing. When not entertaining us with hardcore granite pitches, the mandolin toting Belgians are showing us how to have a party on a big wall in style and generally make a massive big wall look like 11 days cragging, except with a drop of justice underneath. Great stuff!

It’s in the shop here.