Dream Holds review

My friend Scott emailed recently looking for some pictures for a brochure he was putting together for his new range of holds. He already runs a business making climbing walls but this is his first venture into the area of manufacturing climbing holds.

I mentioned I might buy some holds from him for my soon to be finished board and he offered to give me a load to try out! I told him I’d get a review up on here to share my thoughts on his range, since they are a bit different to what you are probably used to pulling on ‘down the wall’.

Scott has done what many people have attempted over the years, right back to the earliest climbing walls - mimic real rock. The reason? Well, there are two separate reasons really. Firstly, real rock formations are clearly more varied and aesthetic both in the shapes they form and the movements that result from them. The other quite obvious reason is that if you are training to climb real rock, training on something as close to it as possible is a rather good idea.

But so many hold manufacturers have moved away from ‘rock-like’ shapes and gone for highly synthetic smooth shapes in recent years. I guess this reflects how indoor climbing has separated a little more from outdoor climbing for an ever greater proportion of climbing wall users - perhaps mimicking real rock hasn’t seemed so important as indoor climbing has become so much more of an activity in it’s own right?

All fair enough of course, but where there is a lot of ying, some yang often makes a pleasant change. Scott’s Dream Holds are definitely full strength yang.

There is another fine reason why hold manufacturers have gone down the smooth and sleek route with rounded blobs in abundance; they are kind on the skin and body. Smooth, rounded and fine grained holds are definitely easier to train on for a long time before sore skin sets in. But this comes at a cost. The movements these holds lend themselves to are predictable, often fast, and basic (in certain aspects of the movement at least). Ever noticed that your grade indoors is waay higher than outdoors? This is the most common reason.

So, Scott has gone fully the opposite way and provided an alternative, making no compromises and taken moulds directly from our finest rock types, from chunks hand picked for their loveliness/evilness (these may be interchangeable terms for lovers of training for rock climbing).

What has come out is a range of holds with a true variety in every aspect, just like you’d get visiting a different rock venue on a road trip. There is glassy smooth, there is Gabbro cheese-grater rough, there is spiky sharp, massive, tiny and just plain weird. Exactly what you find on the crag.

To climb on, you have to slow down a bit overall because it’s not obvious at all how to take the hold on first acquaintance. There is much more udging, adjusting and matching hands than you normally find on indoors, exactly the types of moves indoor climbers often fail to spot when climbing outside. These minor adjustments, you could call them ‘components’ of whole moves that you get so commonly on real rock are what provides much of the pleasure in rock movement; the feeling that a small adjustment made such a huge difference. For sure this will be good for those who climb indoors for the purpose of training for outdoors. 

But even for those who don’t, these will be a very welcome break from the mundane blob pulling experience that is rather too common these days. Every climbing centre should have at least a few routes of these I think. In fact I think these holds will be at their best on F6 to low F7 graded routes on more friendly angles that make up the bulk of what climbing walls must set.

My personal experience is a little different from most, given that my indoor training is purely strength training since I get a fair bit of time on real rock. My requirements are very much something skin friendly enough to pound away for hours on a 45 degree overhang and be limited only by muscle fatigue. But even though Dream Holds are sometimes a little hard on the skin for high end training sessions, I’d still have many of them on my board as it’s just not possible to source manufactured holds with certain grip positions these provide. 

Good work overall by Scott and I’d expect to see them in most climbing walls in a year or two. The range still needs a bit of expanding - more pockets and super incuts please! But these are only just off the first moulds so plenty of time to develop more.

Scott has made a couple of neat patents with some technology to stop the holds spinning or breaking, but I’ll let him explain these on the Dream Holds site. Currently available in Gabbro, Torridonian Sandstone, Gritstone, and Gneiss, with Dumbarton Basalt, Mica Schist and granite on the way. 

Dream Holds are here.

No substitute

Inimitable E8 6c, Styx Buttress, Glen Nevis

A couple of weeks ago I had a message on my phone from my friend Donald King of Abacus Mountaineering. Donald is always a psyched man and a very positive person to be around; training sessions with him in the ice factor are particularly hard on the abs from laughing too much.

Anyway, Donald was on about a new line in Glen Nevis he’d tried with the steely fingered Ewan of Glen Coe. “Way too hard for me buddy, but it might have your name on it?” the message said. Before I left for a festival in France last week I took a wander past it. A classic hard grit style route, 30 feet of F8a with a couple of wires just too low to feel useful as you slap your way into a rounded scoop, iron-crossed between distant sidepulls.

Last night, bleary eyed after the return trip from France, I rendezvoused with Kevin for a crack at it. We laughed as I abbed down it about how messed up it is that we might think “excellent, the protection is even worse than it looks”.

After some tries the moves came together, but I was a bit tired after an hour or so on it and we hung around, slowly being eaten by the midge as the cool wind dropped and was replaced by midgy warm, still humidity. Just what you need for a solid E8 lead.

I was about to sack it off but on the way back from a wash in the river to get rid of the nasty anti midge cream (together with creamed midges), the wind suddenly reappeared for a moment. All I needed was ten minutes of breeze. 

I threw my harness on, swallowed hard and launched up past the RPs with dilated pupils and Roosevelt’s quote “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself" ringing in my ears.

That was all fine until I got to the crux move, Feet not quite right on the smears, hands not quite right on the crimps, bum sagging and the realisation that I’m probably looking at a broken leg in three seconds time.

There is no substitute for this feeling. Real consequences, right now, no chance to think about them, only to react instantly to your last second of chance to save yourself. This brings out the best in ability, in creativeness, in excitement and in satisfaction. I threw for the hold and arced back, sure I was falling off. Kev was turning to run. In that split second I was able to think and understand what this meant and that I had to dig deeper. So I did. 

That last bit is the crucial bit for me - If it wasn’t for the real consequences, I would have fallen. The real danger was essential to the experience. There is no substitute.

The new facility

Quite a few of you were asking if I would post up some pics of my home board as I built it. I was planning to blog as it happened, but sadly I was still sans internet connection so it had to wait.

It’s all done and dusted now and I must say I’m pretty chuffed with it and wearing down the holds already. I filled the room with as much 45 degree board as possible, with a small roof at the end for extended circuits. As well as some of Scott’s Dream Holds (review on the way) and Entreprises crimpers, I enjoyed making some holds out of wood although I’m no skilled woodworker let me tell you. My wood crimps are quite nice creations though. 

The board ended up being about 47 degrees and It’s pretty amazing how such a small angle change makes a big difference to the training effect. I really noticed a gain in body power in a few sessions, and after returning to my familiar 45’ problems at the ice factor, found myself noticeably stronger on big powerful moves.

It’ll take a few months to get used to the board and set a cadre of nice problems, tweak hold positions etc. But it’ll be super interesting to see the longer term effect on my climbing. I’ve waited a long time to take this experiment!

How nice is it though, to have things exactly as I would want them. I spent several years nagging Glasgow Climbing Centre and then the Ice Factor to install a simple fan to keep conditions for training cool and dry to conserve finger skin, but they never went for it.

I’ll keep you posted on the effects of the new facility, and hopefully get some more hold reviews up etc..

making a mess

puss puss oversees the drilling of the panels

DIY'ed out

Feeling like a kid in a climbing hold shop

What do you think?

Getting Connected

Finally, after three months on a waiting list, we are connected to the internet here in Letterfinlay, albeit rather shakily. It’s really a bit of a relief. However, I still don’t even have a stable enough connection to run a software update.

Our ISP is a London company called Avanti Communications. We need to get out connection via satellite here since we are too far from the telephone exchange to get any useful connection. That said, I’m beginning to wonder if it might have been just as good? Avanti were awarded a contract to supply houses in the remoter parts of the highlands with broadband via satellite by the Scottish Government. We get free installation, they get the customers. But it’s turning out to be more of a winner for Avanti than for the customers I think!

We put ourselves on the waiting list for installation as soon as we were committed to buying our new house, back in early March. We figured we’d have the connection up and running in plenty of time for moving in at the end of March. But March, then April, then the first half of May went by before Avanti ‘were in our area’. 

When the man came to bolt our satellite dish to the house in mid May, he announced it still wouldn’t be connected until the start of June because Avanti were upgrading their own equipment.

What a mission. I’m told from various sources that we don’t have much choice to find another provider that can get us a more reliable broadband connection, at any price, never mind Avanti’s £60 a month. But if anyone knows of something better we can do, we’d love to hear your beta!

Thankfully we can just about get by with a slow and shaky connection to run our respective web businesses. But I sure wouldn’t like to try setting up a business in the highlands that needs anything like a fast connection by city standards.

Anyhow, for now we are just going to enjoy being connected at all.

[UPDATE] After returning from a film festival in France and turning on the computer again. Our connection is seeming rather more healthy, thankfully. Still slower than our old connection via telephone line in the city lights of Fort William, but enough to update some software and post pictures to my blog. Wahay!

We have moved

We have moved. We now live here:

Ardlarach

Letterfinlay

PH34 4DZ

Claire and I have both been working like hell since last autumn to save up for a house move. We managed it. We are fatigued, but very pleased.

I like the fact that things have a tendency to work out when you really put your back in. And with a bit of cunning, stuff that would otherwise be a pain can coincide nicely at the right time, so as not to be a pain. At certain times of the year, working very long hours can be a right drag, less so when you have a good goal like a nice place to live. But still.

Rehab from a nasty elbow injury can also be a right drag, requiring everything in your training to be structured, measurable and at times, laborious. But laborious and structured training fits well with laborious and structured work. And both of these fit well into the highland winter. Good timing all round.

So winter has passed, new house got and sore elbow complaining less often, if not completely there yet. As is often the way with rehab done right, I have got significantly stronger in the process and climbing better than before the injury, despite still being in the mid stages of the rehab after 4 months. I’m not yet able to operate at full volume so I can’t get really fit, but small holds are certainly feeling bigger than they were. 

All this indoor training locked away in Lochaber’s bouldering rooms has swung my current motivation very much in the direction of looking for an adventure. So although I write from the limestone of Catalunya on a short sport climbing trip, my plans for the coming months are very much centred around trad, in places I’ve never been to. Lets see where all this takes me...?

NB: I wrote the above a few weeks ago. Since then I have been.....

Building for later

Between mad bouts of travelling about doing lectures and coaching, we have been getting used to our new house. Some serious DIY jobs have been keeping me busy into the wee small hours each night. Happily, one of these is to build a home training facility. It’s the first time I’ve had the room for anything more than a fingerboard, so I’m pretty excited about that. Actually thats a bit of an understatement really...

The quiet here is really nice, exactly what I need between the bustle of travelling for work.

Update: Learning more about making some fairly significant alterations to our new house has been an uphill struggle for me. Like most things, I’m pretty useless at it, so waste impressive amounts of time on faffing and correcting earlier blunders. Nevertheless, one loft conversion and a half-built climbing wall later, I have learned some things. The hard way as ever.

Claire and I had a good time travelling to Stockholm and Birmingham with Claire for lectures and coaching. I learned once again from the strong people I’ve coached lately how much you need all the ingredients to crack hard climbing. I met many more climbers much stronger than I’ve got after a few years of trying, but without the same climbing level. The difference? Sometimes it’s naturally light and strong bodies, sometimes it’s teenage life locked in indoor boulder walls, sometimes both. Even the young are stuck in their ways, and can’t get out of the groove of thinking of climbing limitations in terms of strength. For me, it’s the opposite problem. Many years learning to be a wily cunning crag tactician, but sadly lacking in finger strength to get to V15 level. 

But in possibly one week I will have a killer 45 board, right there, in my house. No excuses, nothing in the way, no distractions, just getting down to business. Crags, be afraid...

(can you tell I’ve been a little starved of climbing during my moving/self-build stint)

Chain clip number one

Yesterday we waited until tea time for Siurana to dry out after a rain storm. The route I wanted to be on was still a waterfall, so we ended up on a nice 8b+ that happened to be dry (La llarga Traversia del Capita Enciam). After a couple of goes I grunted through this to a nice stroll to the chain in the sunset.

No matter how many routes you have under your belt, it’s always lifts you a bit to have a feeling of completion of something. On the other routes I want to try, there will be no chain clipping. Not on this trip anyway. The goal is just to get better on the route and get better at hard climbing, so my focus will just be on getting one bolt higher than last time. There are a lot of bolts above my highpoint.

NB: I wrote this post on April 8th. After that, it poured with rain in Catalunya, I changed my flight and went home and renovated my loft instead!

Busy times again

Climbing Batuka Extention 8b+, Freyr, Belgium. Photos: Jonas Haspeslagh

When I’m working these days it involves a lot of travelling. I’ve never been good with feeling at home wherever I am in the world. I tend to feel at home only at home. I guess thats my personality, but it’s annoying sometimes because my trips are always really interesting for seeing places and meeting people.

Last week among other places I’ve been in Slovenia and Belgium doing lectures to climbers. One of our goals with making Echo Wall together was for Claire and I to be able to travel to some of these nice events like Silvo’s festival together, instead of me disappearing on a bit of a lonely travel for work. We enjoyed seeing Llubljana and it’s people. Echo Wall won a prize at the festival too. It’s only the third year Silvo has run the mountain film festival there and it’s already a pretty big festival.

After a blur of Ryanair flights, working hard on my laptop and a squeezed visit to Dumbarton Rock I found myself in Belgium, climbing at Freyr the day after my talk. It was the first time I’d been out climbing in warm sunshine for several months, and it was making me impressively lethargic. In fact I reckon could have slept for the entire day. The Scots are so useless when we see a glimpse of decent weather. 

But it was a valuable chance to get some routes in, so I blasted off up a long 8b+, without really remembering the moves from my warmup bolt-to-bolt. I flailed impressively at the end, but bicycled my feet on the polished footholds through to the summit moments before forearm meltdown. All I could manage after that was a sleepy flash of the 8a next door. Although my head was still asleep, I did notice that I wasn’t really that pumped. Strange because I haven’t had time for endurance training with all this work. The reason, I found on returning home was that I’ve got back down to my fighting weight for the first time since I did Echo Wall. Feeling light on the rock is something I love but don’t get the chance often.

The grabbed climbing sessions in between work and travel have been really worth it, it seems. A friend showed me a prospective eliminate on Totality at Dumbarton. I made the mistake of trying it after I’d just spent a couple of hours pounding my forearms on my endurance circuit and failed from the crux several times. So it was nice to go back on the way home from Belgium and nail it quickly between showers. Before I left I also managed a quick hour in the glen and finally destroyed the roof project on Heather Hat I was talking about before. It goes at about V12 for me, but possibly a tad easier for giants. I’m not sure. I’ll try and get some video of it if the rain stops. 

Tomorrow, I am getting a new house which is very exciting. Comparatively little climbing has been done in order to make this happen, but naturally now I’m just starting to think of the coming months and churning around plans in my head. 

Thankyou for all your comments about Claire’s recent BAFTA award. There’s an video interview from Scottish TV about it here

Claire enjoying a ‘Coke Float’ a little too much on the way home from lecturing in Leeds.

Claire wins Best Director at BAFTA Scotland

Last night we were in Glasgow for the BAFTA Scotland new talent awards ceremony. Claire was nominated a few weeks ago for Best Director with Echo Wall. Claire was chuffed to bits to get the nomination and both of us were really happy to see a film from the small world of climbing making it into the glam limelight of the mainstream film and television industry.

But we both convinced ourselves totally that this would be as far as it went, and that the other three nominees for Best Director, with an obviously closer involvement in the film industry would have a better chance. 

I sat with Claire while she was briefed along with the other nominees (including the likes of Limmy) about which red carpet to walk down if their name was called out to come and receive an award. I thought it was nice to be invited to spend an evening in such company and see one of these ceremonies ‘in the flesh’. Loud music was played, presenters cracked jokes and announced winners. There was punching the air, shaky hands and tears from winners, and whoops and rapturous applause from a packed grand hall.

Claire’s Echo Wall was up against the directors of the thriller The Dead Outside, urban drama Running in Traffic and the documentary Ballads of the Book featuring contributions from Ian Rankin. We watched the nominees clips play including Echo Wall and then the presenter opened an envelope and announced the winner was Claire MacLeod. 

Claire’s face was indeed a picture. 

Neither of us can still believe that Claire won this award. The feedback we had from BAFTA’s jurors was that apart from the practical challenge of shooting a film like this single handedly and the seriousness of what Claire filmed (her other half risking neck), they liked the personal nature of the film and the appreciation shown of the beauty of the Lochaber in the shooting.

The impact of it in the ‘outside world’ of film was summed up by one of the other nominees. He asked Claire about the clip that played from Echo Wall of me saying:

“If I make a mistake on the climb, the consequences could not be higher for me, or for Claire.”

He asked if I was meaning we’d have to re-shoot the whole climb if I failed.

Claire explained, “No, he was meaning he would hit the ground and die with his wife filming if he made a mistake.”

This week, Echo Wall also won the Best Scottish Film award at the Fort William Mountain Festival, and Best Film at Glasgow Mountain Film Festival.

A little lost

This winter has been strange for me. I did my hardest onsight of a mixed route back in December, so my level has increased a little. But in trying many of the lines I’ve thought of in the past, I have had the feeling that in the right conditions, with the right partner, I’d have a good chance. Sometimes that feeling is nice. But sometimes I’m looking for a bit more. The bit more is a true uncertainty about whether the climbing is actually possible for me.

The solution to this is really brain dead simple - try harder climbs. Dumb ass. I’ve had a idea for such a climb for some time now, and been turning over in my mind about how, when and with whom to try it. The ‘with whom’ is actually one of the big problems here. Everyone I’ve asked so far if they fancy a look at it seemed a bit unsure. It’s hard to take a serious gamble on precious good winter days. One man who’s keenness seems to vary in line with how hairbrained the idea is Kev. 

So off we went on a perfect day on Tuesday for a look. The conclusion was as expected. Over an hour trying to get past the first 5 moves, followed by failure of arms at the crux and lowering down with my upper body turned to jelly.

But this was the most exciting and inspiring day out mixed climbing I’ve had for years, or maybe ever. The thought that one day, after more training and maybe more tries, this line could be a winter route gives me the same feeling Echo Wall did. 

I have a project again!!

One step forward, one back...

Working on the remaining Heather Hat project last winter. Yesterday I finally managed to stick the second sloper and take the cut loose. If I can just repeat that on a dry day I can try and link it through the finishing lunge.

Today I had a nice walk in the rain on Ben Nevis with Malcolm who'd flown over specially at the hint of good conditions coming on the Ben. Sadly it was the thaw day in the current good freeze thaw cycles going on up there. Observatory Gully looked like a dangerous place to stand today with huge amounts of snow turning wet in the sleet and then rain and just waiting to 'go'. We picked our way across the sidewalls to stay out of the firing line, but it was too unfrozen to justify starting up a new route. The thorough soaking did wonders for my head cold though!

Maybe I'll see some of you tomorrow for my lectures at the Transition Centre in Aberdeen.