Thinking about meditation

Several people over the years have asked me if I meditate (as training for hard and bold climbing). I always used to say ‘no, I don’t think so’. I certainly didn’t sit down in a field and deliberately try to meditate. But more recently when I was asked again I knew the answer. Yes, I do. But I do not meditate, and then go climbing. The climbing is the meditation. I didn’t realise it for a long time.

A lot of people will squirm at the sight of the word meditation. It carries a lot of hippy connotations and seems pretty far from most peoples every day lives, including their sport. But, like other words I commonly deal with like ‘training’ or ‘risk’, it’s the baggage that we’ve attached to the word that seems weird or uncomfortable. The activity itself is quite simply to focus the mind.

It takes a lot of effort to get a true meditative experience, whether it’s by finding the time to sit still and managing the shrug off all the noise that modern life throws at us, or having a really pure, highly concentrated effort on a climb. I really think that you get what you put in here.

I think that sports in general could be a lot more rewarding as activities and especially as therapy to recover from the shit we have to go through in ‘real life’ if this coupling of meditation and sport was better recognised, and people were better at tapping into it.

Note to self: think about this more for coaching climbing...

In the footsteps of…

One of the cool things about climbing is that when you read or hear good stories about climbs that inspire you, those climbs are there for you to go and actually experience. Whether it’s a nice boulder problem your mate raved about, or a big mountain epic shrouded in legend from it’s first ascent stories. Many other sports don’t have this. You hear about football fans standing on the pitch and using their imagination to feel the intensity of big games played out by the stars on the same spot over the years. Not much to go on really, is it?

But if you are a climber, you can have more than this. You can go and repeat the very same routes, pull on the same holds, make the same movements on the rock and feel the same fear, just as in the story you read about as a youngster. With every move you make up the route, the 

first ascent story takes on a new illumination. This is pretty lucky I think.

I just had this experience tonight, onsighting the second ascent (??) of Chairoscuro E7 6b in Glen Nevis. This climb was put up with great determination by Kevin Howett and Andy Nelson in 1988, with Kev’s lead being his hardest ever.

left: Kevin Howett

I read Kev’s account of his first ascent just after I’d started climbing, and just after I’d had a bit of a defining moment in my life visiting Glen Nevis for the first time with Claire when I was 17 and being totally inspired by the place and the multitude of climbs there. Kev’s lead sounded unbelievably bold, taking a huge fall from near the top of the blunt arete of Chairoscuro onto an RP1, and breaking his ribs on the swing in. But he returned soon after, taking more falls from the same spot until he nailed it.

This sounds crazy enough just reading about it, but it’s something completely different to actually be there yourself, wobbling and gibbering through off-balance rockover onto a sloping rail after 35 metres of E7 climbing, when that RP1 is so far below you can’t even see it.

This would have been a great climbing experience for me if I knew nothing about the route. But to be there knowing Kev had fallen from that move and come back for more added a whole other dimension to it. You don’t get this when you turn up at a crag in Spain and look at a bunch of lines on a topo with a number attached. This is the depth that trad climbing has, that other types cannot match. Of course their qualities lie elsewhere - thats fine.

This route was also a personal score settled. I had previously gone to have a try at the route onsight with Niall McNair about seven years ago. At the time we were both onsighting stacks of E6s and I had a couple of E7 onsights under my belt. We tied in and started up Chairoscuro feeling confident. Too confident it seemed. After 4 metres (count them!) we went off route and immediately ran out of holds or any gear and reversed down, confused.

It was strange coming back several years later. It really hit home how different the rock looks with experience behind you. It took me five minutes to spot a sequence through some unobvious quartz knobbles we had completely failed to spot last time.

With that in mind, when I finally committed to the section where Kev fell, I reminded myself as I rocked over, wobbling that I had a lot to throw at the next few moves - experience, experience, experience, and a bit of raw crimp strength too I guess.

I hope it’s nice for Kevin to know that his creation back in 1988 was something that bubbled away in my head for some years and imagined many times what it would be like to be alone up on that arete, onsight and scared. It was just as good as I hoped.

The last six weeks in pictures

Regular readers of my blog will know that I'm just back online after a couple of months away from my normal routine of blogging. It's strange for me to think that I've been writing this blog since mid 2006 and especially when I meet people who tell me they've read it regularly all that time. I still think that starting it was one of the best decisions I've ever made, and it's contained some of the best work I've produced as a person.

However, a break is always good to rest and refresh the mind, and although I quite enjoyed my daily routine not involving a computer for a little while, I must admit I've been going through a serious crisis of confidence in my blogging. I'm not worried about it really, It's a good thing to question whether you could improve or take what you do in a different direction. I'm sure the time to reflect a little on what this blog is, and could be, will be exactly what it needs to become something better.

Anyway, now my house is in order, I can put down the hammers, spades and screwdrivers and start hammering the keyboard again. To fill in a little of the last six weeks while I was offline, fixing stuff around the house or off around Europe giving talks, here are some pics from my iphoto... (click on them for a bigger image)

Drew makes the top out

And thank god for that.

Scary rope after falling off an 8c in Siurana

Bloc with a view. I climbed a lovely new V10 traverse here in April, with a V13 extention in the project book for the autumn. the topo is on page 129 of the Scottish Bouldering guidebook

The Ben looking pretty on a March morning

Puss puss attempted an ascent of our chimney and paid the ultimate price (a bath)

Claire attacks the garden before it attains rainforest status

Ready to plant my tatties

Fingers crossed I'll for a fine harvest this autumn. Tatties, carrots, cabbages, lettuce, celery, onions and, of course, broccoli ; )

Enjoying the space beneath your feet on Angel Face E2, Far East Wall, Beinn Eighe

Blair heads off into the Sky on Moonshine E4, Beinn Eighe

PS: is it just me, or has picasa's jpeg compression on it's blogger image uploader got worse?? Anyone else noticed this on their blogs? Does anyone have any good recommendations for photo upload sites with decent compression?

Another King line...

Blair 5 metres in to the big traverse project, just 25 to go. (click the pic for a big version)

After I bagged the E8 Donald King pointed me at the other night, I gave Donald a bell to say thanks for the tip off. Always a man for knowing what’s out there, yet seemingly right under our nose, he came back with another recommendation to look at.

This time spoke about a long limestone crag with potential for a very hard and long traverse along the overhanging base, again something that might ‘have my name on it’. A limestone crag, with good friction, with a 30-40 metre overhanging traverse project that might stay dry in the rain, half an hour from Fort William??? If it had been anyone else I would have told them to pull the other one.

But it wasn’t. So today Blair and myself went to check things out. It was even better than I expected! I spent four hours working out the moves on the massive rising traverse, often on big burly undercuts with absorbing technical but really powerful climbing. Brilliant stuff. By the time I’d made several short links along it, I was ready to lie down and sleep in the evening sun.

I think this one will come in about route grade 8c or 8c+. Every time I tried to link I was thinking more 8c+. There’s my endurance training through the rest of June right there!

I’ll keep you posted on progress.

Thanks again Donald, thats two pints I owe you.

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!