Siurana pics

A local attempting the famous Kalea Borroka 8b+, sector El Pati, Siurana. This large overhang has been my battleground for the past week or so. On Sunday I did a simply gobsmacking new 8b+ called Dogma that breaks left out of Kalea and heads way off into the sky above with cruxes and bat hangs a-plenty. Tomorrow it's battle day with an equally brilliant 8c just to the left.

Sport climber’s breakfast for me, mountain guide’s breakfast for Donald. What about Ewan? My guess is he finished his ages ago.

Harold the bug. Keeping us company on rest days in the wendy house. More pics on Gaz's blog (of Siurana climbing, not Harold, that is).

Crawling along

Endless sport climbing - hard not to improve!

Sport climbing trips out here in Spain or France have been a staple of my yearly climbing diet for nearly ten years. I come for lots of reasons, to relax the mind (these days), to replenish the body in a less harsh climate, to enjoy the climbs here also. But mainly I come here to train.

Trying to achieve a very high level of rock climbing fitness in Scotland is very like being pinned down in a game of chess - lots of potential options, but all of them blocked. We have a world class climbing facility at Ratho, but those who could really use it the most can’t afford to train there enough. We have a handful of wee sport crags, but not enough to make a platform for the best climbers to step to the next level (this idea is called a pyramid progression). 

For a while, cheap flights made it easy enough for those at a medium level to put a patch of fitness in their game a couple of times a year. Maybe this day is already passed. Some more bolts in local crags might work out better environmentally than the carbon footprint of a twice yearly migration of the sport climbing population. On this trip, I’m coming round to thinking that this migration might be losing it’s appeal, both in terms of cost, and effectiveness.

It worked to get me from 8c to 8c+ and even helped me scrape into 9a. My current goal is to get 9a+, both for it’s own sake but also to assimilate this level and apply it in my mountain trad and winter climbing. Training strength in Scotland is no problem. With some good training I’ve got strong enough to do 9a+, but endurance is a stumbling block.

I’m not saying it’s impossible. I intend to personally prove otherwise. Rastko said those who crawl cannot be brought down. So I’ll keep on crawling my way to 9a+ and the resultant E11s and winter projects. Some changes might help break into a walk though. Some ideas:

Scotland’s rock climbers would really benefit from another sport crag or two that really works for training - steep sustained and often in condition. There are crags. It could be time to go and open them. Even just one sector like El Pati in Siurana could be enough to kickstart some exciting things in both sport and trad. I know that I couldn’t have done Echo Wall without the bolts on Steall Crag in Glen Nevis where I put down the foundation of fitness on Cubby’s old ‘controversial’ project.

A lot of the other things are potentially terrain where our sport’s governing body - the MCofS - could help with. If there was a special membership package that included free entry to any climbing wall in Scotland, I’d certainly be buying that as a christmas gift for a teenage son or daughter who’d recently discovered climbing. Parents would be gifting access to the world of climbing safety and environmental advice and training etc plus unlimited access to their new pastime/obsession.

As a 16 year old I managed to get my three sessions a week in the Kelvin Hall because every third visit I’d pluck up the courage not to buy a ticket and keep an eagle eye for the attendant all through the session. It’s rarely so easy for the young and keen to increase their training volume with this method these days.

Out here in Spain, we keep finding ourselves saying ‘it’s hard not to get good at climbing here’. In Scotland it’s a lot harder, so we better make it as easy as possible.

9 out of 10 climbers is here (soon)

Our stock of my book 9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes is printed and currently being shipped to us. So in a week or so (our highland address always seems to bring out the worst in delivery companies) we’ll be sending copies out. We’ve just put it up for pre-order in the shop now. I know some of you are after a copy in time for Christmas and so it should be in plenty of time. We are dispatching around 11.30am every day until Christmas, worldwide.

I’m very happy to see it out and I’m pleased with it as a representation of much of what I’ve learned in 16 years of study in climbing improvement. It’s always been a big satisfaction in my climbing life to take what I’ve learned from sport science and half my life observing, experimenting, and measuring every last thing that makes climbers climb better. I’m expecting that the ideas in it will polarise a few readers. It does attack some of the fashions in the sport of climbing, and the wider world of sport and improvement that are working in the wrong direction for improvement. Engrained habits die hard and folk don’t let go of them easily. So I’m quite direct. Expect some further discussion of the details of the book over on my climbing coach blog as the reactions come in.

Some more info on what’s contained in it is on it’s page in the shop and you can get an order in here now if you are keen to read it. For now though, here is the list of contents so you can get a feel for the information thats in it.

9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes: navigation through the maze of advice for the self-coached climber

Contents:

9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes

Barking up the wrong tree

Part 1 - Creatures of habit

Stuck on the basics

The first thing to understand

The first thing to change

Fail, and prepare to succeed

If only I knew now what I knew then

Too embarrassed to climb?

Is this grade a success or mediocre?

The first generation was the freest

Starting from scratch

The truth about famous climbers

Know your enemy - your tastes

Don’t get stuck

Creatures of habit

Part 2 - The big four: movement technique, finger strength, endurance, body mass

The biggest lesson from sport science

You cannot break the laws

How to learn technique

Record, replay, review

No one does drills, right?

The structure of climbing technique

The need for momentum

Types of momentum

The issue of height

Don’t just push with your feet!

Counterintuitive aspects of climbing technique

Precision really matters

Trying to make the hold bigger

Don’t overrate strength

Bouldering is number one

But I don’t like bouldering!

How to boulder to show off, or get strong

Board heads

A good bouldering session

Fingerboard rules

To crimp or not to crimp

Making sense of Haston and Oddo

Making sense of Ondra and Sharma shapes

How light do I need to be?

How to get light without pain?

Steps for losing and maintaining a lower weight for climbing

Who needs to pump iron to climb hard?

To the wiry

To the beefcake

To the tall

To the lucky little ones

When you really can blame your tools

Campus boards hurt almost everyone

Climbing is not a cardiovascular sport

Where is climbing endurance?

Endurance activities

Understanding fatigue symptoms

Endurance rules

Part 3 - Fear of falling: the real problem, probably…

The only way

Falling technique

Practice indoors

Practice on sport climbs

Building falls into your daily climbing diet

Practice on trad

When you just can’t fall off

Part 4 - The other big four: attitude, lifestyle, circumstances, tactics

I’m young, spoon-feed me!

Why mid-teens drop off the radar

“I can’t do that” he said, mistakenly

Too old to improve?

To find time, make your time work harder for you

Do you really want to be an athlete?

Tactics often trump training

What the warmup does

Tuning in and out

Managing the ‘psyche’ level

Do you really want it to be easy?

Be thick skinned at all times

Does flexibility really matter?

Part 5 - What’s next coach? Planning your improvement

Think curves, not lines

So jump off that plateau, if you can bear it

Regimes - how much can you handle?

Over-resting or under-recovering? 

A kid’s regime

A student’s regime

A family/career hustler

The wannabe pro

The confused and disillusioned

Same old routine, same old results

Cracking bad habits is tough

Rules of the training day

Rules of the training season

Annual rest and recuperation time

Summing up

A tentative start to the winter

Ahhhh! Hot refreshed elbows after hot & cold treatment. Feels good.

Right now I'm in Spain, at Siurana. The purpose of the trip, apart from enjoying some outdoor climbing after the Lochaber perma-rain of autumn, is to recharge batteries and get ready for winter. As usual for late autumn, I'm strong from three months of solid bouldering, but my endurance is poor, and joints are complaining from the punishment.

Long routes are the answer for both, with a little more dedicated recovery time than I'd normally manage at home due to work. Rest days between attacking the hardest routes of Siurana are restful in one sense, but busy nonetheless. I've just spent four hours on rehab activities for my elbows. They are complaining after I overdid it with training during November. After one of these sessions the tendons feel great, going from a creaking mess to a steely strip of hot working collagen. I've posted more on this subject on my training blog here.

Yesterday was a little brutal on the body. First I narrowly avoided a long fall that may have involved contact with the ground. I went for a big link on a project I'm trying, and after skipping a bolt (they are spaced anyway!) my foot slipped just at the last move of the runout. I was holding an undercut with one hand, and a small intermediate edge with the other, but managed to stay on from that instantaneous hit of nervous tension you get from a slip at a bad moment in climbing. That might have been it over, except Michael thought I was off, exploded into a backwards run and fell over onto his back facing downslope. A comedy moment followed of me dangling desperately against a tight rope trying to replace my foot on a smear while Michael righted himself beetle style and resumed paying out rope. All was fine except I struggled on for a few more bolts until arms melted.

Later I dragged a wasted body up for a work session on a massive new 8b+ called Dogma. With two bat hangs and overhanging about 15 metres in it's 45 metre length it should be the kind of full body workout I'm needing just now. The short days of December mean I'll have to wait until tomorrow for more action on this.

BTW - More news on my book during next week.

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...

New stuff in the shop

Some news from our webshop:

Echo Wall has been out a year now, so we’ve dropped it to half price. We’ll be selling the rest of our stock of the DVD at £10.

Mountain Equipment hats - Loads of you emailed over the past year to ask where you could get the ME hats that are never off my head when climbing. So after a bit of persuasion with ME, we’ve got some in red, black, yellow and various blues at £15.

Arriving hopefully any day is our stock of the new Welsh Connections DVD. I’m looking forward to seeing this myself, especially Mr  Robins on Liquid Ambar but also all the rest of the trad and bouldering madness from the best of the Welsh scene (Dawes, Davies, McHaffie etc..). We are taking pre-orders for it now at £15.

The other week we changed our postage charges to free for orders over £30. A bit later on we twigged it would be kind of handy if the various things we sell for £14.95 or thereabouts were actually a nice £15 for obvious reasons. So for example, now £30 gets you Welsh Connections and an ME hat or T-shirt and free postage to anywhere on earth. More sensible.

My own board report

Many of you have emailed or commented asking me to talk a bit more about my board and  the structure of my sessions. The details are a bit intense for some readers here, so I’ve posted a fuller version of this post on my training blog for those interested. The short version is that I have been using it most evenings after work and I’ve made really good strength gains in the past 5 months or so. I’ve also been almost constant on the edge of getting injured - climbing in there is pretty damn intense. I’m used to training for several hours at a climbing wall, so I’m conditioned to keep going. But 1 hour on my board equals about 2 in a climbing wall and 4 outdoors. I just completed a couple of projects on it I’d been trying for about 4 months which are in the wee youtube above.

It’s really kept me going since I’ve been writing the book. Btw progress with that is going great guns with 12 hours a day working on it. Right now it’s mid way through being edited. I’ll keep you posted how it goes...

Creag dubh on the Cobbler in '78

Paul Cunningham points me at another new youtube of John Cunningham and Creag Dubh club friends rock climbing in pretty wintery conditions on the Cobbler in 1978. What really struck me watching this was how dramatically rock climbing in Scotland was about to move on in terms of attitude, tactics and standard shortly after this. Just one year after this on the same cliff Dave Cuthbertson was making a massive step forward in standard with Wild Country at hard E6 6b (sparsely protected F7b or 7b+). This video really shows an end of an era of an approach to climbing, and the start of a completely different one.

Payback

Last night, seemingly out of the blue, I felt stronger in training than I ever have. The reason, in hindsight is obvious. I’d just been doing one/two sessions 5 days a week for about three weeks, and my body was shredded. An enforced couple of days off due to appointments around Scotland last weekend barely even seemed enough to feel normal again. It sounds like nothing, but three weeks is a long time to feel no improvement, or negative progress, when you are giving it full pelt every single night until your upper body can’t face another move in the wee small hours.

We are totally hardwired not to think of the long term in this respect. It takes a bit of faith that it’s working. If I’d got too frustrated (which I nearly did) and taken some rest to ‘cash in’ too early, I would have sabotaged the kickstart for the body.

Last night, two boulder problems went down that I’d been trying for four months. They felt easy. Like nothing. Last week I spent a whole hour (a long time on a board V-hard with 60 second rests between tries) just trying to do each move.

I nearly saw of the hardest project I’ve set so far, got to the last move of seven and swung my legs about wildly in confusion, eyes practically drilling a hole in the board searching for the crucial foot hold. Except I’d taken it off the board and forgotten. Idiot. The next ten attempts to move No. 5 were fair punishment.

Progression is here

Just a note to say the Progression DVD stock arrived with us this morning and is in the webshop now. Sharma’s first ascent of Jumbo Love 9b in the states, Adam Ondra making 9a+s look like nothing, the young americans destroying the hard grit classics, Patxi Usobiaga showing you what training really means. Tommy Caldwell trying to take big wall climbing to a new level of difficulty (again) and all the rest of the jaw dropping bouldering we expect from a Big Up film. You can get it here

I’ll be finishing writing early today for my appointment with the DVD player before training this evening. The board better be ready. I’m expecting this film to get me very psyched!