The Show Must Go On

If you wait for everything to be perfect then it never happens.

I have accepted that my ankle is going to have a long healing time. I have also accepted that I am going to make the healing time even longer because I keep climbing and training. I can rest when I’m done Ice World Cup.

Next week I leave for Switzerland. I decided to tack a couple of extra days onto the start of my trip, using up almost all of my vacation for the year, but this way I can sneak in the competition in Saas Fee. I will be showing up jet lagged and worn out and need to be ready to compete by the next morning, but I figure if I’m going to do this world cup stuff I might as well go all in! Three competitions in 18 days…..it’s going to be intense.

If I’m going to be honest though, I am a bit intimidated. The competition in Bozeman went okay, but not as well as I wanted. Since then I’ve still been training with my ankle, but I’ve had to change tactics. No more pushing moves at Neil’s home wall and tumbling to the floor. If I am doing movement training or climbing outside I’ve been taping the crap out of my ankle. Otherwise I’ve been sticking to my smaller training wall, trying to build my strength and endurance, but mostly I’m just trying to maintain the fitness that I built before the Bozeman comp.

One more week and I fly out! Eek! Hopefully I can still get a couple more training sessions in before then.

Training – Things I’m Good At and Things I’m Not

Your actual training routine is important, but you also have to take care of yourself. So with that in mind, here is a list of things I’m good at, and things I need improvement on (and like most people, there are more things I need improvement on than things that I’m good at).

Sleep – I fail pretty hard at this one. I’m very bad at going to bed on time, and then even worse at falling asleep. My alarm is set for 6am to get to work for 7am. I’m often running behind because I don’t wake up until 6:30am.

Food – One reason that I’m up so late so often is that I start cooking at 9 at night. So while I’m tired at work, I’m getting a filling and balanced meal for lunch. I am not vegetarian, but I eat very little meat, so I need to be careful about getting enough protein. Some days I’m good at this, some days I’m not.

Water – I don’t know if tea really counts (but I drink a lot of tea). I know I should keep that water bottle filled at my desk at work, but who has time for that!

Cross Training – I mentioned my love affair with my bike this summer in an earlier post. My problem is that when I get into an activity I can get almost obsessive about it, so I have a hard time doing multiple sports at a time. I am super into training for drytooling right now, so I find it hard to make time for things like running. But I have been managing to get to a yoga class once a week. Yes, I could just stretch, but I won’t stretch for an hour without a yoga class. This also helps strengthen opposing muscles with all your chaturangas and down dogs and such.

Current Training

I just wanted to give a taste of the training that Neil land I are doing right now at his home wall.

Since neither of us have any competition experience we have started setting problems that average 14-15 moves that we try to complete in 7min (which is a typical amount of time given for prelims and semis). If we fall off we hop right back on the wall, because the other aspect of this is to improve our endurance to actually climb for 7min.

I see hold #4, 2, 15…..

The first couple of times I did this I rushed and didn’t even make it halfway through the route we set. A good lesson there for me for the actual comps: I’ll do better if I shake out thinking how to preform the move before I launch into it than just trying to climb fast. Since I don’t know the routes we’ve set very well it is also good practice for me practice onsight climbing, which I admit has never been a strong suit of mine.

Last week we added another element to this routine. At the start of the session we took 7min to each preview a route we hadn’t been on before. After preview we each went through a warm up routine. After the warm up we each climbed our onsight route. This was enlightening, for each of us there were moves we thought would be hard but weren’t really that bad, but also moves that we thought would be easy but completely shut us down.

Action shot of me falling out of a figure-4. This kind of thing happens.

One more thing we work on is clipping while climbing. This is why you see all the draws hanging around Neil’s home wall, or see us climbing with harnesses on. And if you think that clipping isn’t a big deal, things are a little more tricky when you’re hanging out in a figure-4 trying to clip and long, floppy draw with golf gloves on.

Crunch Time!

Bozeman is getting close! Less than 5 weeks left for training and less than 6 before the comp! We’ve also been pretty busy getting trying to get promotional material together for our fundraising efforts.

One awesome thing going on is the support that we’re getting from Outland Adventure Gear in Orangeville, Ontario: http://www.outlandadventuregear.ca/

Nathan and I will be sporting some Rab MeCo 165 shirts for our World Cup jerseys and Outland is donating the profits of their Rab Meco sales to me and Nathan and IWC until the end of December. It’s a great product and I encourage everyone to check it out their store.

Other wise, I’ve been spending a lot of time climbing with Neil at his place when Nathan’s not available. Neil is also doing Ice World Cup this year, planning to compete in the same comps as me (Montana, Italy and France). His wall is fairly small, but I feel like we’ve been making some good use of it.

future crusher?

Neil’s a great training partner, we’re fairly close to the same level (though he’s a pretty good athlete and his drytool training is really paying off!) and having the same goals really keeps us focused.

Back to Business!

I’ve had a good summer, but for better or for worse I a goal to put at least 100km on my road bike a week through the summer. This was done over two to three nights a week, usually with a time trial in there as well. I got quite a bit faster on the bike, but it was both time consuming (at least 4 hours in the saddle a week) and tiring (time trials are exhausting!).

I did okay climbing on the weekends, and I would have one training night during the week, but honestly I’m going to need more time than that to be happy with my performance in World Cup this year.

In the last couple of weeks I have put the cycling aside and have felt recharged for drytool training. During the week I have been doing two or three evenings and also climbing regularly Saturday and Sunday. During my weeknight training sessions I am continuing with building endurance and working on figure-4s.

This weekend I climbed with my friend Stephanie both days. She is planning on doing the speed comp at Bozeman, but she is super motivated and improving a lot so I secretly hope that she also does the lead comp (shhhhh!). While I love climbing with Nathan it was a nice change of pace to head out with another woman.

When I train on the wall at home I mostly concentrate on movement practice. Nathan has a bunch of holds that he brought home from Korea last year. He has them laid out for his own practice so some of the moves are quite difficult, but since the men’s routes are always harder than the women’s I hope that I won’t encounter moves quite so difficult during competition.

Here are a few photos of me and Steph climbing on my home wall and outside training structure. So psyched on training right now!