Straits of Gibraltar

Tomorrow is the prelims for the Ice Climbing World Cup in Bozeman. So before the competition starts I thought I’d talk a bit about the climbing that I’ve done up in Hyalite Canyon.

Not knowing how my ankle was going to be on my ankle I eased into things. My one big goal was the try to red point Straits of Gibraltar. We spend three days up in the Bingo Cave, and to be honest the figure-4s to figure-9s out the roof felt tiring and I didn’t really fell like it was going to go this trip.

On our third day up in the cave I warmed up on Panama Canal, a tricky hard to read route. I misread it a couple of times and blew off when the line of holds I was following ran out.

I went up Gibraltar a couple of times, not really feeling it, but I wanted to get it down to one hang. This was my goal on my second redpoint attempt that day. Figure-4…..figure-9…..crap my tool is stuck! “Kick it!” shouts Nathan. Tool comes loose and thankfully doesn’t fall off the wall. Figure-4, figure-9….figure-4…..my hand is opening up! I had a big move to the last hold and there was no way I was going to make it. Quick toss to an intermediate and then establish on the clipping hold. Send!!!

I couldn’t even do all the moves on this route last year, so I’m super excited to send it. Definitely the hardest drytooling route I’ve sent yet.

The only photo that any one took of me that day…..sorry.

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.

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!