Home Boulder Wall

Last night Pete and Rhys Langlands came up to my garage to do some climbing on my 45 board as its better than our local wall!!!!
Rhys on a mediam circuit.

It was a good nights boulder session, hands are wrecked today! But my back is still sore from the weekend.

British Team Training

Friday I travelled down to Sheffield, England for the first British Team event of the year.

Saturday we were at the Climbing Works, a bouldering venue in Sheffield. The bouldering wall was massive and awesome with loads of circuits and boulder problems. The first thing we had to do was complete 40 problem circuit, then we could get lunch followed by doing an easy circuit as fast as we could then a fitness assessment. In the assessment we had to do several different exercises:

• Tap downs, for two minutes
• Sit-ups, as many as we could complete in one minute.
• Lock-offs, For 15 seconds on each arm.
• Pulups, 20 continuous.
  Type writers, 15
• Dead hang on the campus board, for one minute.
• Dead hang on 45 sloapers, for one minute.

Day Two

Sunday we went to the Foundry climbing centre which is also in Sheffield. Sunday morning started with a 30 minute jog around the Foundry climbing wall. The run killed me as I don't have much aerobic endurance which I need to work on. After the jog we were straight into training. Ian Dunn and Tom Randle set two training sessions which each lasted an hour.

The first training session I done was anaerobic capacity, which is when you find a 13-16 move boulder problem 80% of your maximum and do it 10 times with 3 minutes rest in between each attempt, you should not manage to complete all 10 reps, you should be failing around the 8Th rep if the grade is right.

The second training session I done was a core session. We were giving 8 different core exercises to do each lasting 1 minute, we had to complete all 8 of the exercises three times. This core session lasted 30 minutes.

For the last 30 minute of the session we were giving 8 climbing pacific movements we had to complete on a overhanging board.

After a morning of climbing we headed over to Sheffield university to get a lecture on sports nutrition from Audrey Morrison and some stretching exercises with Ian Dunn.

This weekend I have learnt a lot of different and new training methods which i can now use. My next event is next month in Leeds which is a semi competition and it decided who will be competing in the European competitions this year.

Home Boulder Wall

The boulder wall in my garage has been changed several times, from three flat panels, to one flat panel, 20 degrees over hanging wall, 45 board and a small 90 degrees panel on the roof. Its awesome to train on. Last summer I spent more time in my garage than I did at my local wall, I could put my music up loud and set as hard as I wanted to.

Today I spent the afternoon resetting circuits, so I can get back to hard training. When I am training on my 45 board I usually train for up to two hours, usually doing hard circuits!

Right now I am training for the British team assessment which is in March, it might decide who goes to the European competitions this year, its hard for me this year because I have all of my Major exams, but I will still try my hardest to keep up my training. Where I live there is only one climbing wall and the next is 150 miles away down in Edinburgh, and in my local wall the hardest route is 7c. It really sucks but I just have to train more on my 45 board and travel down to Edinburgh more often.

EYS Training day

Last weekend was a 3 day training session for people competing in the European Youth climbing championships at the end of September, I was reserve in the boys group B.

Day 1 (Friday)
We started climbing 2 o'clock on Friday afternoon. Day 1 was a hard fun boulder competition, which included of 20 boulder problems. At about 4 o'clock Dave Binney (head coach of the British team) came and gave us a lecture on how most of the European and world competitions run.

Day 2 (Saturday)
Saturday started in the lecturer Theatre on how we should warm up and route demos.

Warm-ups

On a event final the isolation area opens at 7.30am and closed at 8.30am. At 8.30am route demos start, and 8.45am first climber is out to climb. So if you are climber number 1,2 or 3 you will need to be warmed up and ready by 8.30am, which means you will need to be in isolation at 7.30.


Route Demos

When Dave Binney was telling us about the route demos we had to take some notes. I learned a lot from what I was told about route demos.


At 12 o'clock after we had been talking about warm-ups we were all send down to the warm up area, and try and warm up in a small space with a lot of people in only 1 hour, just like it would be like in the EYS. It was quite hard to warm up in a smallish place because people were fighting to get onto the wall. After 1 hour of warming up we were all sent out to climb 2 routes.

At the end of the day Dave Binney came over to me and said one of the other climbers injured there finger and could not climb in the EYS, and offered that if I wanted I could take the place!!

Day 3 (Sunday)

Was a mock EYS competition, so we had to get up at a silly time and be in isolation. We had to be in isolation one hour before route preview so the first 3 people could warm up and be ready to climb. We all went out for route preview and read the route, after 6 minutes we were all sent back into isolation and carried on our warm up. During the day the judges put in some Technical faults in (Eg a spinning hold or a clip that was the wrong way or something like that) the idea was so we were aware of what to do if this happened in the comp.