EYS

This weekend was the British round of the EYS and I was one of the GB team members to compete in the event. This was my first EYS competition and I was really excited, I was totally psyched.

The Friday night we were told our starting place for the first route, and I was climber 120 and was climbing 16th on the first route.


Me on my first route.

I felt really strong when I was on my first route and was really happy that I got to the second last clip.

A pic of me climbing my second route.

My second route was really hard and had a few long moves at the start, which made me use most of my energy.

After this weekend I am now placed 33rd in europe in youth B boys!!!!

Sport Climbing

Went climbing at Moy rock tonight, the weather was really good and managed to get a few routes done before it got too dark. I have not been out in ages as I have been training for my comps, and really enjoyed getting out.

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.

Tooling

Only 5 weeks to the first of the dry tooling comps so I put up a couple of training routes in the Cave.

Here is a clip of me dry tooling last year
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXUFDDY5ElQ

BLCC 2009

Last Saturday was the BLCCs, which was held at Ratho climbing wall Edinburgh. I was in the Junior category (U16), We had to climb two routes graded between 6c+ and about 7c.
My first route was about 7b (I think) I managed to get 3/4 of the way up until a really long stretchy move spat me off.

My second route was about 7c I managed to climb about 25 moves up and was trying to clip one of the quickdraws off a small slopper/ crimp then my right arm got flash pumped.

Over all I came 20th, I would have liked to finish in a better position.

Applecross bouldering

This weekend I managed to persuade my dad to take me to Applecross so I could do some bouldering, the weather was scorching hot about 25'C. I went to sand bay boulders and managed to get a little bit of bouldering done, despite the weather was really hot and there was lots of horse flies biting at my back and legs.

Me on MOD Traverse V4+

We were going to stop off at Torridon boulders on the way home, but it was getting late in the day and we had no food or water left, the nearest shop was 20miles away, so we headed home as the weather forecast for the following day was heavy RAIN !!

Gory Magazine

A few months ago my friend Lukasz Warzecha took some pictures of me climbing at Dumbarton rock, and this month some of his photos went in Gory climbing magazine, one of the best selling climbing magazine's in Europe.