Training and Blokfest 4

Again, apologies for a very delayed post, work at Vaux has been picking up the last couple of months and I haven't had any time. So much so that with bad weather too I have failed my monthly challenge and hadn't been able to get out and probably won't until April... At least this has left me with some money in my pocket.

With a lovely Christmas pressie from my parents to have a few sessions with the VauxSquad head coach, Robin O'Leary, I decided to take them up on the offer to find out where I'm going wrong and how I can better myself. With a good 2 hour trashing at Whitespider spending only a couple of minutes on routes, he tells me is that my tech is good buuuut I'm very weak! The remainder of the session we spend in the gym working on all the things wrong.

I knew that I was weak from when I started climbing. From climbing at XC back in the day, the setting there teaches you that you have to be strong to become better. This is what started me setting in the first place, not by harder routes get harder due to bigger reached and smaller holds, but by using heels, toes, good balance and crazy moves! From this session, I now know what I have to do and with the hard going training plan that I've got, I'm going to try!

With plenty of fingerboarding, campussing, strength&conditioning as well as other things to do, nearly every day I have to beast myself. Hopefully by the end of the year I'll reach the goal of climbing a V9 boulder or 8a sport/being consistent on V7's and 7b/b+'s. Only time will tell.

 

Onto Blokfest now with round 4 being all the way down at Bristols brand new Bloc climbing centre. With a fairly good sized centre and some cool problems for the team to get on the day was looking pretty good! Only two of our members turned up which is fairly fair considering how far away it is from London. With textbook stuff of going around the blocks, planning them out and marking them up, we get on with the warm up and off they go.

 

With a good start, things were going well until one of the medium blocks proved a problem for one of our squaddies. A quite an off balanced cross through to a big move out to a sloper, high feet then the standard "hadouken" move to rotate up into the corner and a few big moves to finish. Not her style at all and after battling with it a few times, I believe she could've gotten it a few goes earlier. Alas they both still crushed everything else. A little lower score than normal but it happens and they did have an early start with a long journey there. The scores still put one member in first for her overall category, and am looking forward to the last round of Blokfest!