Happy 2018! It's been a great one for me so far, largely colored by the knowledge that I'm finally going to be a dad in about three months. I feel like I should be nervous, but if I am, the excitement is doing a great job of masking it. If anything, I've found myself feeling more motivated these past several months than I have in a long time. Maybe my schedule won't change as much as I think it will, but right now while my schedule is all my own, I've been taking full advantage of the fitness area at our gorgeous new climbing gym. Focusing on full-body antagonist work that I can easily replicate at home while the baby naps, my back is finally in good enough shape to let me take advantage of the vastly steeper bouldering terrain that the new gym offers.
While my after work bouldering sessions have mostly become training days at the gym, I've been trying to get out as close to every weekend as possible, generally aiming for quantity and variety of movement over any harder projecting. With so much out there that I want to climb, and the freedom to get out wherever I want right now, I don't want to look back and realize that I spent most of the winter staring at the same few feet of rock.
After not getting out for the first couple weeks of the year because I thought the weather wasn't good enough, I ended up heading to Governor Stable as an excuse to have lunch at the Troegs brewery afterward. Even with temps in the low teens when we got there, twenty minutes of cardio and calisthenics in the parking lot had me feeling toasty all day, and the friction was the best I've ever felt on diabase slopers. Unfortunately I still kept peeling off the finish jug of
No Moss, but the day was a great reminder that even seemingly sub-optimal conditions can actually be fantastic with the right mindset.
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| Photo: Mike Brest |
Last weekend I went out for a much warmer day of Sugarloaf area bouldering, first to Mount Ephraim, and then up to White Rocks. We started off on the Magical Boulder, where I got on Awakening for the first time in almost five years. Even though it felt easy now considering how much work I put into it back then, the movement was every bit as good as I remembered, and I would still rank it among the best boulders I've climbed anywhere.
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| Photo: Taimur Ahmad |
Over at White Rocks, we took a short tour around before stopping to finish our day on the slab at the base of the boulderfield. Taimur snagged the second ascent of
God of Thumbder, managing to continue traversing low for a more direct link into the start of
Crimp Life than I had thought possible when I first tried it a couple years ago, and I was happy to find that his beta worked for me now too,
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| Taimur Ahmad on God of Thumbder |
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| Photo: Taimur Ahmad |
Saturday I went out to Cunningham Falls, intending to work on
Never Let Me Go, but deciding after a few tries that I'm not quite as ready for the first move as I'd hoped. Instead I went for a mileage day, repeating a few of my favorite climbs on the Jonah boulder, and working out a couple of the link-ups that have come to mind in the past few visits. After finishing the link from
Belly into
Baron Harkonen, I decided to reverse it into a
Baron-Belly link that I didn't have enough time to finish after working out the moves, but was a lot of fun nonetheless. In any case, it's still really exciting to be able to spend this much time on steep terrain again without worrying about every move injuring me.
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| Photo: Charlie Garcia |
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| Photo: Charlie Garcia |
Fingers crossed this good weather will hold out for this weekend. I see some more diabase slopers in my future!
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