ODE TO THE UGLY part 3

Nightmares and six packs

The other day I watched ‘The Butterfly Effect’ and it gave me nightmares. The whole film is based around the idea of chaos theory; the idea that subtle changes to the initial conditions of a system could create an exponential increase in error to the point that the system becomes so complex that it appears to behave entirely randomly despite being entirely deterministic. In my dream I went back through time and forced myself to diet for the last 22years and when I got back to the present day my metabolism was so slow that I was so overweight I could only climb VS! I woke up screaming.
Strangely it seemed to spur me on to watch what I eat more. Some might even call it a diet. There seems to be a lot of conflicting advice out there on what to do at the best of times. This is made worse by the lack of climbing specific research. I guess boulderers need loads of protein and not many carbs and at the other end of the spectrum winter climbers need lots of fat and sugar.
I remember Paul Diffley telling me about the treble S diet of Soup, (S)Cereal and Smirnoff. I am drawn to this by its simplicity. No scope for confusion; just avoid anything that isn’t in the list. I am however only about 40% as sociable as I am desperate to burn everyone off and with this in mind I’ve decided to ditch the Smirnoff and replace it with supplements, mainly protein shake and an assortment of vitamin pills.
I’ve only been keeping it up since last Wednesday when I got properly psyched again after a Ryanair induced motivation lull...okay maybe it was a little bit my fault. Anyway I feel lighter already. Maybe I’ll post a little something for the ladies when I’m ripped and learn how to photo-shop out my farmers tan!

It's raining, big up the training!

In the top right corner of your web browser you might well have a google search bar. I do, and rather unfortunately for someone currently staying with his parents it displays your last search even after you’ve left the computer. Yesterday I left the computer with ‘better sex’ typed in the search bar which was promptly found by my sister and has been the butt of a lot of family jokes ever since. Although it should be noted my parents both seem to agree that what I was doing was admirable, trying to justify this and keep my hard earned reputation as a lotharious machine has been tricky. But I think there are underlying principles which are well worth being reminded of every now and then. I used training as an analogy to try and explain this.
Training isn’t a set list of exercises, it’s the application of a set of principles, namely specificity and overload, to your exercise. Perhaps drawing parallels with the swine flu hysteria of the summer past, this is why we, the sad few, can talk so much about training and still not really know what to do. In other words there isn’t really some-thing to do but rather some-things to think about when we do.
Paradoxically on a philosophical level specificity in your training and overload in your training are at loggerheads. You can only truly train specifically to make that of which you are already capable feel easier as you cannot be both capable of doing something specific and simultaneously not yet be capable of doing it. In other words you can’t train specifically for your project until you’re already capable of doing it. Until you’re capable of your goal route your specific training will always be a compromise; holds will have to be bigger, moves smaller or walls slabbier, at least until someone invents some kind of gravity reduction machine. Training king Rich Simpson said you can’t train until you know what you’re training for but if specificity is prerequisite for the existence of systematic training then even when you work out what you’re training for you can’t train specifically for it and thus can’t train for it at all!
Is there anything practical to be taken from this? Well when you look at the way most people go about becoming a font 9a boulderer in Edinburgh they go about it all wrong. They knock their pan in down the wall for 9 months of the year, getting really strong but not in an entirely specific way, then when they decide based on their form during this unspecific training that they’re on form(?) they go out and try a boulder problem of the desired grade and normally get shut down. A sufficiently strong boulderer could walk out and onsight a 90meter 9a if they were sufficiently over powered that the moves just felt so easy that they could keep doing them all the way to the chain, despite having never trained endurance. But just because it’s possible to onsight 9a through non-specific training doesn’t mean it’s the way to go about doing it. With the same amount of effort directed specifically at the problem, the goal would be reached and exceeded much quicker.

But as we already discussed you can’t train specifically for a futuristic goal. What you can do specifically is consolidate the strength and technique you already have to the point that what once felt at your limit now feels 90% by which point you’ve gotten 10% stronger but you’ve also given you’re tendons and joints a bit of time to get used to the level of force your body can exert through them. I think this is why I’ve had a bad run with injuries. I always want to be pulling harder than I currently am. A healthy ambition perhaps, but not really something to get too carried away with in itself. If you’re injured it doesn’t matter how strong you are.

ODE TO THE UGLY part 2

My god he's ugly and man is this a shit interview.

ODE TO THE UGLY part 1

Big Sam's Short Haul

If you’re really into the history of sport climbing there are some venues you have to visit. The Mecca’s we must make a pilgrimage to at least once in our lifetime. Maybe you don’t feel this way, but everyone takes something different from climbing and I’d guess that your indifference over seeing Hubble in the flesh (although probably quite a healthy thing) shows a certain indifference to the sport of climbing’s historical progression. Chimpanzodrome at Saussois, Punks in the Gym at Arapalies, La Rose and Agincourt at Buoux; these are all iconic routes. Iconic in the sense that they capture in some sense the personality and vision of their authors. Maybe that sounds a bit like pretentious gibberish but take for example Ben Moon’s Hubble, for all intents and purposes a shit looking route. Perhaps it is this in itself which goes some way to highlighting Moon’s obsession with pure physical difficulty and perhaps his drive to climb harder than anyone else.
The routes I listed above are also icons of a level of difficulty. They are the benchmarks of difficulty in sport climbing, as opposed to grades. Chimpanzodrome may have been downgraded but it still represented the cutting edge of French sport climbing at one time. Shamefully I have never visited any of the routes I mentioned above. Clearly I’ve spent too much time enjoying the good life on the finest Catalan play-doh and not enough time screwing my fingers into sharp polished pockets.
Anyone who isn’t a complete idiot will have noticed Wall Street and Action Direct missing from my iconic routes selection, perhaps the first 8c and 9a in the world put up by the legendary Wolfgang Gullich. As if authoring the first of two grades as round and fun to say as ATE SEE, mincing about in the Karakorum and breaking his back on Master’s Edge wasn’t enough to seal the deal as legendary, Gullich did what all real legends do- die. L.E.G.E.N.D.
*As an aside, has anyone else noticed ‘legend’ overtaking ‘love’ and ‘random’ as the most overused word in the English language? If we’re honest mate, that boring bastard you go drinking with is hardly legendary and will be forgotten about soon after his death.
AND SO i went to the Frankenjura!
I wasn’t really sure what to expect and I’m still not sure how I felt about it as a climbing area. That makes it sound like I don’t really rate it but that’s not the case, it’s just more musique concrete than easy listening. Also I should stress that 9 days isn’t really enough to really form an opinion on the Frankenjura’s 20,000+ routes (yes I did mean over 20,000 routes which is fairly remarkable when compared with Ceuse’s 350).
My attempt at describing the style of climbing in the Frankenjura, which is very distinct despite devotees saying otherwise:- It feels a bit like climbing routes that are too hard for you, the moves feel desperate and doing a route feels a bit like doing a good link on a long-term project at a proper crag. Rob Mirfin described the climbing as a bit like climbing a route at ceuse but without any of the easy moves. In other words the routes are often short enough that every move can feel desperate even in isolation and so redpoints require you to totally get in the zone and battle blindly without the usual switch from relaxing on the jugs to crushing on the crux, it’s just crush crush crush.
So is it just bouldering with the added inconvenience of having to tie on? I’d say no. Clipping makes them feel like routes even if it’s just strength sapping in the same way it would be to stop constantly on a boulder problem. This maybe sounds a bit of a nuisance but I quite liked it as it leaves you with a greater feeling of the effort you’ve just expended than the same route as a boulder problem would.
Another thing I like about it is the fact that you aren’t going to the same crag everyday. You’re not doing the same walk in over and over. Each crag has a different ambience and outlook and the Frankenjura is a beautiful place. A criticism of the Frankenjura I’d heard before which I thought totally unfounded is the idea that the lines there aren’t impressive. The crags themselves are basically just big boulders and so you get all the wonderful and weird features you get to climb bouldering- striking arêtes and prows are not uncommon which is more than can be said for the vast majority of sport crags where ‘the line’ is simply the line of bolts.
Don’t go to Frankenjura if:- you don’t like pockets (they’re everywhere and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise)
- You like soft grades.
-You like long routes.
-You want climbing in a supermarket. I didn’t really see any crags that were chockablock with awesome routes and it’s quite easy to get lost in the forest looking for crags.
Do go if:- you can do 1-5-9, or at least like routes with hard moves.
- you like routes with history (they aren’t all desperate- fight gravity put up by Kurt Albert as the first 7a in the forest, although it’s allegedly a total sandbag and I avoided it like the plague)
- you get bored of the same crag quickly
-you don’t mind redpointing on your holiday.
Verdict:- More Redpath than McNair but better looking than either of them.

I Love North Yorkshire!

Everybody slags British sport climbing off all the time but for me at the moment it’s exactly what I want to be playing on. Maybe I’ve gone mad... I think I’d rather have Malham and Kilnsey as my local crags than Ceuse and Terradettes.
The routes in Yorkshire are all just so unique. You’ve done a 7c at the cascade of Ceuse? Which one? Who cares, they’re all the same (except Blanche Fesses which is nails). Don’t get me wrong, when you have a good experience there’s nothing wrong with enjoying the same experience again. The routes at cascade are mind blowingly good. The rock is perfect, the views amazing and the style athletic and pumpy (i.e. great). But unlike Ceuse where there is very little to distinguish between the routes on each sector, take a look at the classic 7c’s at Kilnsey. Nobody gets Comedy, Dominatrix or Biological Need muddled up. These are routes with names rather than numbers (not that there is anything wrong with numbers).
The routes have history, and a reputation for stiff grades, the hold types are more varied than those on continental limestone and the routes have more character. The routes in Yorkshire have moves, and not necessarily desperate ones, but memorable ones.
Weather permitting I want to climb an 8b this year. I’ve mainly been scratching away at Kilnsey but when it cools down a bit I need to get back to Malham to try Magnetic Fields. I had a day on it about a month ago and did all the moves, maybe with a bit of a siege I could do it? This might all seem hypocritical after my spiel about routes with names not grades but doing Magnetic Fields would be more than a grade. John Dunne’s route from 1986 was one of, if not, the first 8b in Britain and put up during the original sport climbing boom. For me that makes it the most exciting to try. As Jerry said, “if you want to know where the sport of climbing was in 1993 you can always go and try Dominator”. This is why keeping it old school is where it’s at. These routes are the benchmarks of their difficulty and time.