Hanging on for marginal improvements


I had a climbing session at 9 this evening, which should have given me ample time to get home, put the kids to bed and then go out. Destroyer had other ideas and at 830 was still chasing us around the apartment, at which point I delegated to my wife and went out.
Today I was rather pleased to be able to complete a 19 and an 18, as well as some other problems that had been troubling me for some time. I guess that gets me back to where I was before I went away. That left us half an hour to work on one problem, a cruel 19 with two tiny grips to begin with, and an almost non existent foothold. That meant I spent a good fifteen minutes just trying to pull my hips into the wall – it was a challenge to be in the start position for three seconds, and every time I tried to move to the next part, I fell off.

I guess I’m trying to say it’s nice to have something to work on.

My old friend Olivia from Hong Kong came to meet me at the climbing wall at ten, so I could forsake the wall and shamble away from it. I was really quite tired – as my watch tells me, I did 15,000 steps today. And I got up early this morning to do pressups, so it’s been a long day. Of course, next week I start The Hell Of Pull-ups – 25 in one day, which will be … challenging. Will it be easier if I’m bigger or lighter? How will we find out?


4 responses to “Hanging on for marginal improvements”

  1. Is that the thing you posted a video of? Those footholds were the tiniest thing in the world. What was the advice that guy was giving you about what you should have done? I couldn’t work out what you were supposed to have done from there.

    • So one thing I missed is that if you brace your left arm against the big grey volume, rather than going straight for the orange hold on it, you might make the shift easier. But it’s a challenging one, for sure.

  2. I was well impressed with the foot swap you did on the tiniest foothold in the world. It reminds me of a drill I saw on the Internet – you have to do a climb, and a horizontal one will do it, where you only have one chance to place your foot. Tricky.

    • Thanks! That’s testament to trying the same thing again and again – if you’d seen me a week ago, feet flying around all over the place as I kept falling off the wall…

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