THE TIRED, POLITE BARBARIAN

I’m very very, but I mean very, tired. In the last ten days I think I only had one or maybe two really good sessions. This means that all the others have been somehow lost. To consider these sessions lost may seem stupid, and to lose a session may seem unimportant. But as I said before, every lost session is a missed opportunity to move forward, and to me now not moving forward, not progressing, isn’t like standing still, it means going back. Every lost session means pushing your fingers so that they are damaged, instead of pushed; it means stealing rest from your muscles; it means burning your tips so that they will be thin on the rock; it means, most of all, getting home from the gym not happy. So now I’m very very low, I feel weak as hell, I climb weakly, I look weak. My body flexes when it should keep my feet on the footholds, my ass is heavy and so is my mind. I don’t think light. My fingertips burn on the holds after few moves. My left pinky and my right ring finger scream at every move. And still I can’t rest. When do I start from now? And even more important, where do I go from here? The only direction is obviously forward. I start from the tests I did last Tuesday, luckily at the end of the session, and they weren’t that bad at all. The main thing for me is to fully recover my fingers, to keep climbing without tape and to keep body and mind fresh. One other issue, lately, is the food. I am perpetually hungry and I am perpetually eating: gone are the days when two cups of yoghurt and muesli used to fuel me until 10 30 pm, now I starve after half an hour, despite eating loads. I really can’t eat much more than this: I lack time, if not physical volume. The funny side of this is that my girlfriend now hates me when I’m eating, and gives me every kind of insult because, as she likes to say, I eat as if it was the last bit of food on the planet. My great friend Eric once told me that when I eat I’m a “Polite Barbarian”, meaning that I am polite and educated, but then I eat the food just like a beast. I hardly breathe. I really like how I eat, it makes me feel very alive in that moment.