Friday 19 March 2010

FRIDAY

I have just finished my daily teaching, and it's time to collect my thoughts about last week. It's been another week of hard hard work that, on this matter, will end only after tomorrow lessons. It's hard but it's rewarding, so...
This past week also saw my first free afternoon in a long long time, so instead of sitting in my couch reading crime stories, on Wednesday I went to Florence other climbing gym with The Guru himself. I needed to be shown the problems, he needed a bleay slave, easy to find a gentlemen's agreement.
There had been a comp at that gym recently (video here), and the blackboard with the scorecards was still in place. I had a quick look. My jaw dropped. 30 problems plus the final, with alot, I say alot of the competitors doing every problem but the hardest six. My goal was to do as many problems as I could, so I put my arms to work. I started again feeling as heavy as a battleship, doing the first group of easy 6 problems. Then I belayed The Guru. Then I did my other group of 6 moderates, then I belayed The Guru. Briefly, the battleship had muted into a fast and powerful drug dealer boat, and I powered down every problem but the last 6. At that point the lactic acid kicked in. On the first of the harder problems, I quickly sorted the bottom moves out, but when I reached a flat crimp, my forearms exploded. I took a good rest and tried a more crimpy problem. Same result, my fingers opened up while they were on a crimp that normally I would have slept on. Time to go. Yes, time to go to the bar and eat. I actually went to two different bars, ate and drank. I came back and fired the problems into oblivion. Then I died. I tried the final, but I had cramps, so that if I locked my arms, the muscles would seize and I wouldn't be able to open them. I decided to call it quit. I was happy because of the good volume. Obviously I was disappointed because I could have climbed more hard problems with a better tactique, but that wasn't my goal. My goal was to climb every problem in numerical order as quickly as possible, and that was what I had just done, flashing almost all the probs.
Tragic irony: at the end of the session I found out that the impressive scorecards were misleading. In the actual comp, if you had done a yellow problem, you also got all the whites, greens and part of the blues. This meant that I could have easily done up to 15 problems more than the competitors did. Heh.
On the way home, I suddenly started feeling dizzy. I started trembling, then sweating, then shaking. I was experiencing one of the most terrible hypoglycemic attacks ever. Luckily a pizza take away was open. In I went and I managed to gulp down two slices in ten seconds, under the curious looks of the owner and customers. At home, I ate for a continuous hour, more or less. It was a great day.
I am very happy of my climbing, although none of the things I did was hard. I mean truly hard, otherwise I wouldn't have flashed so many. But it was a mental test also. Maybe I have found my way of enjoying comps. Who knows.


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