Friday 14 May 2010

ALL QUIET ON THE LEFT HAND FRONT

My right elbow hasn't recoverd yet.
I try to keep my chin up, my head down and my eyes fixed on one step ahead of me, my mind on the long term goal.
It's very very hard for me, now, not to get really angry and depressed about my climbing. Ironically enough, I am realizing right now that in the previous weeks, when I was feeling weak, I wasn't THAT weak, and most of all I was climbing well, if not strong. So, to have to interrupt this kind of flow, really makes me sad. It would have been perfect to keep the good climbing style and then match it with some serious training, weights and fingerboarding. Oh well, I have to cope.
I keep doing my left arm training, and I see some progress. I am able to lock off on a slopey edge now, something that I could easily do on my right arm but not on the left one: at least this injury gives me the chance to really address my weak left arm, to regain some balance between the two arms. The other day I also tried to one arm that hold, nearly doing it. I went up with power, but then was unable to complete the pull, stopping a bit shy. Strange, given that the first part of the pull is generally the hardest to perform. I also did some other tests, finding that I can dead hang and one arm that hold very comfortably with just 3-5 kilos off. The hold I train on right now, I am sure, is nowhere close to being as hard as the hold of "Malc's One Armer", and this makes me shiver when I am alone in bed at night. Sometimes the goal seems getting closer, sometimes it seems so far away, becoming so distant in the fog, as if I was lost in a desert and could not reach the oasis that is at the line of the horizon. This really scares me, not because I am scared to fail, but because it will show how weak I am in comparison to other climbers. It's something completely different than, for example, being unable to climb a problem: here, there are so many different aspects thare relevant, while on that hold, you can only be strong and one arm it, or weak and not one arm it. So, it's a benchmark, completely separated from climbing, but also so closely related with it: if one is able to perform a single hand move at Font 8a, the road to something good gets wider, straighter, and faster, and I want to race down that road as fast as I can.

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