Thursday 26 February 2009

Knuckle Down

That has been the mantra of the month. The amazing freeze of the highlands last month has been replaced by a bit of a miserable thaw and damp weather. These things work out in good timing sometimes.

It’s less than a month until I move house and working super hard and saving every penny has been the main thing to worry about. It’s worth worrying about too since a couple of unexpected setbacks have meant I’ve needed to drop some other plans and work even more than I expected. The recession bites! Must bite back...

The prize though will be worth it. A good place to live for Claire and I, and my own personal domestic dream of having space for a training board in my house for the first time. Good motivation to work hard.

The great thing about working is that there is also plenty of time for uninterrupted spells of training after work. The ratio of elbow rehab:training time is lurching gradually in favour of training, and as is normal for coming out of an injury I feel pretty good and strong.

Between showers (week long ones) I caught the Glen’s boulders dry and returned to the roof sloper project on the Heather Hat. I finally managed to stick the second sloper after a million tries last winter. A good feeling to have made irrefutable strength gains. This for me is one of the feelings from training – new possibilities, where before it was the same old impossibilities.

So it’s another month of hard work, hard training and putting in the hours for payback later. Such is the way with creating good stuff – the long slog in the middle between starting out and the end is the hard, but crucial bit.

Some stuff happening right now:

I’ve been writing a series of introductory articles for the Mountaineering Council of Scotland’s site and magazine on improving at climbing. They are focused very much on concepts that apply to everyone from beginners at climbing to those who have been climbing for years. The articles are here with more to come in the next few months.

On Tuesday (March 3rd)I am in Leeds giving a lecture on risk, climbing and Echo Wall. I’m giving this lecture again on March 8th in Aberdeen as well as a talk on improving at climbing. Details and tickets for these here.

Claire has just finished editing the showreel for this year’s Fort William Mountain Festival which is a couple of weeks away. It’s got the best bits of many of the films showing this year. I’m lecturing there on Thursday March 12th. Check the showreel:

2 comments:

  1. I just checked out those articles; awsome job, thanks heaps for the amazing amount of time and effort you go into helping out everyones climbing.

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  2. Yeah, I agree the articles are really good. Reminded me to mix it up more.

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