Some Home Truths

Having only scored 79 points at this weekend SIBL round has driven to rethink my training. Prior to the competition my training was going well. I had completed 3 of my boulder problems I had set on the Bournemouth Climbing Wall in on session. I felt that I was climbing the best I had ever climbed and this feeling kept going into the weekend with an outdoor trip on the Saturday before the competition. I was determined to have an easy day. So I thought getting another 6b tick would not be too much of a challenge. Doing it on my second attempt was good for me and showed me that my lead confidence was defiantly coming back.

Sunday, the day of SIBL Round 4. Going in to the day I felt strong and was confident of gaining a good score. I signed in, got changed and was ready to start. The competition was very crowded and the bouldering area was smaller than I expected. The first problem went down with no problems then the next 4 were ticked with the only problem of having to wait 10-15 mins between them in line. After this the routes went from juggy moves onto more technical moves. The next 2 problems I tried went down without a hitch either.

At this point I was feeling confident but the next few problems I tried I was barely getting off the ground. Again and again I would struggle on the second or the third move. Frustration was settling in instead of the confidence that I once had. The frustration made me mess up on a problem that I should have flashed and cruised on my second attempt. I decided to take a time out and think about why I was not achieving as I should be. Many of the competitors were doing about the same as me and were saying this was the hardest round yet. Also almost all the problems were on a much steeper section of wall than what I have available to train on. So I changed my perspective and decided to see this as a chance to have a really good training session. I focused on the moves and tried to make each one I could do as crisp as I could and those that I could not just kept pushing trying to get as close as I could. Towards the end of comp I looked at bagging as many bonus points as I could. All 4 that I had not already gained seemed too hard for me to gain. But I managed to get one with the use of really focusing and then just jumping for it.

 With my final score of 79 this still sent me up the rankings 23rd. I am now 3 places away from my goal and hope to use the knowledge that I have gained from the reading round to make sure I achieve this.

The Bet

Me and my house mate have this £10 bet on who can do a one arm pull up from straight arm first. He has lately been able to do them from a slight bend and I have been still Struggling with do lock offs with one hand. So this week I decided it was time for a bit of catch up. I have stared do a lot of assisted one arm pull ups using my Iron gym pull up bar and a pinch on the door frame.

.

 

My First Two and Half Weeks Back Climbing

So far this year I have had five indoor training sessions and one out door trip. Three of my sessions have been at my local wall at Bournemouth University and I have taken two trips to a much larger facility at Calshot. The three of us who took a trip outside were rewarded with a day of rare January sunshine and a dry crag at Cheyne Wears on Portland.

When returning from an extended period of time off climbing I find de-motivating at first. The problems which once I could easily do now seem beyond me, the feeling of exhaustion occurs after just a few route or problems and the ability to push through the pump is no longer there. But this feeling is overshadowed by feeling of achievement as the strength I once knew comes back after just a few sessions. It is a shame that my stamina did not do the same thing but this a part of climbing that has always been a weakness.

On the first outdoor trip of year my lead head seemed to be nonexistent, getting nervous of being above my bolt while plodding up a 5+ was frustrating. During the summer I had become a lot more confident on lead and this felt like I was back to square one. But as the day went some of my confidence returned. I was determined to make sure that I did not lose this confidence so my next training session which was at Calshot Activity Centre would address this. Calshot is the closest place to where I live with worthwhile indoor lead walls. I took Dave Macleod's advice on how to overcome the fear of falling and through the session I slowly took bigger and bigger falls until I was happy taking seven meter whippers off the barrel wall (2010).

Even with the extended time off of climbing my finger is still endanger of re-injury so to reduce the chance of this happening I have had to cut my sessions shorter than my usual sessions and have been adding an extra day to my rest periods to stop myself over working the injured area and as of yet the finger is still felling strong and I feel that I am back to the same strength as I was before my injury.
 

To start with I would like to discuss my injury. It is not the first time I have gained a pulley injury to one of my fingers. It occurred during a training session at my local wall when I was working a problem which involved using an aggressive crimp on my right hand. The injury did not just occur suddenly but throughout the session the frontal area of the proximal phalanx became tenderer. This tenderness did not disappear over a week and the feeling was the same as I have had when I previously ruptured my pullies. These are a type of overuse injury and 40% of overuse injuries occur in the fingers (Hörst, 2003).

I faced one big problem with this injury in the fact that I had 2 rounds of SIBL coming up over the following month and the way to recover from this injury is rest. But there are ways to shorten the length of time spent to recover. There are 3 things I did regularly to speed up my rate of recovery: The first was cold treatment, Dave Macleod has talked about this on his and explained it better than I could o here is a link to it:

http://onlineclimbingcoach.blogspot.com/2007/06/finger-injury-treatment-videocast.html 

The second is stretching the damaged are which increases the blood flow and increasing the blood flow is what promotes recovery, the last is a tip I got from my phsyo/climbing friend which is to use cross the grain rubbing for five minutes to break down the scar tissue that is forming in the injured area. So for my A2 pulley I would rub up and down the front of my proximal phalanx because the pulley runs around the front of it.

During the 2 rounds my finger felt better but was not fully healed. In the first of the 2 rounds I managed to do well and was only inhibited on 2 of the routes that I tried. The second round did not go so well, I chose to retire after trying 10 routes due to the injury. After the 3rd round of SIBL I took a month completely off climbing to recover. My advice if you get a pulley injury is to take a break from climbing and use the 3 tips I have stated earlier to reduce the time off from climbing.

With the New Year I thought that there was no better time to start a climbing training blog. It is especially good timing for me as I have just returned to climbing after a month off, recovering from a ruptured A2 pulley on my Right ring finger. Hopes for my climbing this year are to really push myself and be climbing in the mid 7's on sport, gain confidence on trad climbing and position within the top 20 in the Southern Indoor Bouldering Lead: http://www.sibl.co.uk/.