Breakthrough
Recently we’ve been psyched. Psyched to climb harder. Our frequent visits to Hueco have exposed us to people from all over the world climbing hard! April and I have been wondering what we could do, how we can train so we can get strong like the many climbers sending the classics all around us. “It’s time to up the ante,” as April put it. So, over the last few weeks we increased our intensity of training. We started pushing our limits more than ever. Check out Ben Moon’s advice www.moonclimbing.com for some ideas that we think really work!
While training or climbing over the past few weeks we both kept asking each other, “Hey, do I look stronger now? Am I climbing harder after all this training?” For sure, yeah, we noticed the improvement in our abilities but we’ve only been linking and doing individual moves on problems at or above our limits. For example, I recently tried “Right Martini V12” and for a first time ever, did all the moves. I can’t tell how far off I am from a send but I can definitely tell that I’m stronger than ever and progressing every week.
Last weekend I managed to send “Dirty Martini on the Rocks V12” but that climb kinda sucks and it is probably more like V9. April repeated “Baby Martini V6” while Iaughing and then nearly sent the awesome “Big Iron on His Hip V7.” After a couple other pretty cool accomplishments that weekend we still were not satisfied and we craved harder sends.
Well, today, I think we got what we wanted.
Paul: Sent “Predator V10” 1st go (worked out the full sequence last weekend) and “ V6” (I could never figure out how to do this one previously). Repeated “Daily Dick Dose V7” (warmed up the fingers for Predator), fell off “Double Vision V7” several times and tweaked something! And repeated “Big Iron on His Hip V7” to test out the tweak. Yep, definitely tweaked something in the left hand. No more climbing today.
April: Cranked out her best climbing day….E V E R. Decided to try out “Daily Dick Dose” just cause we were there for me to warm up, and then went ahead and promptly SENT the damn thing. A Hueco classic and her first V7! We then moved on to the Martini Roof and she laced up for “Big Iron on His Hip V7”, a much better climb in my opinion that is harder and much longer, and the climb which she had been projecting the last few weekends. She fell three times at the last move, fingers an inch away from the finish hold. Then rested. Then sent. April’s second V7.
Stay tuned…the sending train is just gettin’ started.
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