I'm a boulderer based in the big smoke, on the eternal journey for more strength and less weight. Here you'll find a collection of the variety of techniques that I've tried and used in that search.

Wednesday, 23 March 2011

That Fresh Feeling

I can't believe it has taken me well over a year to get back to enjoying climbing, ridiculous. I woke up this morning having trained 3 days in a row and the body felt good, as I lay in bed sipping on coffee and staring out an open window I realised that it was warm not cold air coming through. The tide is turning and limestone season can't be far off? Is it here already? I started flicking through my diary checking days off, getting psyched to get out and get crushing. I've got a list as long as my arm of things I want to get done on Limestone and in North Wales this spring/summer and a new rota I'm moving on to at work gives me four days on four days off, so plenty of time to get out on rock.

In the meantime I've got to hit the plastic....

As I've been off the scene for a while this vid may have been seen already by most of you, still got me psyched (even if it does seem to involve a bunch of old men salivating at the chance of catching a grope of a pre-pubescent boy as he falls off a boulder problem).

Paul Robinson: PlasTic'n from Prana Living on Vimeo.




To the wall...

Monday, 21 March 2011

Psyche

Psyche is a strange thing, for me it comes and goes with relative ease but normally always lingers somewhere in the background. Often it'll remind me it's there through a quick trawl of climbing videos or a glance at UKBouldering, but sometimes it just seems to disappear completely. The last year and a bit it has evaded me, I've had no psyche, nothing - I've flatlined. In a year and a half I managed to drag myself outside to climb once, to Wales for one weekend, I ticked a few font 7a's and then drove home psyched... to... well... get home again. Granted many a time I've blogged on here, often with some title saying something like 'I'm back', but not once has that blog been written with any psyche behind it.

Until now...

I'm pleased to say the psyche has well and truly returned, I'm back training, back on the campus board and back on the Beastmaker, but most importantly I'm back climbing and loving it. I've been training properly for two weeks now and my base level seems to have got much higher than it once was. A solid year of training in 2009 seems to really improved my finger strength. My first couple of sessions on the Beastmaker saw me crank out full sets of repeaters on the front two and back two on the small pockets and two full sets of encores on the back two on the small pockets. This is a much greater level of finger strength than I ever had before and can only improve as I hit my new regime hard. This last week I've managed one campus session and 4 Beastmaker sesssions, that can only be done with a good dose of psyche...

Bring on the training.