MegèveSki

Slightly more sensible climbing

I spent another couple of hours at The Castle this evening doing some much more appropriate climbing than the 5As that I was failing to climb on Friday. This time I climbed with one of the girls who'd been on the course with me and, since we were both around the same level, it was much more sensible. It's not that I didn't enjoy the challenge of the 4Cs and 5As that I kept failing to climb on Friday, it's more that by climbing mostly 4Bs and being happy to do some 4As for a bit of a rest and some 4Cs to push ourselves a little we could work on technique much more and we both managed to last the 2 hours that we had until the centre closed for the evening.

I certainly learned some things on Friday (many to do with how little technique I had!) but today I felt I was able to consolidate my technique much more. We also found out something that's probably fairly obvious, not all 4Bs (or whatever) are the same or, more accurately, they don't all require the same set of techniques. A couple of the more challenging ones became easier when we realised what the "theme" was; for example, one route that we climbed seemed to require several instances of the same move, a double handed grip with a rock over onto the new higher leg, and then, once comfortable on the new leg, a reach for the next hand hold.

Hopefully I'll get some more practice in next week. But my arms and hands are already starting to hurt from today's session; it took until the following morning for them to hurt after Friday's...