Day 8 - Downside Up

Wait...what?!

Today is a Sunday, so with most of our chores out of the way yesterday, we had some time to get some exercise in.  

Since returning from Fontainebleau in September, our climbing opportunities have been infrequent.  The weather makes things difficult to arrange as Autumn creeps in (however late, as it has been the last couple of years), and what little momentum we did retain soon dissipated as Bluez's illness took hold. 

Of course, it's taken us a while to pick ourselves up following his passing, but now we're ready to start getting our climbing back up to scratch.  So we went to Creation in Moseley for a bouldering session earlier this week, and followed that up with a roped climbing session this afternoon. 

As it turns out, we're really out of shape!  We're climbing pretty well, but our fingers are weak and we're struggling with (lack of) endurance.   I say we, I mean me, mainly.   Anna definitely did better than I.  I did all the moves on a few of the climbs, but only after resting on the rope, mid climb.  That's not like me, I rarely dog a route (this means that rather than climbing entirely unaided, you "hang-dog", or rest on the rope once or more).   To be clear, it is a failure - the aim being to climb from the bottom to the top of the route without weighting the rope at any time.   

I dogged a few routes today, although they were all 6a+-6c, which is pretty hard for me.  Anna did quite a few of them cleanly, although she wasn't always flashing them (climbing them cleanly on her first attempt). 

Anyway our plan is to climb a couple of times a week for the next couple of months, which should get us into good shape for sport climbing in Spain in March!

For today's photo, we threw a few moves in the bouldering area after we'd finished on routes.  We were really tired, but managed to catch a couple of pics where it didn't really show. ;o)

Anna insisted I use the photo above, even though I didn't take it (it was on my phone!).   I think she just didn't want me to use her pic.   I don't know why not, check it out;

Rock chick

She always looks cool when she's climbing!

Also, I'm just going to have to throw this one in.  Notice neither of my feet are on anything, and yet they're not dropping...witness the core strength!   

Look, no feet

I bet you don't even know how hard it is to do that.  It's well hard!  

'Tis so... :op