Inspiration

LEGEND.

(pic courtesy of Nike / oscarpistorius.com)

I've been thinking a lot recently about climbing performance.  Specifically, just how far I could push my level if I really applied myself.  I've been experimenting with structured training plans and working on my weaknesses. I've taken the time to stretch properly and am looking after my body a bit more. In July I stopped drinking alcohol and have lost eleven pounds of body fat in the eight weeks since (aside from all the other advantages - but that's another blog post).  But I've come to realise that the final ingredient is not physical, it's mental.  Its all about how hard I am prepared to try.  

Thankfully there's been a fair amount of inspiration this year - what a summer of sport it has been.  When the Olympics finished in mid-August, I didn't think it could get any better. I was just grateful I was on holiday in Spain when it came to an end - being out in the sun climbing every day with Lara and Anita certainly helped deflect my sense of loss.  But then we came back to London and the paralympics kicked off.  Wow.  As Channel 4 said: "Thanks for the warm-up". I think the Channel 4 coverage of the Paralympics has been brilliant.  In fact, it was a Channel 4 advert for wheelchair rugby (aka 'murder-ball') that really got my attention - two minutes of slow-motion high-impact crashes between people in wheelchairs, followed by various players listing their injuries from playing the sport (broken hands, fractured wrists, cracked ribs and one player who broke his jaw and fractured his eye socket during the course of a game).  It ends with Kylie Grimes, the only female player on the otherwise all-male GB team saying "how bad can it really get? I've already broken my back."  From that moment on Anita and I were transfixed.

To be clear: I was blown away by some of the achievements on display at the Olympics. Mo Farah running the final 400m of his 10,000m race in 57 seconds (my personal best for a single 400m lap is somewhere north of 1 minute 20), or watching the women's cycling pursuit team breaking their own world record in their heat, and then again in the semi-final, and then AGAIN in the final.  But seeing a Chinese Swimmer with no arms winning a gold medal in the backstroke (defeating several swimmers with at least one arm and a couple with two); a kenyan man with one leg jumping 1.85m in the high jump, or a team of blind football players winning a penalty shoot-out against a non-blind goalkeeper (something Ashley Cole and the rest of the England football team have yet to master) was just mind blowing.  Watching wheelchair basketball last friday at the North Greenwich Arena left me open mouthed at the way in which the players moved the ball from one end of the court to another - marking, passing, dribbling and shooting all whilst piloting wheelchairs at full speed. 

The biggest revelation for me was realising that the paralympics is not about disabled people being allowed to take part in sport - this is sport at an elite level, a level 99.9% of the able-bodied population (myself included) will never get close to.  Ellie Simmonds, who is a dwarf, can swim 100m freestyle in less than the time it take for me to swim half that distance.  Johnny Peacock, a track sprinter with one prosthetic leg, holds the 100m record at 10.8 seconds. He's probably the fourth quickest sprinter (able bodied or disabled) in Great Britain.  David Weir has entered the London wheelchair marathon five times.  He managed fourth once, despite suffering two punctures - every other time he's come first.  At the London Paralympics he won gold medals - destroying all comers - in the 800m, 1500m, 5000m and marathon.  His strength, athleticism and sheer determination are staggering. 

Finally, what to say about Oscar Pistorius? Tonight Anita declared that she is in love with him (I quote: "he makes prosthetic legs look sexy"). I think I may even have a bit of a man crush.  Born with only one of the two main bones in each of his lower legs, his parents were told a few days after his birth that he must have both legs amputated below the knee. Despite this, he excelled at every sport he tried - swimming, rugby, tennis, athletics.  At 15 he ran the 100m at a school sports day. His dad later realised that his time was over half a second faster than the then world record for double amputees.  He went on to win almost everything he entered at multiple Paralympics, including the 100m, 200m, 400m, 4x100m relay at Athens and Beijing.  When he was beaten in the 200m in London it was the first time he has lost a race in nine years (he went on to win the 400m and 4x100m relay).  He's even made the final of the 4x100m relay at the London Olympics, beating a number of 'regular' athletes in the process.  

The efforts of the able-bodied athletes at the olympics at times left me speechless. But some of the feats achieved at the Paralympics made me shout at the television in astonishment.  Blind long-jumpers, sprinters and football players, one-legged table tennis players and high jumpers on crutches, swimmers who swim 50m in under 30s despite starting form a sitting dive because they have no legs.  Don't tell me that David Weir, Ellie Simmonds, Johnny Peacock or any of these athletes are disabled.  They have more ability than I ever will.  It makes me want to go to the gym, to the climbing wall, to put my trainers on and start running - just to see what I am capable of.  As Oscar Pistorius says: "our disabilities do not make us disabled.  Our abilities make us able."  True inspiration.

Hoy mission accomplished

A classic, right there.

This weekend, with my friend Dave, I climbed the Old Man of Hoy.  Situated off the coast of the Orkney Islands, themselves off the far north coast of Scotland, it is one of the UK's most famous and iconic rock climbs.  First climbed in the late 1960s by a team led by Chris Bonnington (an ascent which was broadcast live on the BBC) it offers 137m of adventurous climbing over five pitches up a sandstone sea stack in a wild and exposed setting.  Traditional British climbing at its very best.

Dave and I have been trying to work out when we first came up with the idea of climbing the Old Man of Hoy.  I know it was something I've wanted to do for a while, but always dismissed as too difficult, too far away, or maybe just too improbable.  But earlier this year we dared to think it was possible, and put a weekend aside in the diary.  All we needed was a decent weather window, but as the summer developed into one of the wettest on record, that seemed increasingly unlikely.  Through July and August we browsed guidebooks and searched the internet, researching the climb for tips on success.  Pitch 2 would be the crux - an overhanging off-width crack, too wide for fist jams, not quite wide enough to get your whole body inside.  The sort of crack that requires a peculiarly English climbing technique which you could call "full body climbing" but is usually referred to as thrutching. Right up Dave's street, I thought.  Thankfully he agreed early on to lead the crux pitch, which meant I got to climb the other main feature of the climb - an exposed corner pitch right at the top of the stack. 

Only as the weekend drew closer did we realise that the climbing itself might well be the least of our difficulties.  In fact, we realised that the crux of the climb would just be leaving home in the first place.  Here's what we learned:

1. There's always an emotional cost

Somehow, through nothing more complicated than utter incompetence on my part, I managed to schedule the climb for the same weekend as my niece Lucy's second birthday party.  I'm not quite sure how I thought this particular clash would rectify itself, I suppose deep down I always assumed we wouldn't get decent weather for the climb or would otherwise have to reschedule.  As the weekend drew clearer it dawned on me that something would have to give.  A couple of fraught phone calls with my sister and mum later and I was still agonising. In the end the climb won.  I'm not particularly proud of myself.   Meanwhile Dave was experiencing his own difficulties, trying to explain to his wife and young daughter that despite the marginal weather this really was something worth abandoning them for a weekend for.  Dave, who did his PhD in british mountaineering history, pointed out that many of the really successful pioneering british climbers of the 60s, 70s and 80s - Boardman, Whillans, Tasker, Haston - were often, on a personal level, total bastards.  Maybe that's what's holding me back in my climbing - I'm too nice! I'm not sure my sister would agree.  Its also worth remembering that three of the four climbers I've just listed were dead by their early thirties.

2. Expect the unexpected

The week leading up to the climb was fraught. We both spent hours scouring the internet, looking for favourable weather forecasts.  We planned our route, checked ferry schedules and agonised over precisely what gear to take.  Eventually we were ready and I took the train to Dave's house in Sevenoaks for the drive north.  Except Dave's car wouldn't start. His protests that "its normally so reliable" and "I only drove it last week" didn't help.  I couldn't believe our adventure could be over before it got started.  45 minutes later a friendly AA man explained that it wasn't the car that didn't work, but the key.  Spare key in the ignition, car started, and we were on our way. 

3. You need drive to succeed

A long, long drive. 730 miles in fact.  We left Dave's house at 7.45pm and arrived in Thurso, on the north coast of Scotland, exactly twelve hours later. We drove continuously for twelve hours, taking two hour shifts at the wheel and snatching the odd twenty minutes of sleep in the passenger seat when tiredness overcame us.  It's amazing what you can find to talk about on a drive like that - which is the most manly variety of crisps (wheat crunchies); the appropriate time of day to drink espresso (any time after 11am); and what can properly be considered to be the "classical" method of opening a banana.  We also munched our way through bags of haribo, liquorice allsorts and chocolate eclairs.  Combined with the multiple cans of red bull I think I consumed my entire year's allowance of sugar in one night.  Utterly exhausted and desperate for something healthy to eat on arrival we headed straight for Thurso's best greasy caff and tucked into a pair of enormous cooked breakfasts. 

4. The smallest weather window is enough

Our pre-trip meteorological studies told us that two huge rain systems were heading right for the Orkney Isles on our chosen weekend.  The first was due to hit on Friday and scheduled to last all day Saturday, the second would hit on Sunday evening.  We planned to climb on Sunday as we'd need all day Saturday just to get onto Hoy.  Although it wasn't raining when we arrived in Thurso on Saturday morning, by the time we were on the noon ferry to the Orkney mainland it was drizzling consistently and by the time the second ferry deposited us on Hoy is was hammering with rain.  We found our way to the Rackwick hostel, revitalised with a quick cup of tea and headed out to have a look at the Old Man itself.  The signs weren't good - everything was wet, and getting wetter.  I couldn't see how it could possibly be dry enough to climb by the following day. But as Dave pointed out, the weather was for once behaving exactly as predicted.  On Sunday we left the hostel 5am.  An hour and a half by head torch brought us to the base of the stack where we geared up and made nervous small talk.  By some sort of meteorological miracle, our weather window materialised.  By pitch three the clouds were clearing and five hours after starting I found myself romping up the superb final pitch in blazing sunshine.  90 minutes and three abseils later (including one exhilarating 60m free hanging final abseil) we were lying on our backs in the sun struggling to believe we had actually done it.  An hour later it was raining again.  

The climb was everything we hoped it would be - varied climbing, tricky in parts, with the added spice of damp sandy conditions on the crux, and a generous dose of history thrown in for good measure.  Dave dispatched the E1 5b crux pitch with consummate ease and the final pitch might be one of the best I have ever climbed - delicate climbing up an exposed corner with the waves of the north atlantic crashing into the base of the climb 130m below.  What's next? I don't know. I'm told there are some decent multi-pitch classics in Yosemite valley.  Its only a four hour drive form San Francisco. And the weather in California is so much more reliable than Scotland.