Breaking down.

Its all training: another attempt on "Barn Wall Traverse" (F7a?), Hay-on-Wye. 

When Anita decided to run the London Marathon earlier this year she sought advice from one of her old school friends, herself an enthusiastic (and successful) runner. The advice was essentially this: doing the running is the easy part. The challenge is staying injury-free during the training.  Wise words indeed.

This year I've been trying to heed that advice.  Now I am working less, I can commit more time to training.  A lack of training time is no longer the problem. On the contrary my problem now is the risk of training too much.   It sounds obvious - but I have to keep reminding myself - that I'm not as young as I used to be.  At the ripe age of 35 I don't feel particularly old (although someone at work complimented me on my 'salt n pepper' beard the other day).  But I have noticed that I don't recover as well - or as quickly - as I used to.  When I was an 18 year old student at the University of Bristol I trained with the boat club six days a week (and twice on Tuesdays and Thursdays).  I would punish myself in the weights room, on the rowing machine and out on the water day in day out and still managed to study a fair few hours a day for my law degree and fit in the requisite amount of student socialising.  Looking back I remember feeling tired in the evenings (sometimes too tired to go clubbing on a wednesday night - shock!) but I managed to go three years without any serious training injuries or long term illness.  When I look back on that time it seems like I was invincible. (I also consumed two bowls of sugar puffs and a full english breakfast every day for a year without putting any weight on - those were the days). 

Fifteen years on things are very different and I am slowly learning to adapt.  I have had on and off elbow tendonitis niggles for a couple of years, as well as a few minor finger tendon injuries.  I've realised that if I do a hard session at the indoor wall I need to rest for 48 hours - two sessions on consecutive days leaves me nursing sore elbows for days afterwards. I can generally only manage three climbing sessions a week, sometimes only two if they are particularly hard sessions.  I need to stretch - a lot - and I need to work my antagonistic muscles (the 'push' muscles that are typically overlooked during a hard session 'pulling' on the climbing wall) at least twice a week.  Add in my on-going leg strengthening exercises, a couple of 5k runs each week and half an hour on the bike twice a day for my commute to work, and it adds up to more training time than I perhaps realise.

I've had a mixed climbing year in 2012 - I think Ive managed only around twenty days on rock in the whole year, mainly as a result of the terrible UK weather.  I've trained quite hard though, and spent probably somewhere close to 300 hours in indoor climbing walls since January.  About a month ago it finally started to catch up with me and now I feel like my body is breaking down.  An irritating cough in late September refused to shift and finally developed into a full-on weekend of flu (the proper pounding-head-shivering-uncontrollably-joints-on-fire kind, rather than the wimpy sniffling man-flu sort) at the end of October.  Annoyingly this coincided with a weekend break to Valencia, including two days' climbing on Costa Blanca limestone. I managed only three relatively easy pitches, including one on which I had to rest halfway whilst my shivers subsided - even though it was 28 degrees at the time.

My GP now tells me I have a chest infection and has put me on antibiotics.  I feel permanently out of breath and am going for a chest x-ray in a few days' time (my history with Dickensian chest infections isn't a good one).  I'm taking it as easy as I can - 9 hours a night in bed, plenty of rest - but even taking Lara for a 45 minute stroll around the park leaves me feeling wasted.   Not being able to exercise is a thoroughly frustrating experience.  

Fortunately sitting around feeling sorry for myself isn't really an option. Today Lara and I have had breakfast; been to the park; had coffee and second breakfast in a cafe; bought some bananas (real); been on a shopping trip (imaginary); done some colouring; read some books; and had a cup of tea.  And its only 11.30am.   On reflection maybe its not the climbing training that's doing me in.