Onwards and eastwards.

Preparing to leave london for the East.
We haven't needed the jackets much since then.

As ever, its been ages since I last posted on this blog. I don't know why that continues to surprise me; its becoming a habit.  In the six or so weeks since I last wrote I've had time to reflect: on what I've achieved so far, and what I might achieve in the months and years ahead. Anyone who knows me will already know that forward planning is not my strong suit.  The thought of partnership in a law firm really started to frighten me when I was asked to formulate a plan for what the next five years would look like. Five years! I struggle to imagine what I'll be doing five months - or even five weeks - ahead.  

The one exception to this is climbing.  For some reason when it comes to climbing training I become a planning fiend. Spreadsheets, programmes, planned workouts, grade targets - I can't get enough of it.  I first started planning my climbing training in earnest a couple of years ago and have been following periodised training cycles of one sort or another ever since.  A cycle might be a few weeks long, or a few months; it might focus on strength, endurance, power, rehab from injury, aerobic fitness or a combination of all these things.  In the three months leading up to my trip to the Dolomites in September, I followed a pretty rigorous programme of cardio fitness, core strength and climbing endurance.  Having laid down a foundation of bouldering strength, two months before departure I did my first routes session at a climbing wall, managing eight 10m routes of moderate difficulty in three hours.  With two weeks to go and after a few more sessions I could comfortably climb 29 such routes in around two and a half hours. There is something strangely satisfying about seeing incremental improvement through numbers. 

The training paid off - Dave and I climbed The Comici Dimai route, 500m, E3 5c on the North face of Cima Grande in a continuous 17 hour round trip. Waking at 2.30am and leaving the car at 3am, we walked to the base through thick mist and total darkness (via several unintentional detours) and started climbing at 6am.  We topped out at 4pm, 17 pitches and several unintentional route-finding detours later and then spent another 4 hours descending via a lot of scrambling, numerous abseils and several unintentional detours. (There's a theme here - the drive home through Italy, Austria, Germany and France took 16 hours and several unintentional etc and so on).  Cima Grande felt like a turning point in my climbing career; way harder than anything I had ever attempted before, I genuinely did not know whether I was good enough, strong enough and fit enough to climb it.  Although considered a moderate climb by today's elite standards it felt right at the edge of what I was capable of at that moment: even though I have redpointed F7a, the 7th pitch on the Comici - 40m of overhanging F6b+ climbing at 2700m altitude - was probably the hardest and most sustained  pitch of climbing I have ever done.  Pitch 15, which we named "the unprotectable traverse" was definitely the most frightening pitch I've ever seconded - goodness knows how it felt for Dave to lead it - when I joined him at the belay he'd gone very quiet.  All in all though it felt like we belonged on the route. We completed it within guidebook time; we were up to the challenge rather than in over our heads.  The endless cycles of training, the running, stretching, dead-hanging, sweating in a climbing wall on a thursday night, cycling, resting, the not drinking, the endless planning, counting calories to hit my 70kg performance weight - it had all been worthwhile. 

As I write this in a small temporary flat in Hong Kong I am feeling very lazy indeed. Aside form a couple of valedictory pre-work bouldering sessions in London I've climbed nothing hard since - Cima Grande marked the definite end of one period of my climbing career.  Within a few weeks I had left the UK and moved 6,000 miles across the world to start my new job in Hong Kong. I am currently - and have been for some weeks - in what is known in technical training circles as a "transition period" - the time between ending one performance phase and starting the next major training cycle.  Or as my friend Ted the cyclist would call it, the "cake eating phase". In my case it is Dim Sum, rather than cake, and lots of it. My climbing gear is packed away in a crate that has hopefully cleared customs and is waiting for me in a warehouse somewhere. I probably won't unpack it until mid November, by which point I'll have had over a month off - the longest non-injury related climbing break I can remember. 

It's not like I've got nothing else to do - we've only been here a week and Hong Kong already seems like a place of limitless possibilities and opportunities. I'll have to write a separate post about our life here so far as there is simply too much to report in a post which is ostensibly about climbing and which - lets be honest - is so boring you've probably stopped reading altogether. Unless you're one of my hardcore pre-work arch session climbing buddies.  Nick, Jon and Dave: I salute you all. Nee-hau!