Week 2 Training Round-up, or Give Me More of Those Juicy Hot Sweet Flappers

I've been thinking, lately, about two art projects I did sometime back in my pre-school days.  One involved tearing long strips of orange construction paper, smearing them over with Elmer's Glue and sticking them onto styrofoam cups to make shaggy jack-o-lantern faces.  In the other, I ripped little pieces of thin cotton and canvas to glue onto poster boards for texture.  The emphasis of my reveries is on the sensations of tearing things-- things that I ripped up for some lofty goal like art or self-expression.  These days I still tear things up for reasons equally as nebulous.  The sensation of skin peeling back off your hand, incidentally, isn't too far removed from the way ripping construction paper or canvas feels.  It hurts a hell of a lot more, but that comes a second or two after the feeling of it actually tearing away from the rest of your tissues.

I've said it many times before, but there's just not a much better representation of what climbing is all about than a fat, bloody flapper waving around on your crankin' finger.  For example, no matter how many hamburgers you throw against a rock, the rock will never break.  Hamburgers don't get back up and give it another go when they get spit off their project and busted all up.  Also they can't do heel-hooks. Climbers, on the other hand, sometimes climb so hard the skin on their hands curls up, bleeds and falls off.  Climbers don't break the rock, but we also don't usually get completely broken by it either.

The point being, if you have flappers on your hand you are not a hamburger.  It is possible that you are a climber if you have flappers on your hand, but further testing may be required to make a definitive claim.

Exhibits A and B: photographic evidence that I am not a 1/2 pound char-grilled angus patty:

 Awwwh Sookie!

 I got this puppy Thursday afternoon bouldering at the U of A Rec Center. This is my second week of trying to stick Eric Horst's 10-week 5.12-training regimen.  The first four weeks are all about mileage to build up endurance.  So, this week I hit the gym on Tuesday,  but only put up about six routes due to the unfortunate time constraints of being a full-time grad student and working.  Thursday I cranked at the Rec Center doing lots of long traverses and trying to crank out as many problems as possible. You can see what happened.

Wednesday, though, I went to The Loft for the Reel Rock Tour to re-up on my rock-horny.  Jesus.  That's all I can say about that.  Sicker 'n hell!!!

It'd be hard to ask for more inspiration than that. I was so pumped to hit the Rec Center on Thursday I climbed until my finger burst.  I think I've written about this before, but my dream, the idea that really makes my heart quake in the dark hours of the early morning, is to climb so hard that I explode.  Not pop, like a sausage, but to climb like a meteor in reverse, moving so fast that the friction of my skin against the atmosphere and of my hands against the rock creates so much heat that I burst into flaming plasma and shoot into space.  You'll be able to find me, if I ever stop, heel-hooking a meteor somewhere out by the Horse Head Nebula.

Now, and this is a little bit of a spoiler if you haven't seen the tour, what I just said was way cooler than what Dean Potter says about what he does in the tour.  Even if what I DO is a lot less cool than what he DO (hint: things get really good at about 2:10).

Yesterday, Saturday, I turned back in to the gym-- with heavily taped fingers --to, again, try and crank out as many problems with as little rest as possible.  Joe joined me after I'd been going hard for about 40 minutes or so and already had a decent pump.  The gym held a comp on Thursday night so there are sick, sweet problems all over the place-- a bunch of which Dustin put up.  I gave as many as I could a solid go and felt pretty strong, but realized that even with what I felt like was a good showing I probably wouldn't have even placed in the comp.

  To top things off I had Joe time me on two sets of hangboard pyramids right at the end.  I managed to hang on some tiny, tiny crimps (4 seconds) and even if the first pyramid didn't feel too hard the second round drove me right into the ground.

Here's a video of what I aspire to on the hangboard:



Got training tips? Pictures of sick-ass flappers? Brutal hangboard workouts? Tell me all about them in the comments sections below.