Power is nothing without endurance?!

Since coming back from Fontainebleau I've not been out much mainly because my middle left-hand finger was feeling pretty sore after pulling hard on the starting pocket of Carnage. I went up to Fairies Chest and did Pixie Tits from standing - which has a pretty scary mantle above a crap landing (even with the 2 pads I'd lugged up there) but the hot weather and sore finger meant I couldn't manage the sit start. The next day I had a sociable evening at Caley with Matt, Johnny and Dom but didn't do anything hard and Matt missed the pads falling off the top of the Pinch and hurt his foot which looked very nasty.

Escaping the Royal Wedding I went to Guisecliff armed with my copy of the new Yorkshire (moorland and esoterica) Gritstone Bouldering guide. This was great as it's easier to identify where all the boulders are in relation to each other than it was from a handful of printouts from yorkshiregrit.com. It started to rain when I got there and was a bit humid but I had a few goes on Pok-a-Tok and went up to Trust - which looked great but I wasn't sure how to pull on.

I was at Matt's for his birthday BBQ on Wed that week and had drunkenly agreed it might be time to go sport climbing. Matt txted me on sunday to make sure I had remembered and so we headed to Troller's Gill on Monday afternoon. For the last few years I've only been bouldering so it's almost 4 years since I actually tried to climb anything hard on a rope and since then I've got a lot stronger but have no stamina at all. I thought it would be a bit of a depressing experience and I was right. After Matt put the clips in the Jim Grin (7a/+) by pulling on the draws and resting on every bolt I had a go on top rope. Predictably up to about 3 bolts I was thinking "this is piss all the holds are huge" then I got pumped and suddenly I couldn't pull on anything. I managed to do all the moves with a lot of rests but didn't really recover even after I was on the ground for a while. I did go up it again on top rope (again with several rests) but wasn't feeling recovered at all. The next day I felt totally broken in a completely different way to how I feel after a hard bouldering session.

I guess that I need to work on my power-endurance (I've never been very inspired by long stamina routes and most UK sport is short and cruxy) or go climbing at the right hand end of Raven Tor if I want to improve my sport climbing grade. Unfortunately training power by working lots of hard boulder problems is fun but training power endurance means pain! I knew this would be the case as I've been bouldering several times when women who've done 8b were trying the same problem and it's obvious a) that they aren't very powerful but b) they can apply the same amount of power every single go for many more attempts than I could - which clearly illustrates you don't have to be able to pull *that* hard to climb power-endurance 8s...

In an attempt to get a bit more volume to my climbing I went up to High Crag on Ilkey Moor and ticked 3 3s, a 4, a 5, 3 5+s a 6A and a 6B+ in about an hour but then got sucked into the "classic of the crag" a 7A+ on slopers which felt desperate in the heat (and I think I might have been eliminating an undercut that is allowed). I tried to focus on doing easy problems with the minimum amount of effort which was hard on some of the dirty top-outs!

Yesterday I went back to Guisecliff armed with video beta but the undercut needed for Pok-a-Tok was filthy and I didn't have a proper brush to clean it. I went up to Trust and tried pulling on with the high foot method I'd seen in a video on UKB but this was so contorted that I needed to bounce off my left foot to get it off the pad. I then tried rocking up off a lower left foot hold without "french starting" off the pad. Eventually I could do this and hold the side pull and 3 goes later (including an exciting out of control fall bouncing off the edge of the pads and tumbling down the slope) I'd done it. This gets 7B but it's a bit odd as I found getting off the ground without bouncing off the pad is the hardest bit. If there was one good foothold just a couple of inches above the ground to start on it'd be a lot easier. Certainly if you were tall enough to pull on 1 move higher (which I could do off 2 stacked pads) it'd be a gift for 7B (Matt are you reading this?!)

Here's a picture anyway