Mad as a lorry that fella, I thought to myself. Then everything went back to how it was before...
Through the shotgun loch paths, over stone walls through trees. Take the long drag up through the dip where Giant Hogweed grows in summer. The crunch of frosted grass leaves you in the hands of a reign of icicles & solid mud before the crag proper fills your vision & the ground behaves. Without conscious thought, I settled under my own Latino Chrome arranging kit, kicking sheep shit down the steep incline into the sea loch. A brew later, I was set for tooling all day, & what a day it's been. A few hundred meters of steep traversing all told, setting myself headgame technical problems to escape up...then some more overlap roofwork, some impossibilities, then more traversing.
Am I trying to get good at going sideways? Do I secretly aspire towards becoming a sideways beach dancer with castanets?
By midday I was down to a ragged old T-shirt, trying wild footless campus moves on steel claws, barefoot but for my Merrels, attempting speedy triple twist one point contacts, then climbing slow one armers, breathing calm, throwing balance off centre, this way & that to learn more; confirm this & that, & undo any established form that crept into my engraming, keeping intuitive movement free & purposeful, going up against the borders, where nobody is master & questioning them. It's a voyage. A foolish man defines movement, & within that definition - he sets his own limitations. The motivational rage for climbing everything hard, that had me by the ears long ago as an intemperate youth, has levelled out in comparison to the way I apply myself today. The relevancy has almost been dealt with & climbing well has long since taken priority. If you climb well, climbing hard becomes in simplicity, a by-product of your actions, rather than an achievable target on which you set your sights. To that end, things become alot easier when you don't expect to win, you abandon the masterpiece you are trying to create & slip into the real masterpiece. Anyways... on with the blether...the sun all the while was slowly creeping into my cocoon of shadowed cold air, my protected world beneath a stone umbrella of enormous overbite.
By midday on the other other hand, I was getting clatty, I had more dust in my skin than a hoover bag, more grit in my mouth than John Wayne, electric hair & an empty flask. After a quick psychological gear herding session, I found also, that after several highball dismounts from the 3rd overlap of LC, I also owned a singlular, highly dense entity that carried a vague resemblence to lots of little independant apricots...Even the food was having a good time, see. By midday I was also happily wearing several fine abrasions & a numb hoof, which I'd given myself by deftly swinging the tappy end of the axe into my ankle while wrestling an out-of-control figure 4 contortion. Am I an anarchist if I fling one of my DMM Anarchists down the crag? By 3pm I had tendons resembling strung ferry mooring ropes & the dog had also joined in with the electric hair thing. The cold shadowed air was moistening in the heat of the day & orange flies had started to gang up on me in legions. The sheep shit was on a nasal march as well. I was sweating lactic acid through a body searching every anatomical niche for a recognizible sugar count.
Dream steep - climb steeper
The first person I came across back in the dusky village was 3ft tall, female, & enquired in a helium voice: Hey mister, can I clap yer dug?...
The Coire will be here for later aye, as will the juice bar - & don't break the rollerskate again if you're taking it....maaaaaan.
This was a personal reply to John on the comments involved with the Storms of Light entry, but a few phone calls have insisted it should be a post in it's own right. Toolering photos up soon.
°°°°°°°°°
At 2/26/2007 5:03 PM, 
John Hunterâ
http://www.videoservicecorp.com/images/MightyDucks%20D2.jpg
Thats D2 for ya!
Never tried this Dry tooling lark, maybe the old workshop here could go at about D1, its easy, verticle, scary landings tho.
How about a grade for Drytooled Bouldering? Puncture proof mat anyone? Fancy spotting me? Just watch out for the feet.
Your man Finn speaks in Code, I dont understand that boy. Its not London, how can a space cost so much?
Now, if you get bored, find me a job, design, creative, outdoors, well paid? its a fruitless search tho. Ive tried.
At 2/27/2007 7:10 PM, ※Sgian Dubh ※â
Those spaces he's talking about John are tanker rig construction berths, not for a Ford Escort. The fella bought them for 1 million each & without having ever used them, sold them on a year later to the Saudi/Sudan crew for 8 mill each. No bad for sitting on your ass for 12 months aye.
Desperate to get into Coire Lagan for a session...got a few more bolts to add, 3 sport lines to redpoint, one is totally nails, & a back-log of great boulders to complete, but its howling here again, the collie lacerated his back pad on glass in the woods & is on three legs, another canine victim of juvenile glass smashing. One Miller Lite & a Woodbine & they join the fuckwit brigade aye. I should grab them, remove their shoes & make them run barefoot in the dark through their own cleverness...
Mind you, they'll probably go on to make good abusive replacement personas within climbing forum communities of the future, so all's not lost aye.
Toolering grades, by default, would be more intense than DTooling grades just as bouldering grades are more intense than roped grades non. I recommend landing in a bucket rather than on a mat when Toolering. A T14 instead of V14 would be A Tool-9a comedy maybe, on a rope... We've got this boulder under Darken Down that nobody can grip due to it being made of needles & razor wire. Not even wearing eight layers of Marigold gloves & a woolly hat, no no no. Since it's a fine candidate for Toolering I should attack it with my Anarchists aye....either that or detonate it with some play dough, by that I mean PE. Either would be fun. Just a shame it's to big to trundle...
Bring a harness if you get over after the grit, & I'll get you on the DT venue for some roofwork with a pair of Ronco Extendy Arms & steel talons. I'll have a go at the project as well. It feels V14 on picks & a rope to my mind & the physical applied reality of climbing it remains totally horizontal with thin tenuous holds over it's length, thus not funny at all.
Climbing frustration is building again, had enough of the training barn, & now stuck indoors all fired-up for getting on the Coire boulder projects. Can't even fit in the Carn Liath, Floddi & Raasay boulders yet. The rain & wind has now decided to make my hillside windows growl...while everything waits packed & silent at the door, ready to go...
₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪
Finn - Aye the minger finally made it back from Reykjavik. She's spent the last few days drinking the coffee machine dry in the climbing shop.
At 2/28/2007 10:01 AM, John Hunterâ
the frustration is boiling over, the rebel in me is skiving the afternoon tomorrow to go bouldering somwhere, lets pray for sun, or maybe Its wellies on V1's.
Translating your words, I get 'Youth of today', geeze are we so old so soon? Well Im 32 on monday, seems old to me. At 18 I climbed E4, at 32 Im struggling on a F4, the Letter has changed, Theres more of me, profit? must get fit, must train, Ed Hillary could only climb Vdiff at 33, but then that was at 8000m.
At 3/02/2007 5:37 PM, MacGill Fhinneinâ
hi there John. one day get Si telling you the "Cake, Concordia and Karakoram" story. makes a funny end after a day of climbing with him. best translated with a pint mind ;) he used to train bouldering hard stuff out there at a fair old altitude. still makes v14 look almost straight forward, calls the Cuillin Ridge a "sheep path" and hes 40 these days. you get used to the basta being a 100 strides ahead of everyone, grinning and carrying 2 packs. this sport route hes working on gabbro is a total beast. he may be turning into an old mountain as well, but youd no think it most the time!
Finn
Si where you dude? stop drilling gbbro and pick up the phone ffs.
At 3/06/2007 12:31 PM, ※Sgian Dubh ※â
Thanks for that Finn - cheques in the post aye.
I think what he's trying to say there John, is that people dedicate their time differently & your climbing input changes as day-to-day priorities change & so on. I've climbed with severe dedication for 20 years & more. It's what I do daily. 24/7, 7 days a week if possible, so I get results. When people like Latter, 2nd fiddle to Glen Coes finest, go crying on Cubbys doorstep, having never even met me: V11! V12! V13! Impossible!! bullshit!! I realize it must get perceived as a threat to an otherwise closed circle, but I don't think they realized then that this IS what I do, what I train for, full time. I think they believe I just go out at weekends & bang a hard problem or line up...
If only...
If you are gifted with the burden of, family, work all week, chasing kids around ecetera, & you share a proportional amount of that week trying to adhere to a personal climbing regime, the results won't be as high end, becuase the needed input isn't there to achieve that sort of intensity. I'm unfortunately not tied by any of that & live in an empty place shared with a collie & some nice toys, which are pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things...the toys more than the collie aye. It wasn't always like that but it has been for over a decade & my lack of social confidence & inabilty to resolve it, dictates that my climbing is all I have...So I go at it quietly & furiously aye. Maybe it's a certain cowardness as well, a reluctancy, but that fury has carried me well, from here to Aconcagua.
My epitaph would read: Climbed brazen E9/10 & V15 - but ran away from girlies.
There's also state of mind, visual approaches, genetic thresholds, engraming, basic health, endurance qualities, power to wieght ratios...the list of achievable goals setbacks & plus signs goes on, & each has an overal effect on your desire & ability to climb. The most important thing is that you are happy, that you move well when you do climb. That you are purposful in finger & toe, economic within flamboyancy, if that's your style. That you learn, examine or exploit weakness. That you gain enjoyment from the experience. Physical & emotional satisfaction equally. There is plenty of mind boggling regime information out there, ready to bog down a climber wanting to advance, but there's very little focus on play, or fun or the enjoyment of experimentation. It's a shame, becuase the biggest client base for improving climbing ability lays within the sea of beginner & intermmediate climbers out there, who gain minimal benefits from such high octane programs. It's like fitting twin carbs & racing discs to a moped. The relevancy is adrift, but that in truth, is what they're flooded with. I beleive it cuases problems within those group sets becuase they then start to see their personal achievments as insignificnt, in the face of, & constantly paraded big numbers, rather than celebrating what they have achieved.... It's not about ticking numbers, they are just crass markers for an anal mind-set to gauge progression with & argue out. They will follow behind quietly as your climbing develops anyway, like it or not. Just see them for what they are.. Some people seem to use climbing as a mirror, sending it out into the world with the soul purpose of standing back & admiring their own reflections. To my mind, that's an infective agenda, however subtle - it's about plain hard work, directed practise on any level.
If you climb V2, you climb V2 & you are the worlds best. The man who knocks out a V15 is no better than you & argubly no more dedicated when you examine the dynamics. He/she has simply chosen to manipulate practical time into a tool for achieving nothing other than that target...An individual could choose dedicted training & barely scrape a V8. Another individual may never train & flash V11 quickly. Climbing to these sorts of levels isn't as glamourous as the spectator believes either. As the wolf grows, so does it's belly. The success rates on climbing high end lines like Iniquty or Eat Yerself Whole are absolutely marginal in comparison to mid-range lines. Maybe 1% of the time you'll hold the crux & move beyond it. So frustrations can be equally intense, if not more so along the dynamic scale from say V7. Ergo, the extreme standard, carries some big sacrifices that many people simply can't or won't make, for any number of socialogical reasons.
Well...I'd rather spend a day climbing V2s with a good-fella than 5 minutes on a V12 with an egotistical ass. That should say something... I could help you achieve higher targets, but not online, becuase it generalizes to much on there being a standard of physiology. There is, but people are individuals. Granted, most with two arms, two legs & a head, but it's not that black & white when coaching the needs of unique climbers. It requires phsysical presence & entails working movement intimately with them on a one-to-one basis for any marked results. You need an ability to work with what they bring to the table, not just an endless rhetoric of rights & wrongs from your own library of events. A constructive empathy & humour towards their misinterpretations.
That said, V1 in wellies is just plain shoddy John. I'd whup yo' ass, & in the rain, wi a sheep on my heid boy.
At 3/06/2007 3:05 PM, John Hunterâ
'Easy Si
> >
> >Grit fest is next weekend, Brownstones to start and maybe somewhere in
> >the Peak for pudding.
> >
> >Grades matter little to me as such, but they do in that Its about me. If
> >I can climb better, harder, I can climb in more places, more routes, my
> >boundaries are further, restrictions cease to exist.
> >
> >Movement it is tho, being one and whole and immersed in the minutes that
> >last hours.
> >
> >Work calls, time begs me to do something for the man with the wage.
> >
> >Turned 32 yesterday, seems old to my bones this morning.
> >
> >Ps the wellies didnt come out, went to the Wall in Dundee''
At 3/08/2007 1:47 AM, ※Sgian Dubh ※â
Nice display of arrows young sir. Is sir partial to the arts, hmm?
You know what...32 isn't old & age, apart from at the two obvious extremes, doesn't really have a massive effect on your aility to pull down hard. You're ability to repair torn tissues & recovery rates become marginally elongated & you notice it eventually, but you just change to better counter the effect. Mostly it's rarely serious stress & it just means a couple of extra days off. Nobody can afford to be reactionary on basic health issues if they want to move forward, or retain a standard with any effect.
You keep saying you're getting heavier. So loose it. Invest in a mountain bike & cycle to work & back, the long way round. If nothing else it will increase & maintain your aerobic fitness & burn some sandbags off. It builds a big strong heart as well as healthy aerobic respiratory chains. It won't improve your climbing directly, but it will make you feel more alive phsycologically when cooped up in an office eating custard creams...Take a bowl of fruit instead, drink water more, coffee less & set aside time to stretch all your joints & work on finger strength. I used to cycle from Ullapool to Inversnecky & back once a week, until I broke my arse at Blackwater.
Visualize sequences when you're staring out the window, instead of pondering who out of the sad girly smokers outside, is or is not wearing a bra. When you go to the rock, avoid the things you can do for at least some of the visit & shatter your weaknesses by repeatedly going at them. Eventually your body will start to respond when it realizes you're not going to leave it alone. Your library of repetition patterns will grow subtly over time. Ultimately you will gain hidden strengths in problem solving, that will surface unexpectedly on later climbs. Too many climbers give up on those aspects of training becuase the results are not to hand after the effort in an obvious way. Too many climbers will also say: I used to climb E whatever or V whatever, I know what I'm on about, but that's my point...they used to. You can no more slightly climb, than you can be slightly pregnant. So get to work... I think you'd be suprised with what you can fit into a working week if you apply it well. When I'm building stone walls John, I'm crimping big rocks all day, purposefully trying to lift some on monos or wide grips - it's a game, but months, years of that has a contributary effect on being able to hold tiny steep edges on route without fearing them to much, or wondering if I have a response to the sequence ahead. Use slopers as well. Open handed climbing. Use jelly-molds to replicate holds, sequences even...for days of rain, when you find a place to nail up lots of marine ply. Use them, but remain suspicious of plastic walls & home cellars, they can, & do, teach untruths within movement & it's application, leaving you floundering on natural stone.
Hell - you can even have my old homemade campus board if you like, replete with free random 8a.nu sticker & a few minor blood stains. Seriously, throw it in the back of the rollerskate & take it home as a birthday present aye. A faint heart never fucked a pig afterall aye. I've got my 12mtr climbing barn over at Domhnaill Mansions, so I never use the wee thing. Do it, & you'll soon be feeling 26 again. Do it not & you may well end up with Dunnies build, but find yourself more often, at the bottom of the crag with a pie, rather than at the top, with a smile...old man...
As an aside. What sort of grade would you choose to have as your limit, say on redpoint..up or down the scale, but in a realistic sense, overall?...
At 3/08/2007 9:11 AM, John Hunterâ
Well written bud. Climbing in Merrells again? tsk! It all made me lol. That crag is getting full on aye! Back on the proper shore in a few. swinging by Nigg first, DSC being sorted, with a healthy input towards the bolt fund. Them two spaces went for 8 million each. No bad for two empty garages. All the best to Arch and the minger if shes around. Get the bricks charged ;)
PS: Graded table looks fine.
Finn