Sublime slime II

The weather cleared out this afternoon so decided to hit Pleasley with the Flipper. The overnight rain had left the crag a bit wet at the bottom with the odd hold seeping but the majority of the crag was climbable though any cloud cover resulted in a greasy collection of positive holds to try and hold on to. Still turned out to be a good session though - checked out the left hand side buttress which has a few good lines to go at, made a bit of progress on the big traverse and my footwork seemed to be on the ball. All good stuff and as an added bonus we managed to get back to the van about five minutes before the next bout of monsoon rain passed through.

I now feel like I have been run over by a small train and while I won't be going to work at 7PM tomorrow night with great joy etc. at least I will know that I cranked hard on my off days.

Sublime slime

With the heat building up to the levels of a blast furnace it was time to say goodbye to the grit for the summer months and start on a new journey - that of learning (maybe relearning) the intricacies of limestone. I have had a brief play on the white stuff this year but lime has always been a harsh master for me and has only got worse given my steady diet of grit bouldering for too long. Too long off from stuff involving a bit of string and some chunky quickdraws have left me with absolutely no crimp strength and even less endurance.

In an effort to rectify this I am forcing myself to love the lime and I am slowly getting there - spent Friday night bouldering at Rubicon for the first time with the Flipper. A really lovely setting to say the least and the long, long, long traverse gave me a very pumped set of forearms but thankfully not quite as pumped as those experienced on "Sock it to 'em" at Smalldale which took pumped to a whole new level. The traverse is notable for looking piss and being decidedly not piss - it is subtly steeper than you think it is, the hand holds are generally huge and the footholds are not. After an hour and a half I was pretty trashed and for my sins I had managed to work the first part (of four) to the big sidepull flake to a point where I was happy with the sequence. From there I then managed to link half way into the second part where it gets steeper and the ability to put the weight through your feet and hit the footholds both precisely and quickly starts to become more urgent. From this point is unknown but it is not going to get any easier for sure.

Saturday was on more familiar ground at Horseshoe with Broken Beagle. Decided that seconding and focussing on decent footwork was going to be of more use to me than getting scared on lead. Pale Rider (6a) went clean but placed far too much emphasis on pulling hard instead of using my feet, Schools Out (6a+) went better but got the sequence wrong towards the top, fought back to get into a position to try and make the move but lack of arms saw me off and finally Rotund Rooley (6b allegedly) beasted the living daylights out of me. No way is it 6b - for someone of my stature it's somewhere closer to 6b+ as far as I am concerned - the crux felt Font6b on it's own. Grade debating aside it was the best burn of the day - less over gripping and the footwork seemed OK up to that point so reasonably pleased.

Today is a rest day as the first storm of the summer arrived in a rather noisy fashion this morning.

Round up

Well the laptop got sorted - more memory arrived, was fitted, iTunes stuff was removed and a new build of XP that had been put on a severe diet by nlite was slapped on. Take that virus ridden, under powered laptop!

Climbing - went to Pleasley Vale to see what it was like and the answer is rather good indeed and far better than the area we had to travel through to get there. It was a bit of a shock to travel through a rather awful housing estate to then suddenly find yourself in pristine English countryside and the only thing that marred the experience of the last couple of miles were the biggest sleeping policemen of ever. They would be classed as mountains in Lincolnshire!

Anyway welcome back to the limestone (or some geological variation thereof truth be told) and prepare for decent handholds and very shiny footholds. Was good to get reacquainted with the lime once the conditions improved - it was like a 30 foot high bar of soap when we arrived. Surprisingly there were other people there as well which we didn't expect to see - in fact during the course of the evening quite a lot of people came and went and a good time was had by all. Nice to see the place is being restored with a great deal of care and attention by Tony Simpson after the problems of last year.

Lastly I am rather pissed off at the minute due to my box of Cheerios deciding to "commit suicide" from the second floor window of our office resulting in no breakfast for me till Waitrose opens at 10AM. Bugger, arse, bollocks and all that.