This years goals...

The last few months I have been hella busy with home, work and climbing, my apologizes to all for not posting. Here's a recap: I took a couple trips down south to the Red River Gorge and Southern Illinois to do some climbing. Had fun, got in a few good leads including my redpoint of "Puppet Master" a 9+ that defeated me the year before. The climb starts with a few hard and very committing moves. You are 15 feet off the ground before you can get in your first good piece. Needless to say this could mean broken ankles if you are not careful. (I opted to have a crash pad just in case)

There have been a number of trips to Devil's lake as well. Weather has been decent for them, but sometimes we had snow (in april) though it didn't last very long. I took a shot at the "Wobbly Dihedral" a 9 (some would argue 9+) at Devil's Lake. For those of you that have never climbed at Devil's Lake, the grades are way off from most of the rest of the country, most argue "Very f-ing sandbagged". (So a 5.9 here would be a 5.10a/b/c/d other places, yes grades are all subjective, but just saying) This started one of two of my years goals. Climbing at my limit on gear (trad), this means falls. I trust my gear and I am not worried. On the Wobbly Dihedral I took to falls before passing the "friction only" section of the climb. Once past that, the crack got wet and very slick due to the green stuff that was growing in it. (You can see in the top part of the picture to the left) After trying to climbing past this a couple more times, I bailed off the climb. I'll be back and that rock ain't going anywhere.

The second of my goals is to break in to Alpine climbing. This means heavy training. Two weeks ago I started, I added squats, usually about 50 - 75 a session and double the amount of "step ups" as well. Heavy cardio is on the menu as well. Living in the flat low lands will make training for Alpine very challenging. I have using a modified version of what Mark Twight talks about in "Extreme Alpinism: Climbing Light Fast & High". (For those of you that don't know Mark Twight, he is the founder of Gym Jones. ) As well as input from some climbing veterans that I climb with.
Fun nights at the climbing gym have been replaced with laps with a summit pack loaded with about 15 lbs of "gear" and now boots instead of climbing shoes. As it was recently put to me:

"The goal in climbing is to avoid failure; the goal in training is to pursue failure."

Climb on.