I'm back from a long autumn sun bolt-clipping weekend in the Italian sport climbing mecca of Arco. There were many cool things over this mini-trip... Exploring a whole new area, the gorgeous scenery around the top of Lake Garda, 3 days of warm sunshine, hooning around in my tiny Fiat Scroto hire car (dropping it down into 2nd at 70kph to overtake being quite ineffectual fun, as well as trying to slide on mountain hairpin bends), eating ace pizza and other Italian delicacies, hanging out with my old mates and their wee monkey boy (e.g. after knocking over ice cream dish in a face-pulling contest: L: "Daddy are we BOTH idiots??"... D: "Yes....yes we are.") in a tiny little cabin, endless choadly banter and a fair bit of chilling out.
Note that something is missing from that list...the climbing?? Yes, the climbing. There was some. Not as much as I would have liked, and I was rubbish at it. I did a few routes, tackled a few challenges, and most of what I did was pretty good. Most of what I failed on was pretty good too, and there was more of that than I would have liked. D wasn't on form either, and so aptly put it "punters in crime" ! There were some general issues - the consensus was the grades were stiff, some areas were fairly polished and ludicrously overchalked, with their clientele having a particular bad habit of chalking every shite undulation on the rock EXCEPT the best holds, and climbing in the warm sun didn't help. Despite this I felt I was climbing technically fine, and with a fair amount of conviction (albeit the usual fear of falling even on sport routes). But I just seemed to get very pumped and rather tired pretty quickly, and I'm not really sure why.
Even before I left I was rubbish at Ratho and at other training. It seems odd that after a reasonable summer climbing I'm *less* climbing fit than before. The only possible suggestion was that I might just need a wee break. Maybe this is right although with my fucked up body it's really hard to tell what's best for my fitness. However....I'm doing that for now and will see what happens.
1 comment:
arco is super polished indeed.
bear in mind that before and after the comps, many many strong mofos go around its best crags warming up and down on 8a's, so imagine how much traffic could see the lower grades routes (I don't know what you clmbed, though).
but arco is brilliant and I have good memories there.
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