First things first: The new blogspot site / post composition is utterly fucking rubbish. Very user-unfriendly, obscure menus, normal post options made inconvenient, switching between compose mode and HTML mode is broken (randomly adds loads of line breaks in some cases), compose mode with photos produces a load of bloated HTML that takes ages to edit. Just like Metoffice's truly appalling disaster of a new "site" and Facebook's ridiculously bad Turdline farce, this is another site with a redesign specifically to make things harder and annoying for users. Take note Blogspot - you normally provide a good service, but you fucked up this time. Please stop it.
Anyway this is a blog mostly about climbing (and occasionally trying to educate people with properly good dance / metal music), and I did some climbing recently. 2 days in glorious sunshine at Loch Tollaidh and Diabeg. Always a pleasure to visit those areas, even if Diabeg is a bit of a polished trade crag - which I nimbly avoided by doing some lesser-known classics. Unfortunately I also nimbly avoided any semblence of progression or challenge or getting on and putting some effort into things. I just didn't have any OOOMPH. There might be a few reasons: tired from early start and long drive, tired from rubbish nights sleep and general worries, lack of power training due to elbow, general weakness due to elbow, lack of warming up on suitably ooomphy routes. But really there was also a tedious lack of determination and ooomphing the fuck up. At the end of the day I had plenty of fun and it was a NICE weekend (the highlight being Phil's choice of an exceptionally good local game terrine for a picnic lunch), but I felt I missed out on giving more effort to the climbing and reaping the rewards.
As a slight aside, I popped out locally recently with new local Jade and fleetingly visiting old skool gnarler Duncan (who has been climbing for nearly as long as I've been alive, maybe there is hope for me yet!). Limited to local, we cruised to Craigmore and took advantage of the fresh breeze brushing through the shrouding trees. Just a couple of routes each, but it was an interesting experience on Spinal Wall - I had scrubbed the breaks on this a few years ago and never got back to lead it. However now someone has thoroughly cleaned it, in a "wirebrushing the entire sheet of rock" sort of way. Fair enough as it should get a lot more attention and is possibly the most substantial lead up to and including it's grade at the crag. I had vague recollections of lots of little cam and finger breaks....obviously too vague as they all seemed to be thin, flared, and rounded!! Thus requiring some care with the cams and some tenacity with the fingers.
In other news my elbow is still properly fucking tweaked. I am trying to maintain a good balance of climbing and resting and theraputic exercises, although annoyingly taping across the injury site seems to be mashing up the other side of my arm with the tape cutting in :S. The weekend away was okay, the cold cranking at Craigmore was much less okay. Ugggg.
Spinal Wall gurn
Spinal Wall grunt
Flake Crack
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