It's been a wee while, but I've finally got on something challenging, something intense, something that got my heart racing, my hands sweating, got me committed and sketching...
And that was just the warm-up, sandbagged in the sun thanks to Geek "well if I'd told you it used to get a grade harder and is quite sketchy, you might not have got syked for it". Fair enough, it got me fighting a bit! And then it was retreating into the shade for the main event. The Purr-Blind Doomster had gone from "looks cool but well beyond me" in the previous Lowland Outcrops photo, to "maybe I can aspire to that" after doing Chisel and Big Country Dreams in 2009, to "I need to do this" this year. Old inspirations....
So, as well as being a fairly hard climb for me, it was also a Fairly Big Deal, the biggest this year at least. Which explains why I'd gone up to place the early gear and re-warm up, downclimbed, and was now standing on the ground, intensely analysing the chalk crystals I was crushing, and trying to stop shaking inside. "It's alright to be nervous, but not anxious" Jerry said, and I was definitely fluctuating around that border. The butterflies in my stomach were of primordial proportions to match the jungle atmosphere, I tried to sooth them by drip-feeding them little nuggets of truth: "Get stood on the finger jug, place gear", "Layback over to the big sloper, place gear", "Fingerlock with the right, left heel-hook, over into the pod, place gear", "Stretch over to the arete, shake out". That was where my plans stopped and the blind committment started, curiously that was where I started to relax, after hyper-ventilating through the sloper and crack pod. The solution to being so nervous about doing the climb....do the climb. Still, stepping off the ground was the fairly biggest deal. Doing it was a big deal in a different way, it was all about the combination of challenge with pure quality, and after all THAT is why I stepped off the ground....because it's bloody great...
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