It’s been decided, I’m heading down to Bishop during my Spring break. As most of you probably know, the 2010 Olympics are going to be held in Vancouver in under two weeks now. They’ve already started shutting down roads for the Olympics as well as jack up parking fees. They’re trying to convince 33% of people who drive to work to either take public transit or stay at home. They’re afraid that with all the traffic, it’ll be grid locked for most of the day.

That aside, I’ve decided to go to Bishop. It took a bit of convincing but I’ll be going down with at least Jamie Chong. Our tentative plans are to leave after school on Feb 12th, and come back on the 23rd. I also managed to snag mens Olympic quarter-final hockey tickets on the 24th, so I’m aiming to get back for that.

I haven’t been to Bishop in 2 years. Two years ago, I went down with my family just after Christmas and stayed for the New Year plus a couple of weeks. Just after New Years, there was a huge snowstorm while we were in Reno dropping off my parents and when we got back, there was 3 feet of snow everywhere. After a few more days, the snow settled in and it was climbable. This was when I did Mandala SDS! I’ve put together a tentative list of boulders I’d like to get on and they are as follows:

• The Swarm 8B+ Secrets of the beehive
• Spectre 8B Pollen Grains
• The Buttermilker 8A+ Buttermilks
• A Maze of Death 8A+ Buttermilks
• A Scanner Darkly 8A+ Buttermilks
• Form Destroyer 8A+ Buttermilks
• Already Forgotten 8A Buttermilks
• Stained Glass 7C+ Buttermilks

Those are just a few boulders I’d like to look at and try.  If there’s any others that you recommend, I’m open to options.  I’ll only be in Bishop for 10 days, so most likely, I’m not going to get around to trying all these boulders.

It turns out, I’m doing a small presentation at the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival. I’ve always been interested in the festival but I’ve never really been too eager to give any presentations. Because I’m naturally a pretty shy guy, I find it hard to talk in front of large audiences. The first time I was asked to do a presentation at the VIMFF was a year ago but I said I couldn’t because I didn’t have any pictures. I tried to get enough pictures to make a presentation this year but some unfortunate events occurred.

As it stands right now, I think I’ll be doing a pretty short presentation of about 10 minutes. I’ll be talking about my past few years of climbing and where they’ve taken me. At the end of my short presentation, they’ll be a video that JJ Mah has put together of me climbing Dreamcatcher. I’m not sure how the layout of presentations is going to be but my good friends Sonnie Trotter and Will Stanhope are also giving presentations so be sure to check them out!

The date of our presentations is the 29th of January and if you pre-order your tickets, they only cost 17$ as oppose to 19$ day-of.

School

Well my first semester of school is finally coming to a close.  Being back in school has been a pretty big shock to my system.  During the first couple of weeks of school, I was so confused.  It’s hard to go from 3 years of pure freedom to 8:30-5:30 almost everyday.  All that being said, my exams are about to start.  I’ve finished all my assignments for all the courses and my first exam is tomorrow morning in Business Communication.  After that, I’ll have the whole weekend to study for the other 4.  Monday is debatably my hardest day for exams, I start with a Programming Exam on Java at 10:30.  At 3:30 I’ll start my Math exam.  The good thing is that at least I have 3 hours in between the two exams so I can do some last hour studying.  Tuesday is my exam in Web Programming; I’ll have questions on XML, HTML, JavaScript and PHP.  I’m pretty comfortable with the first 3 and PHP is my definite weekend in the 4.  I’ll finish up my exam week with an exam Thursday on Business.

After that, I get a 3 week break!

Climbing

I also have a competition this weekend at Cliffhanger.  It’s called November sessions but this year it happens to fall in December so they renamed it December sessions.  For the past 2 years, I’ve set for this competition.  Since it happened to fall on exam weekend, I decided I didn’t have enough time to make the trek out to Coquitlam for 2 days.  On the other hand, I get to compete at the event.  It’ll probably be top 6 problems basic scramble format.  Although my mind should and will be on exams, I’m sure I can take the 4 hour break for a competition.

Seattle Bouldering Challenge was this past weekend.  I drove down with my dad Saturday morning to Seattle.  My mom had gone down on Friday to do some shopping and we picked her up from downtown along with Elise Sethna and her mom as well.  By 10:30, we had arrived at the competition and waited around for the rules meeting.  At 11, the comp started and I went about my usual routine.  SBC is a scramble competition format and they take your top 5 boulders.  I usually warm up a bit, then test the waters and try a few hard ones.  I kind of hurt my arm a week and a half ago from overtraining.  I was afraid of my arm hurting at the competition so I wanted to get qualifiers down as fast as I could.  About halfway through, I was getting nervous because I had fallen on quite a few boulders that I thought I should’ve done.  One of them was a really dumb mistake; I missed a hold on one of the problems and tried to dyno around the lip…  With about an hour left in the competition, Jamie Chong and I were looking at the two hardest problems.  They were both about 15-20 moves long and pretty overhanging.  I tried one of them and got slayed on the second move.  After a quick rest, I tried the other hard one and ended up flashing it.  Because it was worth the most points of all the qualifying boulders, I knew I had secured a spot in finals, so I stopped.

Haircut?

After the dust settled from the qualifying round, Johnny Goicoechea was leading in first place.  He had also done the hardest problem as well as one of the sloper problems that I couldn’t do.  Finals started at 6 and I had a little trick up my sleeve.  For the past 8 months, I haven’t cut my hair.  I always cut my hair right before I go to Europe which was back in April.  I figured because it was getting cold here in Vancouver, I would just leave my hair long and stay warm.  Finally, my hair got so annoying being in my eyes all the time, I decided to cut it.  I also wanted to do something ridiculous for SBC finals because I know it would get me psyched.  Because I wasn’t feeling 100% with my shoulders, I knew if I looked ridiculous, I would try all that much harder.  During the layover before finals, I had my mom cut my hair in a park.  The catch was that I cut my hair into a raging Mullet.  I thought it’d be funny and I think it was well received.  I competed in finals with the mullet and had nothing but complements on my new style.

Finals

I ended up climbing super well on all the finals problems except for one, the first one.  When I left isolation, I was told that all the men would be on Lime Green taped problems and all the women’s would be in Bright Pink taped problems.  I got out to my first finals boulder and it was pretty long.  Because I was really psyched to climb, after a short preview, I jumped on.  Halfway through the boulder, I looked up and saw a huge lime green hold.  Because I knew I was on a Lime Green boulder, I naturally grabbed it.  Right after I grabbed it, I heard a gasp from my mom who was watching from the side.  She said “Sean…” and I looked over, kind of surprised that she was trying to talk to me in the middle of a comp.  I looked back up towards the problem and immediately knew what I had done wrong.  Because my mind was so tuned into the colour “Lime Green”, I hadn’t noticed that the hold that I was on was boxed in Pink tape and just happened to be exactly the same colour as the route I was supposed to be on.  I jumped down and felt pretty dumb.  I think that’s the first time I’ve ever gone off route in a competition.  I take competitions pretty seriously, and this was very uncommon for me.  After a quick rest, I jumped on the problem and fired it second go.

The rest of the boulders in finals were super good.  I was lucky in the fact that boulder 3 and boulder 4 were very hard.  I knew that if the boulders were too easy, the 100 point bonus for flashing that I lost on the first boulder would come back to bite me.  Because I knew I was behind, I think I tried even harder.  The third boulder suited me well.  I had some jumping, some campusing, heel hooks and a final throw to the top rail.  Because I was the first person to top the boulder, the crowd erupted as I stuck the final jug.  I realized after that if I’d had fallen on the last move, I would’ve gone for a pretty big fall down into the crowd…

First and second place came down to the 4^th problem.  Johnny beat me in qualifiers so in a count back, he’d beat me.  Because I flashed the 3^rd problem and Johnny had flashed the first, we were almost tied going into the last problem.  I knew that if Johnny stuck the move that I had fallen on, he’d win.  His first try was probably his best try and he was way closer to sticking the move than I was.  Because the problems were so long, by the time he got to the crux move, he said he was too pumped.  After a very entertaining finals, I managed to pull out another win, Johnny was second and Brian Boyko took third spot.

I created a twitter account a few weeks ago, and I’ve decided to share it with the world. I’ll be trying to update it as much as possible. This is kind of an experiment for me. I know I’m online so often at school, I’m sure I can take a minute to update my twitter.

You can go to my twitter page by clicking HERE or you can follow the link on the sidebar at the right.