After driving through Nancy and Basel to visit Mathilde’s aunt and some good friends of mine in Switzerland, we arrived in Chamonix the night of the 11th.We went to our favorite hostel on the outskirts of Chamonix and had a nice dinner. We woke up in the morning for isolation. It was the regular flash format and it was also Mathilde’s first world cup. She was pretty excited but nervous at the same time. I was something like 30th, and 63rd on my routes and Mathilde was something similar. This meant that we weren’t going to get to see each other climb. Luckily after my first qualifier, I still had time to run back to watch her. Unfortunately on the second one, we climbed at pretty much the same time and I didn’t get to watch her climb.

Both my qualifieres were outside on the competition wall. Both Mathilde’s qualifiers were on the wall inside. The wall inside really sucks, so I don’t know why they didn’t go 1:1 for men and women. It doesn’t make sense to have a whole bunch of people compete in a world cup and just get to climb on a crappy wall inside a gymnasium.

Anyways, back to my routes, my first one went up the right side of the wall. I watched a bunch of my friends top the route and a couple strong climbers even fell near the top. This will be my first lead competition route since 2009 at the world cup in Imst. It’s also hard because I really haven’t trained routes in 8 months. I could tell as I was starting up the bottom of the route that I didn’t really feel in my element. When it feels weird to click quickdraws, it’s not a great sign. Even though I felt bad, I knew I still had to sprint up my route. I got to the roof and I wasn’t too pumped. After a quick rest, I fired through the roof. After I had clipped the second to last quickdraw, I knew it was off to the races. I didn’t chalk, and I just kept climbing and climbing until I was on the last hold, clipping the anchors.

Mathilde also flashed her first route but I didn’t get to see it. For the second route, I was the third to last climber. I waited for about 4 hours before warming up a tiny bit more then going out to climb it. It felt extremely similar to the first qualifier. A bit hard at the bottom, then fins through the roof, and it just had a really weird kind of dyno right at the top. After it was over, I was clipping the chains, and my record stays intact. I’ve never fallen in a world cup flash route! (as I knock on wood)

Unfortunately for Mathilde, her old shoes made her slip on a greasy route on the inside wall. I still don’t understand why they put two qualifiers for the women on the wall inside… a bad move, decision on someone’s part in my opinion.

Because my world ranking is still high from last year world cups, I had climb 6th last I think. I knew that making finals was going to be very hard. After my preview, I was starting to get worried. I had the same method of attack in my head. Climb as fast as you can through the bottom section so that you don’t get pumped.

I started my semi finals and it was going good. I got through the bottom and I was feeling good.

Through the roof, it wasn’t very hard and I got through it without being very pumped. I grabbed a jug with my left hand and realized that the clip was a bit too far away. I grabbed the next hold and it was terrible… I went back and tried to rest, just couldn’t. This is the problem with not route training. As soon as you encounter something that’s super hard, you don’t know what to do and you just sit there getting super pumped. That’s exactly what happened. I tried to go back and rest, but just got pumped. I tried to just let my feet swing to look at the holds, but I fell trying. After lowering to the ground, I looked up and saw the big pocket that I had missed. I had missed a big pocket which was just on the other side of the volume. I was pissed, but that’s what I get for not training routes. When you don’t train routes, you don’t remember as well things you saw in the preview. It was obvious that I was supposed to clip, then jump to that hold, and I just couldn’t really remember. I finished an abysmal 19th, my worst place finish in Chamonix…

At least when I got down, some kids still came over for my autograph and I felt like a superstar!

On another note, while we were driving to Arco, we hit traffic… I hate traffic. This is why there was traffic, talk about an epic crash?

It also looks like it’s already cleaned up, and they just haven’t taken the car yet…

The Sheffield world cup was the 2nd last bouldering stage of the year. Although there has been 5 previous world cups this year, I’ve only been able to attend 2 of them. My first world cup of the season was in Vail and the second was in Eindhoven where I placed 16th and 2nd respectively. Coming off an amazing result in Eindhoven, I was pretty pumped up for the competition in Sheffield. At the same time, I was a bit scared, the last time I came 2nd in a world cup was in Vienna 2009. The next competition I did after Vienna was Eindhoven 2009, where I had my worst place finish in a bouldering world cup, 25th. I try not to repeat history like this so it just made me nervous in qualifiers.

We left Amsterdam with the Dutch team because we were on the same flight. We had an hour to kill before we were supposed to board so we perused around the airport for a while. We found a massive turbine and decided to play tourist and take some corny pictures. Here’s one of Mathilde standing in the jet turbine of the 747.

And of course, I decided I would try to mantle into it. It’s actually really really hard, like groping two massive metal slopers…

Now getting back to the competition, we finally took off, and an hour and a half later we were in Sheffield. We found our hotel and had dinner at a quaint little restaurant on the main street near our hotel. The next day we took off for isolation. Because I didn’t have my car anymore, it was a bit harder to get to the comp. We did the 1.5km walk to the isolation area with time to spare. It was pretty funny what kind of food they gave to us in isolation. Usually it’s kind of a free for all with the food, but I guess here they wanted to keep order so they gave us a sheet of paper with what we could take. Naturally, I just took everything so I could choose a bit later. This was the the selection that I was given/took. It just said pop, pop, so I decided to take a couple of Coke’s.

The qualifying round was really good. Like I said before, I was really nervous going out. After a few hours in isolation warming up, then a brief bus ride to the competition venue, I was next to go out. I ran out super nervous and glared at my first problem. All I could think about was how many holds were on the wall and how I was going to grab all of them. Usually in world cups, you have to use all the holds, I guess this problem was special because I ended up skipping a bunch of the holds, I think…

After flashing the first one, I was feeling good. The great thing about flashing your problem is that you get a 7-8 minute rest for the next problem which is a heck of a lot better than spending an entire 5 minutes trying to figure out a problem, then only getting 5 minutes of rest still feeling pumped. My second problem was pretty much figuring out how to navigate around a big feature. I figured because I’m strong in heelhooks, that it’d be no problem. It was a bit tight in the middle of the problem, but I found the equilibrium on the strange feature and sailed to the top, flashing another.

When I came out to look at the third problem, I was a bit surprised to only find a handful of actual holds. Instead, it was navigating another huge feature. This one looked more height dependent than the first two. Never the less, I jumped on and squeezed myself up the wall. Before I knew it, I was thrutching towards the final jug and somehow caught it. I was psyched that I had flashed the first three problems, and I was feeling good.

I think we need more problems like this in North America. I find that whenever I’m at a competition in North America, it’s so simple to read, or it’s just a super hard problem. These types of problems take a bit of just trying to problem to figure it out. Half the battle is figuring out the problem and then the other half is being strong enough to do it!

When I came out for problem 4, there wasn’t a feature in sight. I knew it was going to be one of those super delicate just off vertical problems. Usually I struggle in these types of problems because I’m not very tall. The sequence was pretty clear so I hopped on. After my initial sequence didn’t work, I figured out the hard move in the boulder as I was climbing it. I got all the way up to the last move, just to have my heel hook pop out just like in the picture below because I didn’t have enough weight pulling me towards the right. I rested for a full 2.5 minutes, then did the problem second try.

The last problem was in a big dihedral and it looked like I needed to use some flexibility. I didn’t really know how to do the moves, but when I stepped on, it became pretty clear. After almost ripping my crotch apart in the “stem”, I managed to get up to the top volume and leap for the top, flashing the problem. Not bad, 5 tops in 6 tries. I knew I’d be among the highest ranked and sure enough, I was tied for 4th position with one other French competitor.

I was super excited that I had just made semi finals. It turns out, you had to do at least 4 problems in less than 7 or 8 tries. My friend Casper from the Netherlands missed the semi finals by only one fall… and he had completed 4 problems… ouch!

After an epic walk back to my hotel (3km) and another dinner at my favorite restaurant in Sheffield, I was already looking forward to going to sleep. It was a pretty long day and I was tired. I knew semi finals would be hard the next day, but I never would have though THIS hard.

After a similar warm-up, snacks, and ride to the competition, I was going out for my first problem in semis. The first problem went up the same wall as Qualifier 1. I hopped on and managed to get to the last move. The last foothold on this boulder problem was ridiculously slippery. As I was going for the last hold, my foot popped and I sailed towards the ground. I took a decent size rest, and sent the problem second go. Not bad for my first problem, second try!

What came after, I just can’t really explain. I don’t have any pictures of the second and third problem because I didn’t make it past the second move. The second problem was a weird pinch out right and made a ridiculously long move up and left to a sloper. There was NO WAY I was going to reach it by standing on the foothold, so I tried to jump a few times, I tried a really high heel hook, but nothing. I didn’t even get zone. The third problem was similar. They decided to put the two worse footholds on the starting footholds which cause me to fail. Similar to the second problem, I didn’t get past the third move until my last try. On my last try, I fell trying to hit the zone hold, but it was such a long move. The fourth problem was also height dependand. I have a picture of the fourth one, but I’m not even on the wall, I couldn’t get past the second move, the holds were just too far apart. All in all, I’d say the semi finals were just wayyyyy too height dependant. Sucks for me but I didn’t touch a single zone hold after the first problem. Problem two, three, and four, big 0′s on my scorecard. So overall, I could’ve just take off my shoes after the first problem and saved me 30 minutes of pure agony of going out, trying problems and just failing… Oh well, win some lose some.

The crappy part was that I finished 7th, even with only 1 top in 2 tries, and 1 bonus in 2 tries. The 6th place went to the Japanese who flashed the first problem and got two bonuses… dam!