24 Heures Du Mur
I got back from the competition “Les 24 heures du mur” Sunday night and it was definately a memorable competition. As I said in my previous post, it’s the same as as a giant scramble format competition but instead of 3-4 hours, you get 24. Pretty straight forward really. After the scramble format, there’s a finals a few hours later, world cup format. I drove to Oloron-Saint-Marie on Friday night with Mathilde in preparation for the competition which started Saturday morning at 10am. We left Toulouse at around 5pm because the drive was about 3 hours and we were supposed to register that night. Mathilde had school for some of the day, but had enough time to get everything organized for the trip. We actually got there too late for registration and they told us to just be there in the morning. [singlepic id=238 w=480 h=320 float=right] The next morning we came back and got registered, paid, and got a goody basket. It’s pretty cool what we got for our 25€. For the small registration fee, we got a t-shirt, some blister bandages and a bottle of wine! They give a bottle of wine to people of age and a box of chocolate to those under age. We figured we’d be sharing it anyways, so Mathilde took chocolate and I kept the wine. I was already psyched, I had seen the wall which was a 22m wall with most of the wall going between 15-25 degrees overhanging. On one wall, there was a small roof about half way up. The competition didn’t actually start until 11am which meant that we had until 11am Sunday morning to finish our qualifiers. They took top 5 routes for qualifiers although you were only allowed to try each route a maximum of 3 tries. I figured it would come down to flashing/onsighting your routes because if you had to take 2-3 tries for each one of your 5 route, plus your warm-ups, you were looking at 25+ routes. I started warming up straight away and tried to pick lines with small line ups. I did a few routes before finally getting on a harder route. The first harder route I did was an 8a. I was pretty sure I could do it, and at the same time, I wanted to have at least one 8 to start the day. It wasn’t too bad, and I onsighted it with Mathilde doing it flash just behind me! After climbing that one route, I looked over at the clock, and it was already 1:30. Almost 3 hours had already passed and I had only 1 route. [singlepic id=243 w=480 h=320 float=left] The day continued like that, because of the line ups and the length of the wall, you ended up waiting a bunch. Our plan was to get a few routes done before lunch, then go eat, and come back for the “ultimate route challenge” which I’ll explain in a bit. By 2pm, we had done 2 routes which we were pretty satisfied with. Mathilde had done a 7c and an 8a, and I had done an 8a and an 8a+. We had also done those 4 routes onsight/flash which was nice. We went back to eat lunch and just rested for a couple of hours. At 5pm, the ultimate route challenge was supposed to start. This small competition involved 1 route for the men, and 1 route for the women. They shut down the main walls and have everyone in “elite” try the route once. It’s also flash, the route setters fore-run for us. For the men, they gave it a grade of 8c and the women a 8a+. The point of this ultimate route challenge was to get a hard route for your top 5 climbs as well as a seperator for the overall results. Because they took the finals round and combined it with the qualification round, there’s a very easily possibility of a tie. If two people tie in the overall rankings, whoever did better on this “ultimate route” would ultimately win. They also set “bonus” holds at sections up all the hard routes. Supposed there was an 8b route, they would have one zone hold about half way up signifying an 8a portion. If you fall from there or higher, you’d still get the 8a part. Then 3/4 of the way up, there would be another zone hold which would mark an 8a+ part. Mathilde and I were in the last few to climb and Mathilde came 3rd on the route, getting all the way up to the last 3 moves. Mathilde got credit for an 8a part of the route. I ended up winning this little contest by getting up to the 8b+ part of the route, and falling a few moves later, just a couple feet from the top. After this ultimate route, Mathilde and I were getting pretty tired. It was already 8pm and we weren’t sure what to do. It’s hard to figure out whether to climb now and rest for tomorrow, or to rest now, and climb in the morning just like a semi finals or something. Mathilde tried a few more routes but felt like she didn’t have enough power so had to retire the day with only 3 routes she was more or less happy with. After the ultimate route, I ended up doing another 8b before resting for the day. Because Mathilde had to do 2 more routes, and I had to do at least 1 more, we decided to call it an early night and headed back. We ate dinner, tried to get some sleep and woke up at 6am Sunday morning and headed back to the gym. We got to the gym before 7 after breakfast, shower ect. There was almost no one there, it was great. We warmed up freely and figured out which routes to try. By 8:30, it was already pretty busy but Mathilde managed to send a hard 8a and finished with a 7c. I warmed up pretty fast, did another 7c+ to get a little pumped and fore run for Mathilde before getting on an 8b which I ended up onsighting. I wanted to try the 8b, because it had two zones, an 8a part, and an 8a+ part. Anyone of the 3 would’ve been good for my score and I was lucky to do it all the way to the top! I finished the 24 hours of scramble format with an:- 8b+
- 8b
- 8b
- 8a+
- 8a
- 8a
- 8a
- 8a
- 7c
- 7c
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Gelu
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Mr. McColl,
I would like you to know that I really enjoy your competition reports. Very entertaining and well written. Keep it up.
Blogging aside, I admire you as a climber and you struck me as a nice, honest guy. Tons of respect!
Greets from Spain!
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Sean McColl
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Thanks a lot Gelu. It makes me happy and encourages me to keep writing when people say they like my posts 🙂
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Training weekend in Oloron | Sean McColl
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[…] to climb on their big wall. The wall is 20m and has a bunch of hard routes from the “24 Heures Du Mur” competition they had last October. I wrote up a post about that competition which can be […]
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