Bouldering to Lead
Since June, I’ve been actively competing the World Cup circuit. At the beginning of the year, it was mainly bouldering world cups with the exception of Chamonix which seems to be on the same weekend regardless of the other competitions on the calender. My world cup adventures started in Canmore where I placed an excellent 3rd place. I had high hopes for the season even though I had hurt my finger at ABS Nationals back in February. Over the next few world cups, it seemed that I was just on the verge of making finals, but never being able to do it. It always comes down to one problem that I messed up somehow. I guess looking on the bright side, it’s always close like that. Now it’s September, and I don’t have another bouldering competition until 2012. For the past month, I’ve started to train for the Lead world cups. Even though during the early part of the season, I hadn’t been dedicating all my training towards lead, I still always doing 30 move boulder circuits which enable me to do pretty well even in the lead world cups. In Chamonix, I finished 15th, and then in Arco I finished 13th. I can only hope that I’ll keep progressing like that… which would mean I’ll be making finals by Valence… heh. I’ve also been trying to train a lot more in roof climbing because I felt like I was weaker in that. Take Chamonix for example, there’s always a crux in the route in the roof. I know it, and I didn’t train for it, my mistake really. The next lead world cup is in Puurs, Belgium which another huge cave. I’m actually really excited to do some lead climbing. I feel that with lead climbing, your result is more closely related to how much you train for the competition. That being said, this is competing and anything can happen :). For Puurs, it’s hard for me to create any goals for the competition but if I’d have to guess right now, I’m hoping to come top 13th to keep my run intact. I know that Jacob is an animal so I’m not worried about that. I’m more excited to watch the duel between Ramonet and Jacob in the giant cave than beating either of them. After Puurs, I’m going to be traveling to Boulder, USA for the first lead world cup on North American soil. I can imagine that the European federations will only send 2-3 of their top athletes which gives me a bit more hope to do well. I think that the style will also be very different in North America. I’ll be ready for pretty easy moves into a hard crux, especially the last 4-7 moves. Just like I heard it went down at the USA climbing Nationals. After Boulder, there’s Valence, France then Kranj, Slovenija and finishing in Barcelona, Spain. I have opted not to do the competition in Amman, Jordan because of it probably being a nightmare to organize by myself and the fact that it’s quite expensive to fly to Jordan. Since all I’m doing currently is competing in competitions, I’m going to be starting a few hobbies. I’ve been working on my new website design but it’s not so good yet. It’ll be a lot easier to scroll through the pictures as well as the overall feel. I guess being a computer student, my website should work as well as any that I can think of. Opening in new tab’s instead of going away from the page and such. So projects are that and I am also in search of a cool 1000 puzzle to try out. If it works out well, I’ll go up to a 2000-3000 for fun. So if you see any really sweet puzzles for not so cheap, let me know! I’m also going to try and further my computer science diploma by either trying to learn a new language or trying out a funny puzzle that someone told me once. So all that will keep me busy and I also plan on trying to blog at least once a week, and maybe a bit more around competitions! Hope you look forward to it all.Trackback from your site.
tomak
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I am not sure tht you are correct about begin a first lead world cup in america what about 90’s i remeber there was one and french guy and girl won
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Sean McColl
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I looked through the IFSC site again, and I still believe it’s the first official “world cup”. There was however a competition in Newport, USA, but it was considered to be a Masters. There were also a couple X-Games which were on there, but none of them official world cups… I might still be off though, thanks for the input.
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