When Pete and I spent an autumn down at The White Rim in the USA, trying to make the first ascent of Century Crack, we left with the feeling that we were only just scraping the surface. The sandstone faces and roofs of Utah must offer some of the most exciting and daunting crack projects in the world. Century Crack, Mason Earle’s Bartlett Wash Project (now climbed!) and Peewee’s Necronomicon give you an insight into some of the best hard routes in this style. What’s interesting for me, is that they’re still a away off the current sport climbing standards and I personally feel there is little excuse for this. It’s just a matter of motivation!
Photo credit: Alex Ekins (c)
Since Pete returned from his epics in Yosemite, enduring the smell of Dan McManus’s socks in 9 day storm epics and Nico Favresse’s sandbag beta, he started to remind me of our plans to get involved with something really meaty again. An all-out unlikely mission where we’re currently way too crap and will involve some serious teamwork, training oblivion and thinking out of box. This led us to the conclusion that we might as well go after something that jointly motivates us. You can probably summarise it in a few words:
Crack. Hard. Long. Meaty.
So what’s the method? How are we going to get from the current standard to somewhat better? Firstly we did what we do for every joint mission – and I recommend that anyone out there that’s taking on a project do something quite similar.
- What’s your goal – what specifically does it require?
- How good are you now – are any of your performance factors crucial to the goal?
- Work like a robot at improving a few key (weak) factors. Don’t get distracted. Focus.
- Have process goals for almost all elements.
- Establish a base of conditioning with your mind focussed on a block of hard work somewhere 4-8 months in the future.
- Don’t make excuses, don’t be soft on yourself. Don’t worry when you feel like crap for days on end.
- Agree a plan of action that works for both people.
If you work as a team – you need to think like a team!
For me and Pete, it’s going to be all about steep terrain and upper body conditioning. We’re not that good in wide positions, mega burly big moves and our core is a looooong way off what it was a few years back. Because we ultimately want to perform on quite a specialist terrain, we need our training to be a mixture of generalised and specific (the specific being a crack). With the application of normal training methods, it’s then fairly simple! Once you’ve got out of bed each morning…..
We’ve already built a few new bits and pieces down in the cellar to work some new crack sizes (we’re not great at thin hands) and the Lattice Board is coming in pretty handy for doing a load of strength drills. Really systematic and easy to measure.
We are about 1 month into it now and adaptations are starting to show though. At first I spent almost every day thinking the training was a complete disaster as I could barely get out of bed each morning, I hurt so much. But then just the other day…. yes just one day…. I had a mega day. Sometimes, it’s little rewards of one good day out of 30 bad ones that keep your faith!
Tom Randall Climbing 