Intro

Life has been good lately. Challenging but good.

Free time is a well appreciated luxury. This blog has suffered accordingly. As have other projects – mental and physical. The good thing is that there is a constant influx of inspiration and ideas for things to make or do.

One thing I have noticed is that the busier I am, i.e. the less time I have to invest on creative stuff, the more creative I become. That, I find interesting. It seems that excess free time initiates stagnation and sluggishness while pressure and limited time feed the creativity afterburner. One way to see it is that the brain responds like a muscle. The more you engage it, the more productive it becomes.

The obvious downside to this unfulfilled creativity surplus is the tormenting feeling of having all these exciting ideas without a realistic chance to work on them. But at least it means that I remain alert and that horizons stay open for future sails to be set when the winds are ripe.

Or maybe I should quit my job…

Rockticity and the lack thereof.

Part of the newly acquired life balance is my reluctant return to training. Training on plastic on a semi consistent basis and feeling in good shape again. In terms of time I am not getting much of it but usually I manage to squeeze two well focused sessions per week and as a result I am happy. It seems to be enough to keep me on a good personal level after months on full idleness.

On actual rock, the situation is very different and pretty much laughable. Which strikes me as interesting. It seems that strength from plastic bouldering does not compile well on outdoor performance unless it is complemented by actual rock mileage. This is no news to anyone involved in rock climbing training but the amount of non-correlation between the two can be befuddling.

I think the key to this counter-intuitive observation is the level of exposure to real rock you are getting. In other words, the amount of real climbing you can get to cash out on your indoor training. A few months of solely gym training can have a detrimental effect on movement and flow on actual rock. Footwork will suffer. Coordination will suffer. Most importantly confidence and commitment will suffer. Overall, the connection to the rock will be severed. Connection not in a bullshit metaphysical sense. Connection as on a purely cognitive context. Something similar to what freedivers call “aquaticity”

Maybe we could invent a new term to describe this:

Rockticity?

“The capacity of a terrestrial mammalian organism to function and habitualise in a vertical rock environment. The level of rockticity depends on mental and physical characteristics and can be improved by frequent exposure to the rock element“

Well, I can’t see that to stick around…

But here’s the catch. I suspect that the reverse-correlation between indoor training and outdoor performance is a nonlinear function. The outdoor situation in my case appears so desperate because my outdoor mileage is desperate low. I have climbed a total of five times on real rock since last summer. I theorise that with just a slightly better vertical mileage the gap between indoor and outdoor performance would diminish rapidly (?).

So, what now?

So, current situation boils down to:

Muscles and tendons – kinda good state
Climbing grey matter – mostly atrophic.

The abstinence from real rock and the corresponding shortage of actual climbing routes to aspire to, brings me in a weird situation training-wise. And that is that there is no obvious goal to train for. No new route dreaming to send. No lofty new level of performance to reach.

So new goals had to be invented, to keep the training juju from burning out.

It pretty much boiled down to:

Train to keep the body engaged for the better times that will surely come.

I declare this a solid goal. The fourth decade of my life approaching fast, I feel that if I abandon myself to idleness for a long period, I will soon reach a point of no return. It will be really hard to get back to climbing in 5 years-time with no action in between.

Therefore the current climbing goal is a long term maintenance of the body. Keep those muscles contracting for the time when you might need them again.

In the process, training becomes a self-fulfilling process. You become one of those gym rats who train for training’s sake. You know, those guys we used to laugh about? Always pulling plastic and never hitting the real rock.

I am one of them now. And funnily enough, I enjoy it too.

So what’s next?

It’s been five times I have been on real rock in the last six months. Interestingly enough, three of those times were on new crag. Also, three were outside Athens on a road trip.

My original intention was to write about those road trips but I got carried away talking about stuff no one wants to hear…

I ‘ll try to write about these road trips soon. For now but here’s a tease from the latest creation of one of Athens’ most motivated bolters, on the foothills of Parnassos Mt: