Friday Night Climbing Session
I’ve been struggling with insomnia lately. If I fall asleep early, my body wakes me up at 4-something. Or I can’t fall asleep until after 2. I’ve been averaging 4-5 hours of sleep a night.
When I woke up an hour and a half before my alarm yesterday, I went ahead and started on my knee exercises, getting them all done before work. Woot!
After work, I went to the climbing gym, where my goal was to work on endurance. I started off top-roping, climbing up and down the same route (a 5.6 -- I skipped some of the holds) about 5 or 6 times (ten minutes). Then I tried out a different auto-belay, which was on a less steep wall (less than 90 degrees). The belay device seemed too easy to pull down, and the guy on it before me had positively flown down it. So when I reached the scary bulge halfway up, I came back down. I did that route 3 or 4 times (downclimbing as well) before switching to the bouldering wall.
I started with the long-haul, but only got to 13-14 before my arms gave out, so I took 5 minutes to do ball squeezes (one of my knee exercises). i tried the long-haul again, and made it legit all the way to 17 (they’ve changed the feet on some of the routes, so there’s a section of the long-haul that’s really hard to keep your feet off the ground, but I managed to do that and make it to 17 last night).
17-18 is a weird pinch-or-crimp hold that I just don’t have the grip strength for yet. I did practice the transition from 16 to 19 a few times, but it was too much strength work, and I was working on endurance. There were a lot of other people bouldering, and they were working on the same sections of wall as the beginning of the long-haul, so I practiced the 19-23 transition (monkey bar + the rounding the corner one that I nailed for the first time Wed.). I was happily surprised to make it all the way from 19 to 30!
I took some breaks for lachés. It took me a bit to get the courage to try the 5′9″ downhill gap again, but after a couple of hard landings (I swung too far) on the 4′-something gap, I knew I was ready. I made it 3 times, and then decided the only way I could make it the other direction (uphill) by the end of the month was to start practicing. First try, my right hand just missed the bar. Second try, it just brushed it! So I’m actually relatively close already! (I only gae it two tries because the landing was a little hard on my knee.) Next time I’m there with Kirsten, I’ll have her take a video so I can study my technique and see where I can improve. But for now, I’ll just keep practicing.
I continued to work on the long-haul route for the rest of my session. When I’d get tired and slip off early, I’d hop right back on and continue for as long as I could. At the end, I did some static holds on 17-18, because I really need to get stronger to complete that within context of the long-haul.
My whole session was only an hour, which was shorter than Wed. But I think I was climbing a higher percentage of the time. I wish I had a better sense of how to structure climbing workouts. In running, I know what fartleks, tempo runs, intervals, and LSD (”long, slow distance” for the non-runners) do for your body. There’s really no equivalent to LSD for me in climbing (well, maybe the easy top-roping I did at the beginning, but I can’t do it for much longer because it’s a little hard on my knee). I guess the long-haul is equivalent to very short intervals (more like a track workout).
I guess it’s time to start looking up climbing workouts. I’m sure someone has posted some kind of training regimen somewhere. Unless anyone has any suggestions?
Oh, and I ended up crashing before 11 last night and sleeping until 6! Over 7 hours of sleep is really sleeping in for me! I walked a mile when I got home, but didn’t do any more of my knee exercises (so I didn’t quite finish the 2nd session of all the 2-a-days). My body wanted sleep, and I listened to it.
Today, I’m taking the day off from upper body (my first since... last Saturday?). No pull-ups, even! I did activate the Groupons last night, so today I’ll focus on meal prep/grocery list-making, planning my workouts for next week, etc. Plus my knee exercises and walking a mile, of course.
