The Away Game

I've just returned from a week trip to the Red River Gorge, and it has reminded me of what I consider to be my biggest weakness as a climber: the away game.  Climbing at my "home" crag of Rumney is conducive to projecting at or above your limit.  This is due to a number of circumstances:

 1. There is not a wealth of climbs at all grades.
 2.  The climbs tend to be technical and powerful requiring considerable rehearsal.
 3.  The harder the climb the more fun the climbing. (I believe this to be true everywhere not just rumney).

If you add the fact that I'm naturally more of a power climber than endurance climber, this all adds up to subpar performance on the road.

Since this blog is meant to be about training lets go over some "holes" in my training methods that make for my underachieving in the away game.

1.  I do zero pure endurance training.
          
I have done plenty of pure endurance training in the past without very good results.  While doing endurance training I watch my power and power endurance levels fall like a lead weight.  Hard sections of climbs that I should cruise past become so difficult I either fall or barely squeak through and never recover.  This is the weakest portion of my training program.

2.  My over-reliance on the fingerboard, campus-board, and problems I set on my home wall.

In order to be a good away game climber one needs to be subjected to a large volume of different climbing movements.  I've pointed out in an earlier post that my local gym does not consistently provide climbs in a good range for me.  If I were able to set there(which I am not) the situation would be slightly better, but really I need problems set by other people.

I am in the process of brainstorming some solutions to these problems.  Here is what I've come up with so far.

1.  I've never tried to add pure endurance training to the program in its current state.  My current training program (a version of this fitted to climbing at Rumney on friday and saturday) seems to be perfect for power and power endurance.  If I replace the maximum hangs with "super repeaters" (more on that later) I think I'll be able to hang on to most of my power endurance and only sacrifice a moderate about of power.  I have a few more ideas I'll outline later.

2.  Since there is no real hope of better plastic climbing around here any time soon I've made it a goal to get more mileage days climbing outside this spring/summer.

A good question to ask is: What is a good standard to achieve on roadtrips?  My goal is to be able to climb within 2 letter grades of my hardest redpoint in a few days and within 3 or 4 letter grades in a day. On my recent trip to the red I was 1 for 3 on the second goal which gives me a good starting place for improvements.