Saturday, August 28, 2010

Rumney Trip

After a summer full of very little training and no climbing I can safely say that my finger is finally better. This has been the worst finger injury I've had, and the first that has forced me to take significant time away from climbing. I was able to maintain some of my strength through supplementary exercises and thus climbed much better on an end of the summer two week trip to Rumney than I expected. We didn't catch any sends on video but here are some edited ascents from the trip:


Serious training will begin tomorrow at which point my training charts and logs will finally be updated live again. It should be interesting to see the relationship of my "training numbers" with the success of this "comeback".

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Special Home Improvement Post

There has not been much climbing this summer for the robot.  This is mostly due to my fingjury(thanks for the term beastermaker.co.uk), which was the worst I've ever had.  For the lower elevation areas of the northern hemisphere summer does not lend itself to difficult climbing.  A climber has a few choices around this:

1.  Travel(hopefully we'll do that next summer)
2.  Climb sub-maximally(I don't really enjoy this)
3.  Explore other facets of life.

This summer has been devoted to the third.  There were three main projects this summer, the kitchen tile back-splash, the floor, and the garden. I was nervous about installing tile on the walls of the kitchen, but it turned out being a very reasonable project I would recommend to anyone.  Here are some before and after pictures.




Next up was the tile floor. After our new found skills we decided to shoot for the stars by laying it down in an off-set diagonal pattern. I highly suggest against this if the space is small complex(ie our old house). Here are some before, during, and after pictures. Note how much open space is left after all of the full sized tiles are down.






An ongoing project for the summer has been the garden. We have a garden in our front yard and Murph has a plot at the community garden. I haven't talked any about diet related to climbing performance, mostly because I have a somewhat unorthodox diet(vegan) for an athlete. I used to think that my diet hindered my performance, but now I think it helps me. Here are some photos of out front yard garden:



Now climbing has begun again, and I'm already thinking of good posts. Like the relationship of hangboard numbers to climbing performance.