rginns blog

Just a quick note cos I'm cream crackered. Tonights West View trip was sparse, Lanky dabber was working, and Banksy was looking after sprog so it was me and the Brother-in-law. Anyways, after a bit of faffing I crushed the V5 black problem using an ingenious swing technique at the end as oposed to Beardys leg-flag method. My first Preston V5, yes yes. GET. IN. ps. Font targets I think are this: 3 x 6as, and a 6b. Voila

Well, we made it back to blighty in spite of the inch of snow in Manchester and 24 hour delay in Finland. Still, they made it comfortable and put us up in a nice hotel for our troubles. Our trip to Finland took us 300 Km into the arctic circle , and as such it was rather chilly, reaching -45 degrees at times (!). Thie usually resulted in nose hairs freezing immediately you go outside, and eyelashes developing ice shortly after. The scenery was fantastic aand it really is such a magical place, the snow was 6 ft in a lot of places, but the reason we went was to see the Northern lights. We were not disappointed, and on the second day they appeared. We subsequently saw the lights on another four nights. Aside from that we went husky sledding, which was fantastic albeit very bumpy, and snowmobiling, snowshoeing and reindeer sledding. I could rabbit on all day about how good it was, but instead I've opted to put some photos up. Hope you enjoy them.

Today was west view day today. Today. I had told chunk I was heading down and he seemed keen, so arranged to meet him when I finished work. He was late and I still hadn't done everything I need to get done before norway, but what the hell, Preston was calling, fuck work. I was a bit keen today to look after the finger as it didn't feel good at all yesterday and each time I flexed it today it twinged. It actually fared a lot better than I thought it would. We started off with some rope action as s-man was keen for the rope and it proved to be a good warm up although the grading at least on the 'blue' Walls seems a little off, either that or I can flash 6b+ from a standing start... After that we hit the bouldering. S-man ws keen to keep the action around the v2 level as it's been ages since he's been climbing, but after a bit of encouragement he made it u a v3, a Stirling effort after such a long lay off. The beard man and lanky-dab turned up eventually, pah, and

I was supposed to be going out for dinner tonight,but in the end that was cancelled,so I decided to head down to broughton for a session. It was as cold as ever and it took a while to warm up. I warmed up on a few easy problems and then attacked the 5cs. Last year I found this was pretty much my limit but today they seemed easy. I flashed the first two or three and took a couple of go's on the next one. So I went on to try a few 5c+s. Much to my surprise it only took a few go's to climb two of them. I've noticed a slight improvement in my climbing since taking a different approach. Instead of just trying the same beta over and over again, each time I fail I've been trying to change a foothold or body position to work through the problem more systematically. It seems to be helping anyway... Last year I damaged my finger on a problem at widdop, more than likely a partial tendon tear. Tonight is the first time it has flared up since the autumn. Although I don't think i

I went down to Brownstones this morning primarily to have a look at Satisfying sloper. I'd worked late last night and I was working from home this morning so I had a bit of time before I got stuck into work. The temperature in the van was -0.5 so conditions should have been perfect. I always forget how waterlogged Brownstones gets in the winter, virtually all of the Pond Area was full of water, and pretty green. The good thing is that most of the vegetation has died back and you can see the rock for what it is (or something). Disappointingly, both the low crimp on S.S.P. and the higher, slopey crimp were wet. It appears that this part of the wall is the only seepage point in the rock, so I'll need to get back on it after a few dry days. I went round to the Nexus area and was dismayed to see that the big flake from Nexus has finally dropped off, it appears to have been dragged out of the way. This will almost certainly affect the difficulty of Nexus Dyno 6b+ (on my 2010 list), L

Headed over to Preston last night for a bit of Apres work climbage. I managed to finish pretty much on time, and planned on meeting the G-man and Nik a bit later, so I opted for a swim first. As the west view pool was shut until 7 I headed over to Fullwood, and swam for about 45 minutes. I thinks this was clearly a bad tactic. I got to West View and could barely climb anything hard! I was losing strength really quickly and sweating like a pig, but this could also have been brought about by not really eating much in the day, and then swimming, and then climbing. Next time I could do with loading up a bit more on carbs... G and Nik arrived about 8 and started to crush, Nik especially seemed to be all over everything up to V8, although G was no slouch hitting a the V5s and v6s. If he was just a few inches shorter he'd be so much better! In brief many problems were ascended above V5 West View has been reset, and there are a few good problems there, Mr Vickers having done himself proud

Reading GCW’s latest post on climbing motivation has got me thinking (not necessarily a good thing, but anyhow): I have a tendency at this time of year to lose sight of my climbing goals, at least temporarily. 2009 saw about 6 weeks off climbing at the front end of the year, in 2008 it was about 3 months... It seems too easy to blame it on the short days or the weather because winter is not exactly a secret. We expect it every year, know it’s coming and so logically, should be able to form some sort of strategising to get through it. Invariably however, I get lardy over Christmas, enjoy a brief, New Years enthusiasm, and then usually around mid-January settle into a de-motivated state in which few gains seem to be made which makes it twice as hard to go climbing. In the normal scheme of things, this then turns back into enthusiasm when the nights start to get lighter around March. The problem is, my preceding inactivity has usually led to inhibited crushing skills (negative cycle cont