Monday 2nd Session Club

 One way I know I've done something right as a coach is how weird the second session of Monday climbing club is. They're just really excited to be there and be themselves and also do a little bit of climbing. We get a lot of turnover and we get a lot of kids that decide climbing isn't as fun as they thought in a space that really isn't designed for kids climbing. It's hard when you only see the groups once a week to feel like you're making a connection but we've got a lot of returners in this session. It's very affirming to look at a group and say, it's no accident that you're like this. You're like this because I'M helping to run this show.

thought about droopy dog today

 you know what? I'm happy.

today the smell of coffee and maple syrup and open windows

took me back to a cabin in the woods

a very specific place that I can't fully remember

had a bunch of great days in a row

 I've been drawing a lot and putting them at the gym. That's been fun.

Climbing and running are going really well. I'm not sick anymore and the humidity went down so everything feels a lot easier.

Coaching has been fun. The kids are doing well and excited to climb.

no complaints.

just an absolute gold star day

 Slept well because I'm finally over my cold. My apartment isn't getting too hot anymore because it's cooling down at night. I did a drawing I was really happy about. I did my first track workout in months and the weather wasn't awful. It wasn't great but it wasn't awful. 

Had a good time coaching. Climbed after and that went well. Then I ate a bunch of food.

I always forget how much doing a little drawing at some point in the day makes me feel really happy and accomplished. Puts my head in the right space for the rest of the day.

getting back into actual climbing

 From around mid-July to now I haven't been climbing that much and have mostly been focusing on hangboarding which is where you just hang from a rung of a certain depth on a wooden board and see how much weight you can add. 

I was feeling like finger strength was a relative weakness and felt motivated to improve it in an objective measurable way. In my first hangboarding session it was pretty hard to hang at all from a 20mm edge and I found I could add about 15 lbs to my body weight and hang for 10 seconds. I improved pretty rapidly and last weekend I hung 45lbs plus bodyweight for 10 seconds. 

A large part of that increase can definitely be attributed to getting more familiar with the hangboard as opposed to an actual increase in strength. Regardless, I'm pretty happy with the improvement I made and excited to get back into actual climbing. I'll keep hangboarding about twice a week (one hard and one easier session).

If I had to make a running analogy I would say that I did the equivalent of improving my 100m sprint time. In climbing and running, top end performance is a large limiting factor to overall ability. If you can't run 100 meters in 15 seconds, there's no way you can run 400 meters in under 60 seconds. No matter how good your endurance or resistance to fatigue is. I think the same is true of climbing. If you can't pull a hard move on a bad hold, you won't send the climb. Or, if one move is too close to max effort then you won't have enough energy when you reach it and/or after you do it. 

Today was one of my first days of only climbing in a while and I can definitely tell that I lost some endurance and stringing multiple moves together felt harder than I remembered. Sometimes I would pull through the hard part and not have enough energy left to do a relatively easy finish. I'm not too bummed about it though. I can tell that my confidence has increased and the climbing fitness will catch up relatively quickly while the new finger strength shouldn't decrease at all. 

In an ideal training setup I wouldn't have cut out climbing as much as I did but running and camp were hard to manage. If I wasn't working outside at camp in the summer then I would've had a lot more energy to dedicate to climbing. Same with running. You can't do all three all the way. It was really really tough to do two. One is plenty. Anyway, the nice thing about hangboarding is it really only taxes your fingers and some relatively small muscles in your forearms so it was by far the least fatiguing form of training to still make direct improvements to climbing. 

I would really like to break into V6's and V7's this year. Last year I could send about every V5 in the gym and a lot of times I would be able to send a V6 in two parts but not put it all together so I could tell I was near the cusp. I think the training I did will make me more confident to persist on harder climbs and expect more from myself!

this is my inner middle school journal entry

 Just listened to Paint the Town Red! What a great song! Did you know that the music video is based on paintings she made? Incredible. It's an incredibly catchy song about how she doesn't care what people think of her and if you think that she's a bad person, well too guess what ding-dong because she would love to be the villain anyway. And then I was thinking about all the other great Doja Cat songs. Say So, Get Into It parentheses yuh, Kiss Me More, and Mooooo! Say whatever you want about Doja but she knows how to make pop bangers. 

And then earlier this week I saw a video of aman with a very scary intense face telling me that I shouldn't put bananas in my smoothie. He had one of those faces where you can see all the muscles and sinews and stuff in his face and it looked really tense and his eyes were super wide and he was like, "IF YOU PUT BERRIES AND BANANAS IN A SMOOTHIE TOGETHER THE BANANA HAS SPECIAL BANANA CHEMICALS THAT CANCEL OUT ALL THE BERRY CHEMICALS!" Well, guess what scary man? I wasn't trying to put berry chemicals in my body anyway. I just want to have the yummy smoothie that I like. That's awfully presumptuous to think it's acceptable to look like that and to assume my smoothie intentions.

Also I just heard a cricket and it was extra super loud.