The Rumble 23

 Man, climbing is hard. And competition climbing, shoot, nearly impossible. Did my second ever climbing competition today and it went about the same as my first. Just totally wiped.

Reflections:

Some good things: I tried this one climb that was pretty hard but seemed doable and I didn't end up sending it but I'm happy with the progress I made on it. It's a climb that a year ago I wouldn't even have bothered trying so I'm glad my confidence has improved. 

The other thing I was happy with was that about 90 minutes into a 2 hour competition block I think I only had one warm-up climb finished because I had spent a lot of time and energy trying to get that aforementioned goal climb. And at that point I knew that I was really tired and not feeling great and that the only way I was going to get some points was by doing some climbs that I felt like were below the level I was hoping to achieve. So I definitely had the thought of just throwing my score card away and leaving. I'm glad that I didn't do that and managed to record at least 5 climbs. I'm not proud of what's on my card but I'm happy I did the equivalent of finishing. 

I saw one of the athletes I coach who also runs and she asked me how I did and I said that if this was a race, my game plan had me going out way too fast. I think that's a pretty accurate summation of how it went.

Things to Improve On: 

-In my training prior to this competition, it wasn't unusual for me to send multiple v5's in a single session. Normally, depending on the climbs, I could reasonably expect to send 2 v5's and more v4's even if all of the climbs were brand new. I feel like I fell short of that today and my climbing didn't match what I thought I was capable of. And then my confidence went down. And then I was a bit of a mess. 

So, one adjustment I will make for the future is instead of comparing how I climb in training to how I climb in a comp, I'll compare comp climbing to comp climbing. Next year I'll begin with the goal of improving on this year.

To phrase it a different way, instead of starting with very easy climbs and gradually increasing the difficulty, my strategy today was, "I'm gonna bet on myself and go for hard climbs early because that's when I'll be the freshest and have the most energy." In hindsight, maybe a gradual approach would have been better because being absolutely shot and falling off things that I knew I could normally do easily was not fun.

The other biggest change I would make is climbing more and training more in the week of the comp. My build up was not ideal. In March I felt like I was in pretty good shape, then going into April I had about 9 days of no climbing because of Costa Rica. I had one week of training where in the span of three sessions I went from feeling pretty weak to decently strong again. And then this week I climbed on Monday and didn't really do much climbing specific training until today. So that's not great. I could tell I was pretty fresh but then became very tired very fast. 

I've never done a great job of keeping up climbing fitness when the gym isn't available to me but it's definitely something to be mindful of if I want to improve next time.

Overall, a positive experience. I'll definitely do it again and I look forward to improving and really look forward to projecting all of this stuff for the next few months!