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!