Tour de Bloc - Boulderz

After not climbing for a month then climbing, setting and fore-running for 5 days in a row I am devastated, crushed, but happy. The Tour de Bloc at Boulderz went off almost perfectly, it may have been the smoothest running comp I have been to. It was also the first comp I have been involved with that we had more than a day to fore-run, tweak and perfect and we still finished at 9pm the night before, yes that’s right, 9pm not 9am the morning of!

The team worked great together Jody, Luigi, Rebecca, Chris and Andrew and myself. The separation worked out perfectly with 5 of 6 finals problems getting sent, but only by a few people and the comp was won in both men’s and women’s by the last person on the last problem. It was a dream, setting wise. There were very few technical’s and 106 competitors, which was great for the gyms first comp. Today all the qualifier problems are being put back up, to attract people back to the gym.

The great part behind the scenes, was with 5 people who all new the rules, had a ton of experience and worked easily together with no ego, the comp went together in a super relaxed atmosphere; There was no time pressure and no worrying that your team would make a mistake. This lead to ample time to fore-run, which meant we could tweak everything carefully, even the qualifiers, so there was no difficulty gap, no spinners and no hold used in multiple routes. This made stripping for finals, bagging all the routes separately and marking every hold on the wall, possible. This makes it easy to reset all the routes today.

It was also possible to have no time gap between men’s and women’s finals, each women’s problem was torn down and men’s problem put up in the 5 minute gap. This was fast and like clockwork.

The one unusual issue we did have required a 2 minute time stop. There was blood on the holds of men’s finals 3. One of the competitors was bleeding really bad and caked 5 holds with blood. This is not only nasty, but a health issue, so we stopped the clock on washed the holds on the wall and re-chalked and brushed them. This was not something we were ready for, but I saw it happening as he was on the route, so we were able to do the 5 holds in 2 minutes, which I was happy with.

All in all, I was very happy with the comp, and the team. The climbers put on a great show. The above picture is of Dustin Curtis on Men's Final #3. The top 3 were:

Dustin , Jean-marc , Ayo

Erin, Bonnie, Amanda