Sunday, December 5, 2010

Tour de Bloc Delire


Delire 2010 Photo: Nicholas Charron

The season has began for me. I am in Quebec City for the Delire Tour de Bloc. I feel heavy and injured, but mentally strong. This comp was a necesity for me, as there are hardly any comps in the Atlantic region this year and I already missed a couple in the east due to work.

I did not expect ,as a couple weeks ago I crushed my hand and I think I broke a bone on the backside of my palm. It swelled up double its size when it happend, but has gone down a bit over the past few weeks. To climb is painful, but once warmed up everything seems ok. It is more opening my hand, then closing that hurts. Anyway, I think having an excuse can help performance in some ways, as it removes expectation of results and allows you to just do your best with cirumstances at hand. No expectation, no anticipation, just being in the moment.

I was suprised at the number of climbers there, most of the strong guys showed up, Terry and Simon even came from the west coast, turnout was definity good in the open catagory, 60 I heard.

The comp was well run and well set. The guys at Delire are an excellent crew of people and it is obvious they care about the sport and certainly are doing their part in supporting it. There effort shows in their comps and they get better each year.

I qualified 2nd, but ended 4th. I took a really bad fall on my neck and shoulder on finals #1, which really shook me for the rest of the time. I hurt my shoulder quite bad and am paying for it today. It was the first time I have ever fallen indoors that badly. At the time I really thought I might have broken my shoulder or worse. I am not a worrier about injury, but this actually scared me quite bad. I missed the main matt completly and landed on my neck and shoulder before any other part. It makes me question the safety of comps sometimes. I understand the need to set problems with big falls for the spectators, but this was uneccessarily dangerous, many people fell badly, I was just the one that missed the matts. It was completly avoidable. I think setters really need to look twice at the set up before a comp for safety, its easy to overlook problem areas and this sort of thing happens very easily. Hindsight is 20-20 I guess.

I was quite happy overall. I definity need to work on power endurance, I never fell once because of difficulty only pump.

I guess this was a good gauge of my fitness, now I have to decide to actaully train my weakness not just climb for fun, if I want to improve this season.

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