It’s been 10 days since I arrived in Innsbruck and boy has it been busy. I want to spend my time in Austria exploring my potential by mainly working on my weakness, which is sport climbing. I hope that if I can improve my endurance to a “respectable” level, projects will become significantly more attainable when I move back to the UK and my beloved, early next year.

Keith and I quickly set up a few ground rules to make sure our new regime would be as successful as possible. These include the concepts of “there is no such thing as a rest day” and “river tickets for unsatisfactory performance”. To explain in a little more detail, every day must be spent doing something active and beneficial to the goal. This is normally climbing, but when sore skin etc does not allow, then running, mountain biking, break dancing etc can take its place. In any of these activities, if your performance is less than satisfactory then you must get fully submerged in the (glacial fed) rivers running through the various valleys before returning home. The level you deem satisfactory will increase in-line with your standards in each discipline and is always set a little on the stern side.

I have now visited quite a few areas and climbed some amazing routes. Days normally involve warming up then flashing/onsighting, before redpointing any quick projects and moving on to trying long term goals. I think this is quite an effective way to spend my days as I am working on improving many different aspects of climbing, and in doing so I hope not becoming too shit at any aspect either. Having said that, I definitely feel weaker in a bouldering sense than I have in the past. Moves on some of the harder routes are actually really tough, to the extent that there are a couple of routes I am yet to climb from bolt to bolt. I guess this could partly be due to conditions, with temperatures rising some days to the upper 30’s. But this is more than likely and easy excuse, and come November I think I will be dropping back into Boulder mode with serious gusto.