Conserve that energy! There's still a long way to go!
So as I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been dealing with an injury recently and it sucks pretty bad. But yesterday I finally went climbing again and ended up doing 15 single pitch sport routes, none of which I’d done before. For me, that’s a lot of routes. And man oh man, was it awesome! So with that as background information, here are some thoughts about doing a lot of routes in a day:
1. Bring food. Like… real food. I brought Starbursts, some dried cranberries, and a granola bar. I didn’t have anything else at home, so I didn’t bring anything else. I was getting pretty hungry before too long and it was one of the reasons we stopped climbing and went back to civilization.
2. The main reason I didn’t climb any more than that was because my arms were dead. Several of the harder routes we did were steep and pumpy, which is not my strong point. The plan was to do all of the climbs in a certain area by doing them all from right to left. Unfortunately, this left a couple of the harder (and steeper) routes for the end, but my arms were just dead by then. So it’s good to do the harder routes while you’ve still got the juice!
3. Stay well hydrated. If it’s hot, bring frozen drinks. Warm water is nasty!
4. Take temperature and sun position into consideration. The air temperature yesterday wasn’t too bad, but the sun was shining directly into our eyes for a while! It was really annoying. If we’d planned better, we’d have been able to avoid that.
5. Take breaks if you need to! If you’re going to climb for a full day, taking an afternoon siesta for an hour or two isn’t that big of a deal if it means you’ll climb better.
That’s all of got for now. I had another one but I forgot what it was… Oh well. Any other suggestions?
