Archive for the ‘Rock Climbing’ Category
I first heard about Albarracin many years ago. I heard good things and bad things over the years and finally decided that I had to check the area out for myself to be the judge. I made the drive from Lisbon, Portugal to Albarracin in hopes of colder temperatures and majestic sandstone. To my amazement, it was everything I had ever dreamed of.
The climbing in Albarracin is some of the best bouldering in all of Europe! There are big proud boulders in all directions and tons of potential for new lines. I spent my first few days climbing many of the classics of the area but soon found some amazing projects that i was quite eager to try. One of which was on a big boulder and was super steep, much like a lot of the climbing in Albarracin. The climb looked really gymnastic and powerful. Out of all the projects I had seen I was most psyched on this one!
The first day I tried the line I was unable to do either of the crux moves but felt close to both of them. The crux moves are back to back and both are quite low percentage, especially the second one. The first hard move involves jumping to a bad pinch and holding a hard swing. Once you do that you have to match the pinch and do the hardest move on t he climb, a long blind dead point to a very small crimp high up on the face of the boulder. I fell here countless times!
On my third day of trying, I was beginning to get really close.
Unfortunately the weather was not looking so good and it began to rain. I was forced to stop trying for a bit. A lull in the rain finally emerged and I waited 15 minutes or so to let the top out dry slightly. After one bad try, I found myself topping out what would be the first ascent of “Helicopters on Beaches” 8B+.
I am really psyched to have put up such a classic hard line in Albarracin! I think that this line is one of my best FA’s to date and I look forward to people putting effort into repeating it in the future!
After hosting the world premiere of Welcome to the Hood in Madrid, the search is on again for new boulders all around the world!
Paul Robinson, prAna Ambassador
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Cross Posted from Team ABC Boulder
On Thursday, March 29th, 2012, Brooke Raboutou sent God’s Own Stone, 5.14a, at The Red River Gorge in Kentucky. Brooke is visiting the Red over Spring Break with her family and other team members and coaches of Team ABC Boulder. This is her first 5.14.
Brooke’s ascent is extremely impressive and places her in the record books as the youngest American and youngest woman in the world to send 14a. She was also nearly the youngest person in the world to send the grade, but she will now share that honor with her friend Tito Traversa of Italy, also age 10, who sent his longstanding 14a project on the exact same day as Brooke’s ascent.
According to Coach Robyn, Brooke’s ascent took 5 tries. On her first day, Wednesday, it was quite hot and Brooke went up the route to figure out all the moves and then gave two redpoint burns. On Thursday she tried the route cold, fell, came down, rested, and then sent next go. Brooke has previously sent 13d, with Swingline at The Red during last year’s spring break, as well as 13c and a few 13b’s.
To see Brooke’s personal profile, click here –> Brooke Raboutou « Team ABC Boulder
Congratulations Brooke!!!
~Jackie
Team ABC is proudly sponsored by prAna. For more on Brooke’s story check out the Rock and Ice post.
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On March 22, Outside Magazine’s website will be hosting a live webcast of 3 soloing movies from SENDER FILMS and the REEL ROCK Film Tour: “The Swiss Machine” featuring Ueli Steck, “Fly or Die” with prAna Ambassador Dean Potter, and “Alone on the Wall” starring Alex Honnold. Here’s the best part: The star athletes and filmmakers will take part in a live online discussion at 7pm MST about the nature of risk in climbing. See you online!
More from Dean Potter
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It’s a special crowd that’s attracted to a yoga retreat that combines daily yoga practice, surfing, slacklining, AcroYoga, Thai Massage, climbing, Kirtan, Tai chi and dance parties. Looking back on that shopping list of activities I have no idea how we did it all and could still stand up (and dance) on the last day/night. Resembling an adult yoga summer camp, Redefining Balance lived up to it’s name once again exposing students to a variety of modalities of balance allowing them to take their yoga practice off the mat and all over a tropical paradise.
Held in Rincon, Puerto Rico this retreat was like a magnet for truly adventuresome, creative and lighthearted individuals who knew how to have a great time while pushing their own personal limits of balance. The sleepy surf town of Rincon graciously welcomed over 25 students who were willing to take their yoga practice onto surf boards, slacklines, each other’s feet, rock climbs and even onto the dance floor as we had our resident DJ Sinton Vignos spinning several house parties as well as a private late night dance party up at our friend’s local shop the uncharted studio.
Joined for the second year in a row by my dear friend, talented photographer and fellow AcroYoga co-teacher, Kadri Kurgun we assessed the strengths of the group and decided to start them out on the first day with more advanced AcroYoga poses which we then took into full on higher level acrobatics in the shallow waters of Jobos beach – ideal for splash friendly bail outs and fancy dismounts.
Slackline workshops tuned students in to their stealth ninja balancing skills through practicing yoga poses on 1” thick webbing set up in a range of lengths and heights between trees. With a foundation of slacklining, Acro and yoga, students were in good balancing shape to make the transition to surfing and climbing as we took the practice to new surfaces. Groups of 6-9 students would paddle out with our amazing surf instructors to learn the ways of the waves and what it’s like to apply the balance, flexibility and strength of a yoga practice to a moving surface gliding across the water. Similarly the transition to rock climbing brought the practice to a vertical dimension and helped many students conquer an initial fear of heights that was rewarded with an amazing view of the beach at sunset when they got to the top. We were super fortunate to have Danny anchored in at the top taking amazing pics of everyone climbing up and then posing with the setting sun as a back drop.
And as many of us were blessed with bruises, scrapes and entire body soreness from our days in the water, on the rock, flying, slacking and everything else we were balancing on, we were grateful for the down tempo vibe of the Thai Massage classes, Tai Chi and kirtan to help restore us and highlight the calmer side of finding balance. When the Bomba sunset session party gathered mid-week we were all excited to learn a bit more from the local instructors Leslie & Randy about the traditional dance and drumming form of Puerto Rico. Gathered at the lighthouse amongst a web of slacklines, people flying, musical instruments and food we all played up until sunset and then gathered to learn a bit of the dance steps and rhythms associated with Bomba. Once all of us started to let go of inhibitions and just move to the beats the result was a crazy fun dance & drumming party that kept us out for hours well into the dark.
It didn’t take long for friendships to form and I’m excited to see when and where we will all cross paths again. As this was only the second year doing this retreat we all feel the bar was set pretty high by the crew who came out this year. I look forward to offering the retreat again in 2013 as well as expanding it to new locations… stay tuned.
Special thanks to my dear friends Kadri Kurgun, Sinton Vignos and Ryan Martin for their beautiful images and helping hold it down in the water, on the land and in the air. For more information and to check out pictures from the retreat visit ‘Redefining Balance’ on Facebook.
Happy slacking/acroing/surfing/climbing and balancing in your own favorite ways…
~Adi Carter, Yogaslacker
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Abruptly sidelined by a strange, physically painless injury on her first climbing trip to Spain, prAna ambassador Alli Rainey is forced to take a hard, honest look at the starring role rock climbing plays in her world and what it means to lose it, even temporarily.
I arrived in Spain three weeks ago for a two-month climbing trip. My hopes were high for this adventure. Kevin and I were both finally whole and reasonably healthy, though Kevin was admittedly recovering from a terrible flu, and I was on the mend from a radial nerve impingement that had somewhat impaired my range of motion in my left hand through the end of December and January. But we were both otherwise feeling strong and psyched. We had awesome trip companions – a couple from Salt Lake City and a couple from Scotland – who were splitting the cost of renting what turned out to be a virtual castle-on-a-hilltop, our home for the time here. Everything was looking grand, until…
I tripped on marble steps in the Paris airport on the way here. When I did it, I didn’t even really think much of it, because how many times have I tripped and fallen in my life? I was more just embarrassed, probably catching my foot on the stairs because I was jet lagged and tired and not paying attention. I bruised my left knee when I slammed it into the ground. I didn’t even think about my almost-healed nerve impingement in my left arm, which had caught the brunt of the impact – not until a couple days later, when my radial nerve swelled up in its tunnel and cut off the signals from my brain to my hand (this is what’s most likely to have happened, anyhow) – far more dramatically than the initial injury ever had.
Overnight, I went from feeling ultra-fit and ready to crush to being virtually paralyzed in my left hand. Unable to type or use my hand normally in any way, I struggled, to say the least. (For more on how I sorted out my diagnosis and prognosis, check out my blog entries, starting with Sidelined, http://allirainey.com/home/2012/02/07/sidelined/). After two days of climbing here, one on easy terrain, jet-lagged before the swelling really hit me and rendered my hand useless, and one with a useless hand that I shouldn’t have climbed on at all, I sat out climbing for the next two weeks.
I spent the first week mired for the most part in a personal darkness that I don’t care to visit again in this lifetime if I can help it, though perhaps having been there once would make it easier to manage and cope with should it ever happen again. Being unable to use my hand at all, no matter how hard I sent signals to it from my brain, made waves of nausea wash over me regularly; seeing my own limb not respond to my inner commands was the most gripping and terrifying experience of my life.
But even while concerns about climbing and climbing performance faded into the background in the face of my inability to perform daily living activities, my sense of inner balance, peace and joy weakened – from not climbing. It was hard to admit to myself just how dependent I’ve become on rock climbing for balance in my life, and it was honestly quite frightening to weather the impact having it so suddenly yanked out from under my feet in such a decisive and conclusive fashion. Climbing makes me happy, makes me feel alive, makes me feel connected and whole. Not climbing diminishes my sense of harmony and delight – and the longer I don’t climb, the more pronounced this feeling becomes. This is a frightening thing to realize fully, just how dependent I personally am on climbing as a source of motivation and joie de vivre. But then again, it’s also exactly why climbing pulled me in and made me a “lifer” to start with.
Climbing is an amazing whole-being experience, compelling me to draw upon all of my resources as a human being to achieve personal bests and successes in the moment. Climbing drives me to take chances and make spontaneous decisions mentally, instantly delivering them to my physical being to take action, pushing me to stay emotionally centered and focused while my physical body works at its limit. It’s a contrived survival-of-the-fittest exercise in its own way; I think this must be why so many of us get hooked. When we climb at our limits, we’re regularly pushed as total beings in a way intended by evolution or God or whatever you believe caused human beings to end up the way we are. Modern life splits us up into not-whole beings, encouraging us to perform mental work while our bodies sit still and to exercise on machines while we distract our minds with media. But when we climb, we can reconnect all of our various aspects of our being into one coherent whole, dwelling only in the present moment. This is a beautiful opportunity and experience to discover and to be able to repeat, over and over and over again, as I have throughout my adult life thus far.
Having this suddenly swept away reopened my eyes to something I knew already, but perhaps (I hope!) served as the final reminder/kick in the pants I need to never forget it again in my lifetime. Climbing is a privilege, and every day I have the freedom and good health to climb is a blessing and a rare stroke of luck that I should embrace, no matter how I perform on that day, send or fail. After this whole semi-paralysis experience, seeing people have tantrums or get really emotionally upset about not performing on rock climbs seems utterly ludicrous and childish, to be honest, though I myself have gotten inordinately worked up about not sending rock climbs far too regularly throughout my two decades of climbing for me to admit without feeling a sense of shame and sorrow for that former incarnation of me. What a waste of potentially good climbing times, to allow myself to get upset about rock climbing performance, especially since I always try as hard as I can, and what else could a person possibly expect from themselves and their bodies except for that?
Anyhow, I don’t want to get all preachy here; I just more wanted to share my still-somewhat-confused swirl of emotions and thoughts as I return to climbing again, in the hopes that they may help you or someone you know realize how incredible and amazing it is to just be able to rock climb, in and of itself, and to remember that the whole point – the only point – of rock climbing, for anyone really, is to have fun and to push their own human potential, regardless of what others can do. You only get one body, so you might as well appreciate it for what it is and can do when it’s whole and healthy and functioning, as well as nurturing it and protecting it from harm as best you can, and striving to heal yourself back to wholeness intelligently when you do experience injuries from playing hard.
Yesterday, as I led my first route after a week of top-roping, tears welled up unstoppably when I managed to make a clip with my left hand. A week ago when I was top-roping easy climbs, this still seemed like an utter impossibility to me. To be able to lead climb again – on a route that challenges me, no less! – so quickly after being unable to move my hand a mere two weeks ago far surpasses my expectations for the pace of my body’s recovery. Life seems wonderful, balanced and whole for me once again, now that I’m climbing in beautiful places in the sunshine with great people.
And yet I feel something else in me now, too, something that makes me really value and appreciate this whole experience with losing the connection with my left hand, as strange as that may seem…something that’s hard to put into words or express. I’m not exactly happy to have had to deal with this situation, but more retrospectively appreciative of the hard truths it revealed to me about myself – chiefly, my dependence on climbing to bring me to the highest points of exultation as a human being that I may ever experience.
I’ve realized more than anything else that I should savor and revel in every single one of those days and experiences that I can, because someday, the inevitable will happen and I won’t be able to climb this way anymore. The best-case scenario is that I will simply become too old to climb like this, if all goes well, barring an accident or illness cutting my climbing career even shorter. To waste my time now being less-than-100-percent psyched on every day I can climb hard is to rob myself of fully experiencing these precious, fleeting moments of my own existence as a complete human being functioning at my peak capability…
~Alli Rainey, prAna Ambassador
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