Posts Tagged ‘climbing’
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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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I didn’t know it was possible to fall in love with a place. Yes, I had seen cities, oceans, towns, rocks and mountain tops that made me smile and even drool a little, but Moab is different. I am in love with Moab the way you would love a person. My stomach flutters and I hold back smiles every time I type out the word. Yeah, it’s that bad. I don’t think I’ve ever had this big of a crush.
From the top of a boulder that I just climbed, I look out and up at how the bright blue sky lines the rock faces and creates a sharp red edge. Borders and outlines mesh together in some places, like when mountains get blueish and fuzzy with distance, but not here. In Moab, you can see exactly where rock ends and sky begins. They add beauty and drama to each other, but they do not mesh, they only snuggle up close at the places they touch.
I immediately know that this is the place I want to lead the climbing and yoga retreat I’ve been dreaming about for the past year. Of course Moab makes me want to climb, but it also makes me crave yoga like no other place I’ve been. I decide that people need to see this.
A few weeks, hours of research, and emails later, I’m on the phone with Steph Davis, and she is helping me with the details of the trip. Because she is a sweetheart/badass, she has agreed to lead an afternoon of climbing on the retreat, and this makes me giddy in the same way Moab does. As we hang up the phone it hits me that this trip is happening. I smile.
Join me and Steph Davis for the adventure of a lifetime. Spend your days climbing, practicing yoga, trail running, mountain biking, and rafting. Come back to camp to find a freshly cooked meal prepared by our local chef, and sleep under the full moon. For five days, we will live in the wild. Prepare to never want to leave. Can’t say I didn’t warn you.
For retreat details visit solyogatrips.com/trips/moab-yoga and for more on Steph Davis visit prAna.com/ambassadors
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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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Wow! The 19th Annual Rock Rodeo was a huge success! 165 competitors gathered at The Hueco Rock Ranch early Saturday morning, March 3, 2012. It has been one of the warmest winters I have ever spent in Hueco but this day the competitors got lucky. It was cold and the 40mph wind gusts that brought this cool weather in Friday subsided to a nice breeze. These temps would feel good at the rocks but as Emilia Rafaela and I stood at the registration table it was bitter. Eager competitors were eating the breakfast provided and cooked by Evolv as we got them through the registration process with the help of Wagon Wheel and Rock Ranch volunteers. 33 guides gathered to help get the competitors out into the back country. It was a bit chaotic organizing people in groups of ten, in their categories, getting their names on guide and north mountain forms and getting them on the shuttles but Mallory Pickrell and Heath Baily were able to help Adam organize the chaos. Adam Strong, Rocco Bocchicchio, Trevor Turmelle and Andy Klier were the masterminds behind the problem list this year and Adam was responsible for changing the guiding format up a bit to facilitate competitors moving around the guided access areas by having some guides stationed in areas and others running competitors.
Putting on an event of this size there are always a few things that don’t go as planned–the shuttles were not as big as promised. Freed up from registration I went into action. The first round of competitors were off to the park but there was a long line from the road at the Rock Ranch back to the barn. Our truck and Uhaul were both stuffed full of prizes, scanning the crowd and the cars looking for a match I saw Beau Kahler and I also saw his truck. I shouted to Beau about what I was thinking and he threw me his keys. I grabbed a group of 7 people registered in the open category, including Sean McColl, Mike Doyle accompanied by their guide Liz Gilbert. Every one crammed in and Doyle jumped in the back with pads. We were off. About 30 seconds out I remembered Beau telling me the day before that his truck was running on fumes! I remembered our yellow gas can sitting in front of our camper, “Ok everyone I hope you don’t mind but we are going to have to make a little stop at Wagon Wheel” I announced. I knew Mike was going to be confused when we took a right instead of a left to get into the park but we all laughed as we gassed up and filled him in on the pit stop. After a few trips we got the competitors in before 10 am. I was able to meet up with the ladies in the Mr Serious cave where Angie Paine and Nina Williams had just quickly dispatched of It’s a Good Day For Swiss Crisp Mix and Mr. Serious. They moved on and I hung out to see some really good tries by Flannery Shay-Nemirow, Natasha Barnes and Courtney Sanders who fell off the top out. The ladies next stop was Focus. Nina Williams made some great attempts climbing to the end of the problem about eight times and Angie sent. After, Angie said it was the scariest problem she has ever done rivaling Suicide Season in RNMP. Angie continued to have a great day getting the first female ascent of Sub Zero V11. Later, she told me “I knew the Rodeo would be fun, but the event turned out to be even more fun than I expected, and I got to spend the day trying hard with an awesome group of strong women.” I had limited time in the back country since I wanted to return to the vendor village and get things rolling. On my way out I walked by Daniel Woods who was trying Crook By The Book and asked him how it was going, “trying to deal with the heat” Daniel responded, I laughed wishing I got to climb on one of the best days we have seen in months with some great and motivating people.
The comp went on and Daniel Woods said that it was “the best climbing day of his life.” In about seven hours Daniel did Two Days With Gene V11, Full Monty V12, Phantom Limb V12, Nagual V13, Crook by the Book V14, and The Machinist V14 totaling 7880 points. Jorg Verhoeven from Abcoude in The Netherlands was only 475 points behind Daniel. Jorg did Chupacabra Right V11, Rumble in the Jungle V11, Two Days With Gene V11, Sub Zero V11, Nagual V13 and The Machinist V14.
Only 40 points behind Jorg came Sean McColl with a challenge flashing Nagual making him the second person to ever do Nagual first try. Sean also did Focus V10, Chupacabra Right V11, Rumble in The Jungle V11, Sub Zero V11, Full Monty V12 and Flamignon V13. Dave Graham was not far behind McColl by 305 points doing The Hand V10, Sub Zero V11, Chupacabra Right V11, Two Days With Gene V11, Phantom Limb V12, Cut To The Quick V12, and he came real close to Nagul but his foot popped at the last second. Brian Anthenunisse, Sam Davis and Nick Duttle also all had good days sending hard boulder problems.
Katharina Saurwein from Austria was a late entry. She and Jorg did not realize they would have stayed for so long and waited all morning to see if there were spots left in the backcountry and lucky for them there were. Katharina earned 6240 points by climbing Glas Roof V9, Russian Women V9, Chupacabra Left V10, The Hand V10, Focus V10 and Rumble in the Jungle V11. Angie Payne was175 points behind after a great day of climbing doing Mr Serious V8, Frogger V9, Glas Roof V9, A Good Day for Swiss Crisp Mix V10, Focus V10 and the first female ascent of Sub Zero V11. Nina Williams had a strong day as well with 3685 points doing Mr. Serious V8, Frogger V9, Sex After Death V9 and A Good Day for Swiss Crisp Mix V10. Courtney Sanders was climbing really well but it was a heartbreaker of a day for her as she fell off the top of Swiss Crisp, Frogger and Glas Roof! Flannery-Shay-Nemirow and Natasha Barnes were out there trying as well and had a terrific day giving good attempts and keeping the mood light.
The after party at the Ranch was a huge hit! Back at the Ranch Vanessa Compton was classing up the joint with an art show in the house. Her unique visions of Hueco and other pieces were available to purchase as well as Sam Davis’ photographs. Matt Segal and Emily Harrington entertained the crowd of around 350 people with their slideshows about their world travels including the various cultures and climbing they encountered. Party goers are still taking about Dave Graham’s slideshow, “amazing” and “hysterical” are what they are saying. People enjoyed Graham’s down to earth account of living the life of a climber growing up in the industry and some of his life shaping experiences; Graham theorized that if he were still in Maine he would be home shoveling snow.
About a month ago we decided that we should have a climbing wall. Dave from Joshua Tree helped with the design and a crew of Wagon Wheel volunteers got the materials and put it together quickly. The first year that a Rock Rodeo had a climbing wall obviously means that it was the first dyno comp. Daniel Woods set the dynos and Courtney Saunders emceed the event. There was a rare sighting of the masked man, Does Huevos who flew with conviction but Sam Tingey took the men’s victory and Nina William’s got first for females.
We were privileged to have such great athletes being a part of the 19th annual Rock Rodeo. The problem list was challenging and the competition was stiff. I was so fortunate to be surrounded by so many psyched people who were all happy to help volunteer their time to get The 19th Annual Rodeo together and thankful that the Rock Ranch allowed us to continue to host the event (the 9th Rodeo held at the Ranch). Emilia Rafaela killed it getting so many amazing sponsors and with out her I would have been lost. We were a great team. Our sponsors were phenomenal this year. It was a joy to work with professional supportive people. We had copious amounts of prizes to give away and several top dollar items donated for an Access Fund and Hueco Valley Foundation raffle. I have signed up to do this again next year and Adam has agreed to help and of course we will have the beautiful Emilia on our side.
We are still working hard to try up all loose ends but we expect to donate $9000 to Hueco Tanks—and that is what it is all about.
~Melissa Strong, prAna Ambassador
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Let me start by saying that I love climbing. That much is obvious. Climbing is central to my life and has played a large part in almost every decision I’ve made for the past twelve years.
I love climbing, but in the recent months climbing has had to take a backseat to “life”. I’m always amazed by how quickly “life” can swoop in and consume all of my time and energy. In the last few months work has taken it’s toll. As a teacher I always feel like I’m never done, or ready, or caught up. The days just keep coming and I just keep doing the best I can. Everyday someone asks me, “How’s it going?” and everyday I answer, “I’m here and I’m giving it my best”. I love that my job is never boring, but I always find myself wishing I had time to do more and be better. I’m always wishing for more hours in the day to get stuff done.
A few weeks ago I bought my first house. A process that started in July finally ended with a successful closing. The following weeks were spent packing, painting, and moving. I don’t know if everyone agrees, but for me moving is one of the most exhausting and stressful endeavors EVER!
With boxes everywhere, mountains of school work, and numerous home improvement tasks on my to-do list I was a little shocked when my boyfriend suggested we go on a weekend road trip. Climbing was the last thing on my mind but when he said that I could sleep in the car, I agreed.
The further we drove from home the more relaxed I became. I quickly fell into the once familiar routine of watching the landscape roll by as I caught up on my favorite podcasts. We were headed to Lander, WY via single lane highways and wide-open spaces. Rarely did we see another car.
We arrived in Lander mid-day on Saturday and met up with our good friend and weekend host, B.J. Tilden. Sinks Canyon was the destination. The walls of the canyon bask in the sun for most of the day and by mid afternoon I was climbing in a tank top and feeling great.
I do not have any impressive sends to report. In fact, I managed to fall repeatedly on a route that I onsighted a few years back. I didn’t do a million pitches. I didn’t even try all that hard. I just went climbing with my friends. I met new people, read a book, drank some beers, and climbed in the sun. I let go of the anxiety and the stress that “life” had thrown at me and I stopped wishing for more time to get stuff done. I just enjoyed what I was doing while I was doing it.
My weekend road trip reminded me that climbing is central to who I am. Climbing outside, that’s what keeps me sane. That’s what makes “life” worthwhile.
~Jen Vennon, prAna Ambassador
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Chris Sharma and Mindful Living Ambassador Mark Coleman talk about the ‘inside game’ of climbing and how our thoughts can either hinder our performance or enhance our experience. The universal idea of letting go and focusing on the present moment allows us to more fully enjoy our passionate pursuits and our lives… of course this is easier said that done…
prAna ambassador Mark Coleman shares his Mindfulness techniques with the folks at prAna.
Mark Coleman leads a one minute meditation focused on using our breath to help us live in the moment… Ahhhhhhhh
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