Well obviously Climb the Devil's Tower didn't happen.
I started the year with the same resolute weekly rehab/ training program of weights & punishing cardio :sick: at the gym/ auto belay at the wall/ hiking carrying stuff/ Fingerboarding consistently that I'd ended 2019 with and high hopes for the year's climbing. However the first lockdown fucked us all and my way of dealing with it was to forget climbing even existed so the Beastmaker went out of the window (figuratively speaking) and I haven't been back to the gym or a climbing wall since. However, my other half and I turned our living room into a kind of training complex and stayed sane with co-ordinated exercise bike and weight training throughout the year which has seen me get, while not quite into green, a long way into orange status with Equal or better all my pre-injury strength PBs :dance1: This autumn/ winter I've been back on the fingerboard twice a week religiously 8) too. It's funny how much all this stuff interlocks and plays off each other- the secret to regaining leg strength was weighted squats but I couldn't do them to any kind of depth before this summer as my ROM was so poor. But the squats themselves seem to help the flexibility now I can do them all the way... similar with dead hangs- they were so hard early in the year and I made such slow progress. getting stronger shoulders etc. has meant that I see improvements every time I do them this winter.
Emerging blinking from lockdown in May I decided that I was more than happy to just spend a year climbing locally so Central Buttress (The Scafell one) & Climb in Scotland didn't happen either but it did set me up to have a decent crack at the *** Sub-extreme Peak trad list that I was psyched for a year ago. It was 46 routes, mostly HVS (a grade I'd only climbed two of before June and didn't do first go 'til July) so was too much to ask really. I also didn't have the appetite for getting partners to go to specific crags and obsessing over specific routes so I just tried to do 20 HVSs. I just about did that (some real softies in there!) but most importantly I was climbing them confidently and fairly quickly by the end of the season, with very few of the confidence crises and meltdowns that were still part of my climbing in 2019. I didn't Get on The Rasp though- that one was a bit too ambitious. :lol:
So no green, but I do feel like I've had a successful year, just not in the ways I planned to!
