martedì 3 febbraio 2015

The last two months


Here we are with my first blog spot of the year 2015. The period riding December and January has been quite busy and many days were spent inside for training and preparation. Like usual, training has a double face; a bad one and a good one. Once I got the training mood, I always know that I sit the rock climbing out for a while. This is a negative part and sometimes it is even dangerous as you lose the rock feelings and technique. The positive side is that once I got into this process I am just damn focused on training and nothing else; I like this thing and I love to do it despite sometimes rock climbing misses a bit. During 2014 I basically had only 3 weeks of training during all the year, then I got injured and I had 3 more weeks in autumn where I made a kind of soft/keeping training just to recover well and prepare my wrist for hard climbing and for the though moments would come next. Late in autumn, I felt it was time to start again and I opted to buy an online training program from two well known trainers of Teamof2. The program provided 10 weeks of daily schedules. Since the Christmas holidays were in the middle of the deal, I split it in 3 different sections: 3 weeks of hard training, two weeks and a half of rock climbing/rest/soft training and 3 more weeks of full training again; all this package would have made a flew from December to the beginning of February. I was excited.

At the first look, the program seemed to be interesting and mostly new for me. In fact, it was. Many workouts that I wasn't used before had been added. While the schedules I already did before underwent modifies using other systems or other recovering time. It has been curious and newsworthy to follow a program set by every day of to-do's. Before this, I just planned what I should have done in the whole week, giving no matters to the order of sessions or the days when I had to push hard or not. Moreover it is the first time that I followed a program made by someone else and not planned with a self-setting. New stuff like I said, new ways and new workouts. For example I had Cardio sessions where I was completely green, TRX workouts for the core and the shoulders and other cool exercises. Since I do only bouldering I often underestimated the Cardio aspect and its importance and aftermaths. I knew I was bad and it deals of one of my biggest lack, but I didn't think that it could be so useful for bouldering. Definitively it will be a part of my future training.

The graphic of my shape made a lot of ups and downs during the period. At the beginning I felt gorgeous. Between the first and the second week I had a really high peak, I managed to do my first 1-5-9 ever on the personal PG, I could try V14 in the wall and I sent different hard problems in the gym. Then I started to be tired, weak and a bit sick from training. The last few days of the third week I had a big cliff, my muscles hurt but I was mentally serene, since the drops are obviously normal. I went to Ticino for few days; I rested, I climbed a bit and I enjoyed the fresh winter air. I felt pleasure, joy and I got relaxed in being out instead of close into a stinky and dirty pigeon house or into a fitness gym where I could read the sameness of the usual customers riding on a static bike. They seemed stupid and I also was. One day I felt bored and faint, while the day after I ticked "ninja skills" off. This is to say how the ups and downs can change and the shape can evolve, dropping or rising. I came back home and I came up again few days during the holidays. I tried hard on "big kat" and I finished this line after 4 days of war. I tried "the story of two worlds" and I felt everything was going down again. That day I perceived a intensive dose of tiredness which followed me for days. I reached the lowest point during the middle of Jan, where I sensed fatigue and I had to fight to make 1-5 on the rungs of my PG. My shoulders didn't answer, my body was off and what I had was only a bit of finger strength that allowed me to go on. Sometimes I skipped the daily workout; I felt insane trying something when your body or your instinct don't feel good and positive. On the last week I came up again. The skin raised up, the shoulders seemed to be better and day after day I added a piece of mine to the full package. The core strength missed again, and it is missing right now as well. The motivation came and the line of my imaginary graphic probably is reaching the medium values. Now I finished, I felt I need rest and recovering days, I need to find a way to link all the skills together and make one unique well-working piece. The time will say if it has been worthy and useful for myself, or just a kind of "keeping" training and the hard times was vain. I am confident, we will see.

Ninja Skills 8B+, Sobrio (CH). Photo Stefan Kuerzi