Spring in Catalunya
Pau on the slackline, and DJ making a sandwich!
Sunshine! Warm temperatures! Yes, spring has arrived here in Catalunya. The forecast is for settled weather and temps in the high teens for the next week at least, and the air has that certain tang that heralds the arrival of longer evenings and warm weather. To celebrate, yesterady lunchtime Djanira and I went down to beach with our friend Pau. Pau is a keen outdoorsy person and used to climb a fair bit, but since becoming a father last year hasn’t found much time to get to the crags. To compensate he’s got himself a classic climber’s toy, which can be setup up almost anywhere at short notice – a slackline!
We found a couple of perfectly-spaced posts down on the beach, as you can see in the photo. I had never tried slacklining before, and I didn’t realise it would be quite so difficult! For the first half-hour, just standing on the thing was almost impossible, it wobbles so much. However, dyfal donc a dyr a garreg, as we say in Welsh*, and after a while I was able to string a couple of steps together. It’s amazingly addictive, and you learn pretty fast.
Pau is a bit of an expert and can do all sorts of fancy things like jump-starts, little skips, 180s etc. It’s cool because you can use the slackness of the line like a trampoline to help you jump into the air. I reckon next week I’ll be nailing things like this (skip to 2 minutes to see the grand finale):
* metaphorically translated as “if at first you don’t succeed…”
Paul and Ian, Masriudoms, and 7b+
Paul pulling into the sun on a 7a+ at Masriudoms
This weekend saw Paul Mealor and Ian Lau visiting us in Barcelona. The original plan was to get a crew of us down to Siurana, but for various reasons we ended up staying in Barcelona and making day trips. Fortunately, this is still no bad thing!
Not that things went to perfectly accordingly to plan, even so – the idea was that we would drive up to Montgrony for a day on Saturday, though that was scuppered when Paul and Ian’s Friday night plane was diverted to Valencia, and instead of arriving at 9.30, they rang my doorbell at past 2am!
So after a short lie in we decided to cut our losses and go to Gelida. I’m beginning to get a leetle bit bored of going there now, but the facts are that it is a great crag with loads of quality routes across the grades, so in our situation it was a bit of a no-brainer. The weather was spectacular, Ian onsighted his first 7a and Paul his first 6c, and a good day was had by all.
The next day the weather was overcast with a 100% chance of rain. However, PJ had a secret weapon up his sleeve – the cave at Masriudoms! After an hour and a half on the AP-7, we parked the van and walked in, to be greeted by this sight:
First view of Masriudoms cave
It’s very easy to run out of words when describing the Masriudoms cave. Awesome, huge, amazing, scary etc. etc. It’s about 1oo metres high from bottom to top, and so big and steep that after and hour or of being there, we realised that at some point after we had arrived it had started raining, but we hadn’t even noticed.
Paul on "Inhumana al Forn", 6b+, Masriudoms
A rare photo of Mr Lau, pulling around the arete of "ATP", 6c, Masriudoms
Needless to say, the climbing there tends to be in the upper 7s and 8s, and so not much was done – PJ was the only one with a reasonable excuse, in that he was still tired after going there the day before and ticking a 7c! The rest of us ticked the ‘warm-up’ routes, which were still awesome, and then dangled around on some harder stuff; although Lau came pretty close to red-pointing a nice looking 7a+: check out the video.
The next day PJ was working so the three of us headed to Pas de la Mala Dona. It’s a nice place with a fine selection of routes, but I wasn’t expecting a spectacular day to be honest. I had been climbing poorly all weekend, getting shut down totally on a 7c at Gelida, and dogging my way up a 7b at Masriudoms (great route, but undoubtedly the hardest 7b I’ve ever got on). So when I arrived on Sunday, I was content just to go ticking a lot of nice 6s, and completely ignore the two 3* 7b+s in the cave sector. Honest.
Fortunately for me, the rain had different ideas and, after warming up, a light drizzle picked up which forced us to shelter in the cave. It was my lead so rather reluctantly (honest!) I tied on to have a go a Les Garretes del Garraf, 7b+. To my immense surprise, I pulled through all the moves first try, resting only briefly on three of the clips. As a lowered off I realised it that the redpoint was definately on, and after a decent rest I tied on and ticked it first RP – though it was touch and go on the crux. Lau was on camera-phone video duties:
Needless to say I was totally chuffed, and after Paul ticked a nice 6c (going on 7a) first redpoint, the sun came out and it was time to take the chaps to the airport.
Enjoying the late afternoon sunshine at Pas de la Mala Dona, Garraf
So, a good weekend was had by all, and with talk of a bigger gang visiting Barcelona at Easter, and Jo B confirmed for an attempt at Fiesta de los Biceps in May, my climbing year is beginning to plan itself out nicely. And as for my goal of 7c by the end of the season? Hmm I don’t know. I need a fair bit more mileage on 7b and 7b+ to even think about it yet. But maybe.
Alun enjoying Masriudoms!
Check out the rest of the photos of the weekend, including some more of the impressive cave, here.
A rest is as good as a…err….rest?
Obviously I haven’t been posting much recently and that is because, simply, I haven’t been climbing much recently. Work commitments, both with my day job and my ‘project’, which no doubt I will write more about at a later date, have meant that I have had less (read ‘no’) time to go climbing, and neither will I have much more time during the next few weeks.
However, I don’t want to lose my hard-earned fitness, and according to Dave Macleod’s book ‘9 out of 10 Climbers Make the Same Mistakes’ if you find yourself in such a busy period, then just going climbing once a week can be enough to maintain fitness (or at least, not lose it so quickly).
With this in mind I was up to the Fuixarda to train this lunchtime, and to be honest I was expecting to be a bit crap. I haven’t climbed for nearly three weeks and was fully expecting to be weak. But interestingly, I wasn’t. I have one ‘reference’ traverse at the tunnel, 50-ish metres long, about 10-20 degrees overhanging, and around 7b-ish on big jugs. I judge my fitness by how far I can get along it, and with great surprise I found myself walking it all the way, without even really getting out of breath. I guess my enforced rest had given time for my body to heal completely, I’ll be honest I felt the strongest I have been for months.
So with not even a few seconds rest after the hard traverse, I quickly got on the ‘warm-up’ traverse (around 6a/b-ish) and did it three times in a row before falling off. Including the warm-ups I had done previously, that’s 250m of overhanging climbing in about an hour, and a pretty good work-out (for me, at least). And proof that sometimes, a couple of weeks off is very good for you!