Welsh Veduawoo

Mark Dicken past me on this photo of his latest obsession, a place he has descibed as the vedauwoo of North Wales. He is also a fan of widefetish.com, which when he admitted this to me I wondered why his wife was so slim given that he was admitting to being a chubby chaser. However on visiting the website I was totally shocked and appalled to see that it wasn’t a sex fetish but a climbing one, how disapointing.

Anyway Mark has been trying to get me up to his new playground and this photo was meant to tempt me! Who knows, a double foot jam elevator door manoveur seems pretty radical for North Wales, where is Big George when you need him, and why hasn’t this been in boulder of the month?

Anyway I really like the photo, and thought it worth sharing with you all, thanks to Mark for letting me use it. If you’d like to see more of Mark’s random art and stuff then visit his website hoseyb.org.uk which is well worth an explore if you are into your slate.

Nick Bullock

Nick Bullock Cruising Right Wall E5

I was in the Gallt y Glyn last night and saw that the perfect alpine man had returned from his winter of extreme suffering, and was waiting for spring/summer to arrive. I did mention that seeing as he got back yesterday he must have brought that shitty French weather back with him, and in fact he was more or less back in time for the monsoon season to start.

On the plus side the CC has got the Ynys Ettws custodian back, if the current financial crisis carries on I can see the hut getting quite busy. In fact I might have to butter him up to propose me as a member, not! After all I would feel slightly hypocritical after some of the choice stereotyping I have levelled at the CC membership.

Anyway I just thought I would big up Nick’s Blog as he has been entertained with some of my posting over the winter apparently. I asked him about his blog, and whole bandwidth issue. Which he isn’t bothered about as the fact that the peepshow mentality that blogging opens the blogger up to is shut for three out of four weeks a month, suits him fine. I agree with him, I like the ‘for one week only approach’, unfortunately though my blog will stay live 4 weeks out of four!

His latest rant, as Nick’s posting are nearly always good rants, is about internet criticism by one french guy. I will link to his site here, and unlike Nick, what I wanted both of my readers to do is click on his site and leave the one word comment ‘Cock’. If all of you do that I will be made up. It is not big, not clever, but very juvenile and funny to boot. Unfortunately the site is so web 1.0 it doesn’t appear to allow comments although if someone who reads French finds a way to comment then please comment here so we can all join in the misguided fun.

Anyway the idiot accused Nick of being a media whore, which I find very amusing! As he quoted off other people blogs, and whilst one was his sponsor site it wasn’t him that wrote the piece. In writing for the internet and blogging, you have to remember that often we haven’t got the resources, be they time or money to thoroughly research topics. They are totally opinion pieces often based on what google knows, and given that any idiot can publish there opinions on the internet and given the right saturation of key words and meta-tags subsequently appear on google, it is often only complete idiots who make a point from a misguided point made by an unknown and thrown into the cyber-cauldron of anonymity.

However I truly believe that the whole internet slagging comes down to simple playground jealousy. I know I slag of images and articles in magazines simply because I am jealous that talentless idiots are given a licence to print money, when the real talent is swept to the sidelines. You see no real argument, just petty jealousy; besides my granny always said ‘if you can’t think of anything nice to say, say something nasty!’

Later in his article Nick says that he ain’t that talented, now given that I use this line a lot as well I thought I best interject and say that for a shit climber he ain’t doing that bad. What he means is, his ability doesn’t come easily and he has to train like an athlete to get to the level he’s at. This winter I followed his example, and blow me I got really fit and attempted routes I would have never dreamed of  getting on before. I did it through hard training at the wall and running up hills.

So I dare you to follow Nick’s example, climb more, eat less and try harder (…or was that Stevie’s advice?). Either way Nick is a shining example of someone climbing for the sheer joy of it, and getting dead good in the process. He is no slouch at virtually every type of climbing, however if you want to burn him off get him on a boulder!

If you don’t get there today his blog will have run out of bandwidth, not that he’s bothered.

I have chosen this track to be played with this blog, in honour of my hero Nick Bullock! 

Coaching Workshop

Well I have just delivered a coaching workshop to half of the first year undergraduate Outdoor Sport Science course from Bangor University. It was quite interesting as they know the science behind the the practical side. However it was good to see that they were all keen to learn how to apply it to the real world.

We covered topics like:

Performance profiling and goal setting
Warming up
Using Technique Drill
Top roping technique drill for aerobic training
Learning how to find and use rests
Bouldering for various strengths (fingers, arms shoulders, core, legs)
Bouldering for power endurance
Planning the lead climb

Anyway it was only the third time I have used delivered this session, and it seemed to go down very well. As it allows us to cover a lot of subject matter, and allow each individual to go away and apply the tools they need to make there climbing better by identifying key weaknesses, and how to improve them through simple training techniques.