November

Better post something for November, sorry for this being terrible: A new low has been reached in my years climbing. The number of hours spent climbing in the month of November is exactly zero. Contributing factors have been: PhD during week, being too stubborn to go to the wall in evenings, reluctance to use Woodie in evenings due to falling off probably annoys the man downstairs, and being drunk/hungover/doing laundry at weekends. Hmm. I guess at this time of year there's a choice of "train" or "do nothing". Thusly I have opted into the "do nothing" camp, I guess as a result of my continued disillusionment with climbing.

October

Went to Kelvinhall twice. Just back from North West sporting. I could feel the weakness seeping through my fingers, made worse by a fearful observation that I'd put on weight. It's not been a good month.

September

At times, I feel confused. It really annoys me when I read news or politics. What you get is two people's opinion, both of whom are trying to convince you that they're right. Neither of them is looking for the truth, just how best to cover their backs or get your vote. Also, T.V. adverts - I don't understand them, why do people buy toilet paper because there's a puppy rolling around in the stuff? Do people not know that puppies arses are amoungst the foulest places know to man?I've noticed that very few (read: none) adverts appeal to me, which has made me think I'm out of touch with the common person. Maybe there's a massive amount of strange, wealthy people who respond to adverts by buying what I would consider to be shit. We're sold anti-ageing products with the suppressed premise that "You don't want to look old" which is unkind. Although I don't need to worry about looking old just at the moment; "Do you have any ID?"... sad times.

September... Once again my memory isn't vivid, though there are things I recall with clarity. A theme was pets. I took a week or so in Inverness where I looked after my mum's cat. I had access to a car so made trips westward, to the luxury quality Torridonian sandstone. I'll echo Alan Cassidy here and say that this rock is brilliant, however I'm going to keep up the reputation of the lost generation. I just bouldered. No big ticks, but good times were had at the Celtic Boulders and Kishorn. I remember racing Anna's dog across the beach, and getting an earful of tongue from Dave's dog.

I've tried Tolerance a bit, but I don't think my motivation is deep enough for it, unlike someone... I've climbed once since getting back to Glasgow, which was a trip to Bowden Doors, which I liked. But the sandstone was clearly inferior to the north west, with some feeling like soggy cardboard and most holds being sandy, and a bunch of Uni club wanks bumbling over the place... I've recently told myself to stop looking for criticisms and concentrate on the good bits; that last sentence was a bit of a fail.

August

Hazy memories of August... Not sure if I've actually done anything, as what I remember is blurred with alcohol and hangovers. I've sorted out a Ph.D. for the next few years so keeping the student dream going, right?

Ah I went to Reiff. Can't really remember what I was doing there, why I was in Inverness in the first place. I remember having a curry and a night out with my dad. Hmmm... Not going into the details too much there. But the next day, I was at Reiff which was really hot. I had a sore head and smelt badly of B.O.. Impressively, I managed to climb an E3 - not bad.

Reiff - Picture from Murdoch Jamieson

A bad part of my visit to Reiff was hurting my foot trying to jump between two wave cut platforms. I'm just about fixed, 2 weeks later.

I cycled to Duntelchaig. I figured I can cycle, I can climb, but I can't really walk so it would be worth a try. There was this man fishing in the loch; he was like: "sore foot?", "yep", "looks sore", "not too bad"... hobble, hobble, hobble. I did some top rope roping and took some photos for this guide so not a complete waste of time. I loved cycling down hill really fast as well.

Video: Mark McGowan

Back in Glasgow, I've joined the routes crazy at Dumby. Tolerance is my route of choice, and I've been working on it with Nic. It's going ok, expect from holds breaking. I'm inexperienced at knowing exactly when to have an attempt. The trade off between recovering between last go, and getting cold is pretty tricky to master and I seem to end up with cold hands quite easily.

Stamina is improving nonetheless, with a trip to Dunkeld where I got Silk Teddies 2nd go.

Just received a new desk - Nice! It has drawers and a slidey bit for my keyboard. The bad part is that it takes up more of my room and what with Dumbuck II, I need to keep things tidy or it'll get out of hand really quickly.

June

Like most people, I find two things having the same name confusing. The observant amongst you will have notice the neglecting of June in this year of monthly blog posts. To rectify the situation, this month's edition will be named slightly misleadingly as events about to be described have all actually happened in the month of July, but in my opinion this is better than having two July's.

2 main things happened in... the past month. 1) a trip to the Cornice and 2) building a woodie.

1) There are two "Cornices" in the Peak district, obviously the Peak Lime pioneers didn't have the same foresight as I do. We just went to the Chee Dale Cornice.

This is us after a sweaty walk back to Dave's van, seen on the right. I'm tensing my abs but the other two aren't (supposedly). On my first time down into the gorge, I was getting quite depressed - waste high vegetation, ankle deep mud, humidity collecting in the trees, closed in, no sun - even if the crag was brilliant, spending a day down here was going to be shit.

Well, it wasn't as bad as I expected, and as soon as I'd done a route I realised it was quite good. It's more open than I'd expected around the crag, and there was a patch of grass where I could lie down. I basically did a 7a or two each day to warm up (or more like redpoint), then spent the rest of the time failing on Cry of Despair, Powerplant or Nemisis. One particular highlight was falling off a 7a+ having skipped the last clip and ending up most of the way down the crag... Another good moment of the trip was at Raven Tor where I tried a route called In Brine or Sardine or something, around 7B. It was an excellent battle and I fought through so much pump but fell just below the top.

So I feel I've had a good Peak Lime experience, complete with a night's sleep under Ben's Roof. The main things I liked about Limestone were getting pumped, taking falls, onsighting and Malc's one armer. As someone who loves bouldering, I get disillusioned by doing easy moves and I think I did ok avoiding that on this trip.

2) Woodies... I tried to write this bit as a series woodie/penis jokes, in keeping with the entries theme of things with the same name, but I'd just embarrass myself. Anyway, the woodie has been erected ... in my room, and I'm making more holds for it now. It's made me realise something which is climbing is a really dynamic object, which can flow into so many places. All we've done is get some timber from a wood recycling place, applied some ideas, built a wall - it's still the same wood, but it now has the essence of climbing. I used to think climbing walls were shit, but now I realise they're just pieces of plastic (ie quite cool).

The woodie was named Dumbuck II.

July

Student! Expired!

Some of the month of June was spent in a tent. Other times I was in the pub watching football and going to parties, indeed I'm hungover just now. In between these two great activities, I've climbed on Ben Nevis and Malham. The main theme of both those trips was waking up early. Ha very early. Dan and I got up at about 4am to do Centurion, only to find it complete soaking and misty. On the 2nd pitch I ran out of draws and started wigging myself out that I was gona slip off the wet holds, not have enough rope for the belay, etc etc - the kind of stuff boulderers should get slagged for. It was even mistier by the time we made it to the ledge and I started to worry about getting lost going down. So, we abbed off, and by about 730am we were packing up the tent for a bus at 5pm. Wondering aimlessly around the corrie for a few hours in waterproofs, and a with a Soreen malt loaf to share, we didn't get too depressed which I think was partly due to pretending we were characters from Lord of the Rings... The trip wasn't all bad, we had a great experience on the Bullroar which involved lots of exciting traverses.

The earliest I woke at Malham was the morning after a pub quiz at the Buck Inn. After a few pints, the idea of sleeping outside seemed pretty good. I woke up soaked with dew at about 4. Doom and gloom came quickly as I realised it wouldn't go away till the sun got going in 5 hours time. It was too late to retreat to the tent. The only option was more Aimless Wondering, so I put my boots on and enjoyed a good 3 hour tour up to Malham, down to Gordale, onwards to Malham Tarn and back down the Penine way. Quite nice, but I was knacked for that day's climbing. Climbing at Malham was a kick up the arse, I'm unfit. I need an old fashioned climbing binge to get my act together.

I've just been through the surreal experience of graduation. I'm now a proud owner of a sheet of paper with Latin writing rolled up in a red cardboard tube. I've already accidentally sat on it.

May

Well that's Uni over. I feel like making some concluding remarks about the thing so here goes. (Skip ahead to the ******* if you get bored of the physics)

So I did Physics. Sometimes I think Physics statements are just statements of the obvious. Like Newton's laws of motion... "Stuff's movement changes when you push it". That's basically all there is. F = ma, where F is the push, a is the change in movement (or acceleration) and m is just a constant. I look out my window and I can see loads of F=ma. Rain bouncing off peoples umbrellas, peoples feet pushing the world backwards, wheels on cars around round in an angular adaption, a brick's weight on other bricks which push back up due to electromagnetic interactions so there's no net push.

I think one of the main differences between physics and engineering is that physics is obsessed with the simple rules, whereas engineers look at more and more complicated examples of the rule.


There's a quite a lot of statements of the obvious, particularly thermal physics which somehow really confused me. The rule is like "cold things don't make hot things hotter". But the thing that makes such statements meaningful is that they are all testable. It's not like theology. Newton tested his law and so did a lot of other people. The tests worked and they saw that the rule was good... kinda... It doesn't work at really high speeds or really small scales.


My favourite stuff in the course was Quantum Mechanics, which is changes you need for small scale. The rules are still simple but they sound funny. Here's one: "To every observable there corresponds a hermitian linear operator that acts on the wavefunction of the system". An observable is something like position. So "position operator acting on the wavefunction of an electron" is a typical sum we would do in class. The answer to the sum is not where the electron is but where it is likely to be. That's the best you can do.

Where is the electron???

So in the picture the electron is likely to be around position 5, but it could be anywhere. The wavefunction contains all the information there is about the system. So even with all the information possible, you can only get a probability of where the electron is. The wavefunction is found by looking at by looking at boundary conditions, the limiting factors. What happens when you look directly at the electron itself? You find out where it is of course! I'm getting carried away a little bit here...

Gotcha

The most important part of it all is that before you look, there is absolutely no way of knowing where the particle is, which has some really crazy consequences. All the stuff you might've heard about things being in two places at once, alive and dead cats, quantum tunnelling and more.
It seems strange that there is no way of knowing, and you might wonder why that is the case. One of my favourite quotes from being an undergraduate is "Shut up and calculate!" from David Mermin, which helped me get to work on the problems and stop thinking about that kind of stuff, safe in the knowledge that no one knows what's going on.

*******

Uni in general has been great, in particular this last year where I've got to know all my class mates and had good fun. I maybe should've joined the mountaineering club but got the impression they were a bunch of bumblies. It could've been fun, but I reckon my 1st year trips with Danny where just as good. I'm remembering the Cobbler cave, Glen Coe, the Peak, Dunkeld, DWS festivals and Auchinstarry trips.

Most of my climbing time was spent at Dumby, and I'm so glad that I went there over climbing walls, even if it meant climbing less often. My first day there I almost died topping out an E1 on wet grass. That was the only time I've done trad there, which is a bit of a disaster! I remember sending sufferance with a preplaced beer at the top, walking back down that hill over and over after falling off consolidated all the time, doing Hoop with Ben being just good fun, falling off 2HB and landing on the tree, doing the Shield as a first Brit 7a, then lapping it, Pongo Sitter as the hardest and best thing I've climbed and Sabotage feeling easy. Other than the hard stuff, I don't regret just arsing around in good weather, even if I don't remember it as clearly.

At the end of exams I went to Torridon with Cath. Weather was mixed: we had sun, wind, rain, hail, snow, fog and midge weather. Made it up Beinn Alligin and Ben Eighe. Eating supernoodles under the triple buttress was a definite highlight...

In the evenings I went bouldering at the Celtic Boulders. I got quite into making patios and spent a lot of time doing that. One patio in particular was a work of art. It sits under an arete which initially had a terrible landing with knee deep cervasses between pointy boulders. I should've taken before and after photos, it really is something. I then climbed the arete from a sitter, which made a really good problem, like a mini Careless Torque, the crux is getting your foot up to start laybacking.

Up the slope from the ship, just below the crag I found a boulder which had a landing which needed a bit of patio-ing so got stuck in. The problem turned out to be a holdless slab which you could almost walk up - but not quite! At one point I was falling backwards on to the new landing but managed to swing my arms like propellers and regain balance. It reminded me of that wee slab at Burbage North, right of Remergance. That boulder also had a face problem and good arete.

One evening I tried to tick every possible problem on the Celtic boulders below 7a. I got about 30 done but reckon I was only half way. People around Glasgow sometimes ask if it's any good there and the answer I think is yes. There's still scope for "questing" but the stuff that's there will keep most people busy for the weekend.

They're all great problems. There's loads of easier stuff which isn't to be missed either. And if you do go questing, remember patio-ing is very time consuming!

April

Just a quick post cos I'm meant to be revising... err so the main climbing thing was doing Sabotage. The next day it got downgraded which was a complete bummer. Yeah, with modern beta it's fine, once I got over the fact that's it's hard it became a lot easier. Will got it on video, and when I watched it back I thought "Haha, Will thanks very much for putting in fast motion, making me look stupid" but turns out I was just climbing fast and I look stupid of my own accord, but I'd guess it helps.

I went lambing. This time I got as far as pulling a lamb out, but still too frightened to go "elbow deep in sheep" like the pro's. I named my pet lamb Buttons.

Had an interesting trip to Dumby. Two nights before, I'd been in the ABC nightclub and had got a donner, chips and cheese with sauce on the way home from a Kebab Palace run by a man called "Bob". The mates I was with were regulars, it was my first time. The Palace was shut, but a polite knock on the door, and it was open again. Nothing has ever tasted so good.

No surprises then that I spent the next few days on the toilet. Before going to Dumby I was sure that my tummy was empty and that I didn't eat or drink anything, hoping that I wouldn't get caught short. I took some toilet paper just in case. Here's the vid of that day. You can tell by the end that I'm tired - it's because I'm dehydrated. I had to stop at the co-op for a juice on the way home... The ticket man on the train said there was no toilet. I was pretty much running up the stairs to my flat!



Been to Dumbuck a few times and did an excellent route called House of Pain, which had (unusually for dumbuck) a vertical section.

I'm going to be slightly controversial and write about something that happened in May, despite this being April's post. Yesterday I finally nailed So Be It. Getting this route in the bag was great because it felt hard. Sometimes when you redpoint something it ends up feeling easy, but on this I felt like I was taking chances and getting lucky, making mistakes, shaking through the crux - it felt like what climbing should. A good end to the project which started, in a wet November I think. Ha ha oh yeh, thanks to Nic who let me borrow his shoes, chalk bag and harness as I forgot all mine. We made a belay harness out of rope which was pretty good.

March

Since last month, things have progressed a little. Le Tour de Technique now has a sit start thanks to Malc Smith, Le Saboteur - very good! I talked about liking the consolidated wall and I put together a colour coded topo earlier... just a bit of fun really.



It makes a change from the warm-up wall, which is quite nice...


Did the top out to Sabotage which it pretty classic on its own I reckon. Managed the cut loose section and am quite psyched... My temptation is to drop everything and get it done which I'm trying to resist with final exams coming right up!

Headed to Dumbuck where I got back on So Be It. I made it up to last year's highpoint. Limiting factors seem to be dodgy heel-hooking technique to get past the crux, power fad during crux set up and a lack of confidence, which is better than it being soaking wet. My plan is to try some of the other routes there for a bit, to try and avoid complete tunnel vision.

More Recently, Cath and I headed to Glen Lednock. I probably deserve a bit of a slagging because I spent most of my time brushing up an unclimbed wall instead of doing the classics. I just got my brush out and started cleaning, which made a good warm up. I think I started suffering from a mild case of obsessive compulsive disorder and couldn't stop cleaning and trying it - the landing was not safe! I tried to patio out the blocks underneath but they were pretty big. I could've crushed my hand if one of the blocks slipped, like that guy who had to cut his own arm off in some Utah canyon. There was this sheep that kept going BAA!! as if saying "Don't do that!". Shut up sheep. I gave up on the patio and padded the blocks as best I could.

I had one sore fall on/off the pads and rolled down the slope over a pointy rock and through a pile of sheep poo. I reckoned with myself that I was ok, and body reluctantly agreed. Eventually, I made it too the top and silently said "woo!" to myself. Then I realised there was no one around for miles, and there was a great big dam to my left. I shouted "Woo!" and got a good echo from the dam in reply. I don't usually talk to dams, however, having just spoken to my sore back and a sheep, it seemed appropriate and very pleasing. It's called "Afraid of the wave" and I don't know how hard it is.

I tried to do some other problems but made a mess of most of them: I think I topped out too soon for the tick on Breaking Wave, 7a, Tried to do a V4 dyno barefoot but had to put my shoes on, couldn't get off the ground on Reiver's Logic and Manic Stupor was a bit wet and had too much of a 'hole in the ground' feel (but would be good if it was dry). My climbing was a bit clumsy that day...

Oh yes, and I entered a doubles badminton tournament! I teamed up with this guy called Ivor who was from China. We made a good team, narrowly missing progression from the group stages by one point! That point is going to haunt me for a while yet... flip.

Uni courses are over, just 9 exams to look forward to in a months time... ug.

... flip.

February

The Start of the month was pretty good if I remember. I went through a rare psyched patch at dumby and got that lip traverse, Le Tour de Technique (must've thought I was in France). By psyched, I mean psyched for something specific, which is what was rare... Anyway, had a few sessions on somethings... I like the consolidated wall quite a lot now. I picked up litter at Dumby and found 2 umbrellas. Leaving Dumby clean as a whistle was pretty good, but the very next day there had been a party in Firestarter cave meaning more litter. That day, I tried to climb stuff but found my ankle got sore. Since then I've been playing badminton with Dan and Ping Pong with Nic, but most of all I was working at uni.

Sometimes I get really psyched to do something at dumby, like Le tour de technique, and at these times I've dropped lectures and stuff to get it done. But most of the time at Dumby I'm happy doing not much, eating scotch eggs, climbing whatever. I've no motivation to get a project because I know I won't get up it. I'm a very motivation dependant person and really struggle to force myself to do things, especially at dumby where I find it easy to take stuff for granted. But the trade off for that is when I am motivated for something it seems to go quite well. Shrug. I hope I don't regret not trying when I grow up, but hopefully I wont forget who I was just now. Message for me when I'm older: "hello, sorry I didn't really try, but I couldn't be arsed!"

January

For climbing, this has been a bad start to the year. Starting out in Inverness I went to Brin and am fasagadh but didn't do much. Since coming back to Glasgow I've been to the wall once and dumby once.

A goal for this year is to climb an 8a+ route and I should be 1/12 the way there by now. In fact I would say I've actually got worse so reckon current progress is at minus 10%. I'm hoping next month will be better, but uni work is increasing so will have to put some effort in if I want to achieve another of my goals which is to get a degree.

Archives

Ok, so sometimes I write a blog post but don't post it. I had a look back at some of these and I've decided to post them up. I don't really know what I was thinking when writing them so no longer feel liable for saying things that are boring or offensive... (mostly boring)


Kilnsey

I think a large part of my failure to get a lot done at kilnsey was due to my shoes being too sore. Think a new pair of shoes would be excellent, some really comfy ones, maybe even so I can wear wooly socks or something.

Sport Climbing. hmm...

no name

My favourite bit of last weekend was running through a wooded hillside looking for a good place to shit. That, or climbing on my own. Both were done away from the powerscreams, spotters shouting at me and the need for success. What they did have was something I could actually feel and see with my own body and mind, personal experiences that I have and are not some product of training and pushing but just something that made me feel awesome at the moment.

Ruthven Boulder

I don't mean to put a downer on the psyche levels of Dave Macloed after his amazing effort on Echo Wall, but I thought his problem, Dude Direct, at ruthven was particularly easy for 7C!

Climbing vs Maths

Some of the underlying human instincts are common both in a mathematics problem and in a boulder problem, I've noticed.
The first way is that they're both exercises.
The Second is that you strive to perfect them, do them automatically, like a "well oiled machine" (as my lecturer put it).
The third is they're baffling to anyone who hasn't studied them, not only in terms of method, but also in terms of "why???"
Which leads me to the final similarity, an easy way to the solution is round the back...

Christmas and New Year

Got a bit of climbing in over the Christmas hols around Inverness. With the snow, options were limited for rock climbing I think I did ok considering.

Headed to Brin a few times, with all the snow it was great fun to begin with, following deer and rabbit tracks around the wood and sledging down the hill on pads. It was pretty cold though. I got one good tick - Pitbull 7B+, a Dave Redpath problem from a while ago. A vid is here which also shows snow going into my wellies from crossing the treacherous field. Here's a not so good video of a different trip to brin. Enjoy... well, I say enjoy...




I think I had fun that day despite not really climbing. Just brushed up the problem which turned out to be too hard for me. Then went home. err

Another place I went was Am Fasgadh which probably has been one of the most popular Scottish crags over the past few weeks. Some of the routes were seeping and there was a risk of being impaled by fallen icicles, but apart from that, it was good fun.

Back in Glasgow now and here's a taste of life in my flat: