Happy New Year

Happy New Year! Yeah, it's an arbitrary date where everybody gets all fired up about the next year and drinks stupid amounts of alcohol for no good reason, but the world needs more holidays like that. Christmas feels pretty over-commercialized--my parents celebrate the solstice, which is likely where the whole Christian Christmas thing came from anyhow--far easier to appropriate an already-existing pagan festival for a new religion than come up with something original. I'm all for celebrating more daylight, here in Canda we're down to a skinny 8 hours of light in the winter, I can't wait for the days to get a little longer! I generally make what I view as achievable resolutions on New Years, we did that as a group this year and then just swapped resolutions we wrote on pieces of paper. Interestingly, people seemed to get the resolutions they deserved. Mine are to "Get all the POS non-working cars out of my driveway ASAP." Hey, all the cars work, just not at the moment... And one other one I already forgot so it doesn't count.

Spent New Year's Eve in the Cineplex Cave with Guy Lacelle and Guy Tremblay, two strong francophone climbers. Learned some interesting new Quebecois words while the Guys worked one of the best M9 routes in the Rockies, the Cineplex. Both sent it last try of the day, good efforts. I beat the hell out of myself first beating the holds in on my new route, then falling off it. It's nice that it's basically organized now--one of the problems with climbing shit rock with your ice tools is that the rock tends to break until it's all cleaned up. It's taken me four days of effort just to bolt and get the route cleaned up enough to actually climb. I had three redpoint burns on it, but it's really hard, best I could do was two very long hangs. The moves are so continuously powerful that as soon as I lose a bit of power I'm done, it's impossible to keep your feet on the small features in the horizontal roof. The climbing is super technical--keeping your frontpoints on the little edges is critical for the dynamic moves, but doing so requires several "front lever" moves...

Workouts:

Dec 31: Cineplex Cave, 2XM9 warmup, 4XMhard. Absolutely pounded.
January 1: Wanted to train today but my back, lats and stomach were totally thrashed so rest day. Went for a walk to get rid of hangover and did some Yoga.