Qualification
This years competition was supposed to be the biggest one so far. There were 74 men and 52 women competing. Due to the big athlete pool, qualifications had to start early in the morning. I started early on so I started warming up at 6:00 in the morning.
Although it was early I felt full of energy. Additionally the feeling on the wall was great and I couldn’t wait for the qualis to start. Due to feeling really good I was psyched to climbing but at the same time I didn’t want to put too much pressure.
My time to climb the first route came at about 8:40. I really didn’t know what to expect so I just entered the route with a simple goal. Give everything you got! Strangely I fell 2 moves from the top and ended on 7th place in that route. I impressed everyone with my climbing, especially myself.
But things changed in the second route. The route was easier than the first one and it was all about endurance. Therefore I got pumped really low and finished around 34th place. I haven’t been training lead for too long so I guess I currently have enough endurance for one route.
Although my really bad climb in the second route, I was still able to secure a spot in MY FIRST EVER LEAD SEMIFINAL!! I was going into second round in 21st place.
Semi-final
Semi-final started the same time as qualifications, which meant really early. I had to start warming up around 6:00 am. This time I didn’t have the slightest problem waking up and going to the isolation zone, because I was so happy, I got a chance to climb in the semifinals! With that in mind I wanted to make a relaxed performance, with no mistakes.
First off, it was observation. During the observation the route didn’t look that hard. The feeling on the wall was later quite different and some moves felt pretty insecure. Nevertheless I wanted to stay in my flow and make the best of it.
After the climb I was not really satisfied with my final height as I knew I could do better, but due to some mistakes in the lower section of the route, it really wasn’t bad. Although I had a really bad slip and I still fought my way through the next few moves and that really showed me that I might have more endurance than I think.
Walking away with 16th place was not only my first semifinal performance, but also by far my best lead result. I just have to say I am really psyched about the result and all the future trainings. It really show me that my training is finally paying off and gives me even more motivation for the upcoming months.
Next stop
Next stop are the last lead world cups of the season in China and Japan and I really can’t wait to test my endurance there. Of course I will also be trying to make a good result for the Toulouse, but I am going to compete there just for fun.
The lesson of this post is: If you don’t have fun while climbing, things just might now fall in place and therefore any further training is going to feel hard. I am really glad that I took a week off from climbing, after coming from Japan. It really showed me what is the most important part of the sport!!!
As always if you had made it so far, thank you for reading and I’ll be back in 3 weeks time with my report from Asia.
