Fast forward two months and it was time to test my endurance on the first competition of lead season in Villars. Villars is a beautiful village in the Swiss mountains, with a venue that consists of both speed and lead climbing wall.
Speed competition
Everything kicked-off with speed qualifications on Thursday the 4th of July. Speed is currently one of my biggest weaknesses and I always like to think of the speed competition as some sort of warm-up before the real competition next day. It makes you less nervous and allows you to perform better.
That was the exact thing that happened. After a pretty rough practice I was later able to set my new personal best in speed – 8.3s.
It is always great when you set your personal best, but for me it was also a bit disappointing. I was really focusing on improving speed climbing in the last month and I feel like there is no progress…
It is always hard to determine whether your body is tired or if you had been too nervous during the competition or is it the lack of training. I still haven’t decided which one is it, but I know one thing for sure. I definitely trained more than ever before, so I guess it is just a matter of time when everything comes together.
Lead qualifications
With the speed competition behind me. I felt ready for my first lead world cup this year. The competition started in the morning (9:00) and lasted until late noon (17:00).
I began with climbing at around ten o’clock and I felt really good on the wall. And by good I mean that moves felt easy and I wasn’t getting pumped really fast. I was able to recover some energy on multiple parts of the route. I finished my climb with an unnecessary foot slip, but nevertheless still made a good result.
After finishing the first route really high on the ranking, I was feeling more than confident for the second route.
Second route went far from perfect… I feel quite low and it put me in the final 41st place.
Qualification analysis
To describe what happened. The route was a bit more bouldery than the first one and everyone would expect me to perform better on the route like that. Just the opposite happened, I was struggling from the very start of the route and I got pumped in the matter of two moves. I tried shaking-off the pump, but my forearm just wouldn’t relax…
Quite disappointing climb for me and huge blow on my confidence. But like many times before, there is no time to think too much about that one route. Just think how many routes in your entire career didn’t go as planned and it was still okay in the end.
This is how I am going to approach this route as well. I know it was a world cup competition, nevertheless the best way is to forget the route, realise the mistake. Have I been too nervous, did I warm-up enough, was my head in the right place?? Once you know the problem, focus on fixing it the next time you have a chance and just forget the moment when it happened.
The principle is simple, but the execution is always the hardest. Really psyched to try again this week in the valley of Chamonix.
