After the heat had been going in the gym for a time, and I’d walked to the post office with Jedi and back, I headed out to put more holds up on the wall. This has become my pre-bouldering ritual this year, and will continue to be that until all of the holds are up. When Jody arrived, she jumped into the fray, too, and we spent about half an hour of the time we normally would’ve bouldered putting more holds up—it just felt like the right timing for it. Plus, I’ve finally mastered the drill, at least somewhat, so I can get the screw-in holds on the wall securely. It’s sort of the same as the drill I use to bolt routes, in that I have difficult exerting enough power to get the screws to go in properly unless I can get my whole body weight behind it. But if I can do that, even precariously balanced atop the wobbling stepladder that’s set on top of all of the bouncy, uneven mats, I can get the holds up even at the top of the wall.

When we did finally start bouldering, all of the new holds were exciting, as usual. It’s like having new routes every day, right now, which is so much fun and stimulates creativity. New combinations and new challenges are there for us to sort out from the patterns and angles created by the walls and holds. I crafted several new challenges, but overall, I wasn’t feeling too terrific—not sore, just not as peppy as I sometimes feel. So we accepted this state, both feeling this way, and stopped after about an hour and a half.

I came back inside and set up for my Tuesday training, power endurance with the drop-down pull-ups, a grueling 40-minute workout that gets the heart rate and breathing up, leaving me panting desperately as I try to feed my oxygen-starved muscles for another set. I get everything set up beforehand, and then I enter the semidarkness of the cool basement staircase where the setup is, knowing I won’t be leaving for the next 40 minutes, no matter what (sorry, UPS guy!). Then it’s on—I start with one set of maximum pull-ups (32 this time), rest 30 seconds, another (11 this time), rest 30 seconds. Honestly, those first two sets, when I still have more juice, tend to be the worst in terms of sheer pain. I do this for 10 sets, dropping down to a steady number of pull-ups in each set after the first two (yesterday it was seven).

Then, I repeat this in 20-second intervals (6 reps per set this time), then 10-second intervals (4 reps per set this time), and then I do super-sets, in which I add an elastic band (I have four of varying resistances) to take weight off every time I can’t do another pull-up, for 10 sets (started with 44 and ended up in the 20s for reps per set), with 30 seconds off in between. This is what replicates how I feel climbing in the Red River Gorge the best—just desperately pumped in my biceps, struggling to pull down on that hold one more time. It’s so good, so excruciatingly painful, leaving me gasping and heaving for one more rep every time. I’m definitely sold on this workout for working something I’ve always sucked at; it really takes it out of me.

After this self-imposed torture, I take about a 20-minute break to recuperate, eat something, and just get some energy back, and then I finish the workout with all the normal stuff, triceps work, squats, jumps, stretching, the usual. Yesterday, since I’d already walked Jedi in the morning, and since he didn’t really seem psyched to go anywhere (still tired from the run the day before, I think), I decided to forgo a late-day walk, feeling like I didn’t want to go, either. I was just torched and ready to write an article, then eat some food, watch some of The Wire, and head off to bed to try to rest up for today’s much shorter training session.

I’m sore this morning, not terrible, but definitely sore, which is a good thing. I like to know that my workouts are taking a toll and pushing me hard. “No pain, no gain” is so true, so long as its applied with intelligence instead of used to push oneself or others into injuries and poor recovery. But muscles have to be forced to think that they must be stronger in order to coerce them into becoming stronger, and isolating and training specific areas of weakness is the most efficient way to accomplish this. Now it’s my job to promote recovery as effectively as I can, with good, solid nutritional practices and plenty of rest for these worn-down muscle groups.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Climbing, Rock Climbing, Training for Climbing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.