With the new goal to climb V10 this summer and a fine tuned training program, I am going to start doing weekly updates on this blog from now until the end of the semester and then some updates on climbing throughout the summer. These weekly updates will be posted every Sunday between the hours of 12am and 6am because that’s when I work and have time to sit and write a blog (or do basically anything else). These updates will be about the week before starting on Sunday and ending on Saturday of the following week. So, with that out of the way, lets get into this.

I would say that this week was the first full week of my training. I had created the initial version of the training program early on in the semester and actually followed it on and off for the first few weeks because I had weird work hours and general class stuff to get out of the way before hand. But this last week was the first full week of training. Lets start with Sunday.

Sunday (2/7) I didn’t do anything. At the time, it was supposed to be a rest day so I guess I did follow the program.

Monday (2/8) was climbing and hangboard training day. My friend and I went to climb and stuff before I worked the desk. We did some basic projecting, I messed around with hard campus moves, and then we did our crappy hangboard training program.

Tuesday (2/9) was hard training day. This day was quite a good one. After an extensive warmup, we started with some good ole burleys. If you don’t know what burleys are, basically you find a moderate route next to an easy route and climb up the moderate, down the easy, for 10 minutes straight. Now this was not fun at all. Don’t get me wrong, the endurance training is great but the gym was hot, it was on a pretty crappy wall and we couldn’t really chalk up because all I had was my chalk bucket. Instead of doing burleys, we are going to do 4x4s on ropes from now on. After that, we went into burnouts where you hang on the hangboard as long as possible and then run straight to a moderate/hard route while you’re tired. We did this 5 times in a row and it turned out to be super hard and gave us a good pump in our arms. Next up on the list was minute boulder problems. We each picked 4 routes that are moderate/hard for us. How it works is you have 4 minutes on and 4 minutes off. During the 4 minutes on, you have to climb the route starting at the top of each minute. So in the 4 minutes, you climb the route 4 times, take a 4 minute break, and then repeat. This training is good for power endurance and I used to do it a lot while I was competing. After that we projected for a while and then finished with some nice cool down climbs and some stretching. Tuesday’s training was nice and hard.

Wednesday (2/10) was supposed to be a rest day but the circumstances suggested otherwise. Wednesday we had an applied calculus test at 7:00pm. After that, our group of friends that are in that class, got together after the test to climb. We did this all last semester so its kind of a tradition now. It wasn’t necessarily hard climbing but we did climb and I did send my project. One of the hardest boulders in the gym with a really low percentage deadpoint to a pinch on an overhanging wall.

Thursday (2/11) was our second day of hard training. Originally it was supposed to be our cross training day but I had posted my program on reddit and got some good feedback and decided to change it up a bit. Thursday’s training was just about the same as Tuesdays although we didn’t do burleys, did our 5 sets of burnouts with no breaks in between sets, and did 5 minute boulder problems instead of 4.

Friday (2/12) was active recovery day but I climbed way more than I should have. I’m a route setter at the gym and our setting schedule is once a week alternating Wednesday and Friday. This week, we set Friday so I climbed pretty hard during forerunning and then climbed again after dinner with my friends. This was definitely not what I should be doing but next week I’ll be more strict about my rest.

Saturday (2/13) was a pure rest day. I didn’t do anything related to climbing or training which is good. My fingers needed a break.

There you have it. The first weekly update of the semester. This will hopefully be a weekly thing unless I forget to do it while sitting for 6 hours at a desk doing nothing. I want to make sure I keep a good log of my training as I try to send V10 this summer.

Thanks for reading and make sure to check back next Sunday for another update.