It’s been a tough week for training.  My motivation has been all over the place for the past 10 days, and I can’t exactly figure out why.  But, this is all part of the process and the experience, so I will share it.

Now that I have more time to focus on my climbing, I find myself feeling the need and desire to impose more structure on my training.  I operate very well with structure, but now as I try to structure something that used to be somewhat of an escape from the ordered aspects of my life, I am finding it challenging.   A great deal of my time used to be consumed by work and school, two things that come with time frames and deadlines built in.  Now I am building my own structure, making my own timelines and setting my own deadlines.  It’s not a bad problem to have, but it’s a new challenge that I am tackling.      

Despite my motivational roller coaster, I have still been training as much as planned.  My training schedule is still being refined and reworked, but it basically looks something like this: I climb 5 days a week.  I am still trying to decide if this is too much.  Most days I feel like it works, but a few days this week I felt pretty beat up. Two of my training days involve onsight sessions followed by volume.  Two of the days involve double sessions.  On double days, I do weight room work and systems board work in the morning, then go work my part-time job, then go back to the gym in the evening for an onsight or volume session.  In the weight room, I focus on strengthening my puny legs so I can be a better jumper. On the systems board, I do a series of exercises that target specific moves I’m not so good at.  The fifth day involves focusing on jumping….I jump a lot…and I fall A LOT.

The common theme throughout all of my training days is that I fail much more often than I succeed.  This can be very frustrating and taxing on my motivation.  I love the feeling of mastering a climb and being able to repeat it and perfect it and make it beautiful.  This doesn’t often happen in training.  I am trying to target my weaknesses, which is not an easy task for the ego.  This week, I took a day off of flailing in the gym to go climb on some new boulders in Estes Park.  Being outside on a beautiful day with friends was a much-needed break from training.  I climbed well, and even managed to get up some boulders, which was a nice reminder that all of the failure eventually pays off.