Intensive

Sums up yesterdays session at Anston Stones, where I basically climbed all out for about 5 hours or longer without stopping to eat or drink, trying to beat moves into submission and see if I could be close to actually getting an ascent of anything.

It was the usual scenario with a brief warmup and a couple new 7a's. Then straight to work on the stuff that should go down in a session but somehow never quite happens.

I tried in vain to get beta off Owen for Alpha but there wasn't any forthcoming so I pulled on, went wrong handed first move and failed to get the crimp out left. Next go I went straight to it off the pull on and the problem went down this go. Rookie!

Back to my long time nemesis of Ebola and unsuprisingly, I had to work out every move again as it had been a long time since I tried it. I got thoroughly knackered working out where to have my feet for every move and almost got lucky climbing through and catching the crossover move only to fire off two damp holds whilst my legs swung back in.

I had another brief go but didn't get the small pinch and moved on.

Black Crow was the next thing that caught the eye and I got out to the two holds near the lip with my feet set on the first attempt, only for the left hand to fire off soaking wet. This was the same case on two further attempts despite futile drying attempts inbetween.

I did the moves on Dark Art apart from 1 (the only hard one), then continued my beta workout left of Bullet on some reachy eliminate line inside the arete. This was proving a bit hard, so I decided to just try something even harder and got on Revolver.

I wasn't expecting much but managed to get all of the moves apart from the crux slap over in about 1 or 2 attemps on each. The body tension fight to keep feet on the back and get them across was proving a bit hard after 5 hours of horizontal shutdowns but I was glad to have had marginal success on them.

I awoke feeling completely ruined today... so I assume it was a good workout! There is the possibility of a return journey on Thursday if John gets the day off and I think the plan is for a Sunday trip also, which means a chance to have closure on Ebola. Hopefully Black Crow will have a drier LH hold and more progress can be made on Revolver and Dark Art.