It begins again

The night before we go on holiday with my folks, Al shares that there was a blue line on the pregnancy test. Here we go again!

Development update

Took Callum swimming today. He's coming on lots and we ought to think about swimming lessons soon. I think he could take a more structured approach OK. He's happy to try swimming on his own with the armbands, but struggles against the current in places!

Connor's volcabuary is coming on. I thought after I got back from Font that there'd been a leap, but I wanted to document it:

Hiya

Standard phone greeting.

Bye

Standard phone sign-off.

Sweetie

Used when rattling the cupboard door.

Share

When trying to get a toy back off Callum.

Sha-sha

Shower, but can't quite pronounce it.

Mama

...

Daddy!

...

Me!

"Who wants to be first in the bath?"

Yes!

"Would you like some pasta, Connor?"

Font trip 2006 retrospective

So, this is in effect a post-project review. Sad. Next time, I'll have a Gant chart! Anyway, in no particular order of priority:

• I was strong - should have got more done.
• I had real problems transferring that strength to the rock - getting the power onto the road as it were. That felt like a real technique thing - the majority of training for this trip was done on my board, or doing deadhangs and ladder work. So need more variety generally. Well, I already knew that, but it's a bit hard to get living in Hampshire!
• Preserve skin, rest properly.
• Take rest days.
• I don't live in Sheffield and do twenty hours climbing a week anymore. So don't get sucked into climbing with others that do! Further to that, I am only doing around five hours climbing a week. To get the stamina to do lots of climbing, you need to climb lots. No secrets, just hard work and time.
• Specificity! My training mainly consisted of doing thirty problems with two minutes rest. So I was fairly well primed for doing circuits of that length, but not a full day of all-out bouldering.
• Session peak. Doing twenty problems like that is not a good warm-up for climbing anywhere near my limit. Doing a short warmup and making the seventh problem that I do at my top-level would have been a better fit.

So major takeaways from that are that I need to climb more - I'm trying to address that by going to Craggy at lunchtime and getting some mileage in on the self-belayer as well as bouldering. That has its own pitfalls, but doing an additional 150 moves per session can't be a bad thing, even if it is climbing on blobs and routes that I know too well. Also, I need to start doing weights again. Not sure how I'm going to fit that in yet!