Where I Have Been

Everywhere. But most specifically, Orkney, in the North West. Hmm. I suppose things could be worse. In fact I know that they could, because in order to get there I drove past Ikageng. We have some awesome looking soccer stadiums following the World Cup. And we still have Ikageng, and lots of others like it. Anyway, the world out there is brown and cool (because it is still winter) and the sky pale and watery and there are rolling hills and dust and it's the Highveld. Somewhere close to Orkney the hills give way to spoil heaps, and if you drive past them into the town you could try to find somewhere to have a cup of coffee. But I don't think you would succeed. The best I could manage was stopping in the car park of the local Spar.

But here it is, all up on the Interweb. Worldwide...

On the way back I drove through Westonaria, Randfontein, Krugersdorp... It was all quite surreal. Dusk, lights from mines, odd towns that looked like shit heaps and yet made me feel nostalgic for something that was not even in the past.

I drove on, dropping down out of Krugersdorp to the N14, passing a gaudy and bizarrely appealing casino that looked like a cross between a drive-through fast food outlet and something from a Douanier Rousseau painting. Clearly I was losing the plot.

Closer to the airport I heard a song I didn't know - Airplanes II by B.o.B feat. Hayley Williams and Eminem. Cool.

The next day I was training and this is what I could see.

Better?

And then I went to Montagu. On the way it looked like this:

Sheep and wheat, although I don't really notice any sheep in the photo. My camera has a resolution of one nano pixel.

Finally I stopped here. Things could definitely be worse.

I spent three days here, working in the morning, and climbing in the afternoon. 

Workspace. There was nothing to do except work, nothing to read except work, nobody to interrupt me.

And finally, I was here. Things really could have been a lot worse.

Where I Stood

It’s funny but on Saturday after I made the arrangement to climb with Cobus on my route I started to think that I had bitten off far more than I could chew. I wished that I had opted for a venue where I didn’t have to perform, where it was warm and sunny, and where there wasn’t a walk-in, thorns, and a scary abseil. Where I could  belay someone while they struggled. On the drive out there it got even worse – I was constantly wishing I was with my kids, buying books and drinking coffee at a mall, or with my girlfriend. Anywhere safe and comfortable.

When we got to the valley I still wasn’t convinced. In fact we decided to climb where Cobus wanted to first of all, on the pretext that the temperatures were better to do things in that order. The reality is that wasn’t so. His route was getting too hot, and we had to waste time during the day stomping back and forth across the valley. Even when we went over to my route and  I had set up the rope and put the draws on the bolts, I still wasn’t sure. I had been thinking that this was all too much pressure for me, and that it was a sign that I really needed to shift gears big time and stop pushing myself so hard. Time to buy a pipe, and feed the ducks on a Sunday morning. Time to act my age.

Finally I was faced with the decision – to top rope and practise the route yet again, or to go for it and try to do it. So I did the latter. I was ultra-nervous, imagining it would feel insanely hard, that I would fall off the first hard move, or that the back wall of the gully would be too close and I would fall and hurt myself on it.

In the event, it was nothing like that at all. I climbed up and clipped the first 3 bolts, and climbed down to the ground. I took off my shirt and went for it. As soon as I did so it felt as if I had switched into an entirely different mode. I wasn’t thinking about anything except the next move, and while I was still too nervous for the attempt to have been successful, I tried hard the entire way and did every move with real conviction. At the rest, which turned out to be less restful than I hoped, I could see my heart leaping round in my chest like a jack-in-a-box on speed.

At the crux, or at least the hardest move, I got the technique slightly wrong. Accumulated fatigue, a slight loss of sharpness of thinking and I wasn’t pulling in hard enough on the back step, not straightening my body quite enough and hence leaving myself with way too much pulling on the sloping crimp. I got the next hold, but right at the bottom of it, where it’s too bad to hold onto. I kept trying to reset my fingers into it, but each time I ended up with them in the same place, slipping out of the flaring part at the bottom. I seemed to be trying to do this for ages, although I suppose it was merely seconds. And then I was out of there.

On my second attempt I made a small adjustment to how I clipped the bolt just below, and clipped off my left hand, which was more awkward, in order not to fatigue my right as much. This time, something weird happened on the foothold as I tried the move, and my ankle felt odd, but worse, my skin felt really soft on the crimp and I didn’t really stand a chance of doing the move so I fell in a slightly lower position. 

After that I did the moves from bolt to bolt, and it felt OK. But then it would, because it's an endurance problem...