World Cup
15th Jun 2012
I have been spending the last few months training for the comp season. Preparation hasn’t been ideal – I tweaked my knee in December and its been pretty lame ever since. Stupid really, but having a peg leg meant I actually had to pull hard and not rely on my feet all the time. Its not easy forcing yourself to climb stupidly, but it certainly gets you stronger!
Due to all the training I wasn’t getting out too much, but I did manage a few warm days on some trad, and a good (if a little odd) day out at “Barry the boulder” near Scarborough, where I managed Tom Newman's prow Requiem:
After this it was off to Innsbruck for the World Cup.
Isolation is usually very demoralising - watching some of the worlds strongest casually swinging about on tiny edges does little for your confidence, however comp problems tend to involve actual climbing and fortunately I wobbled up enough of them to get into the semis the next day.
I climbed pretty shakily in the semis (nervous!), falling off a lot of times when I really shouldn’t have, but still getting to the top of 3 of them. When the dust had settled it became apparent that 3 was enough to make it through to the final! Stew Watson flashed 3 and was also through, and (obviously) Shauna was in too. We have never had more than 1 Brit in the finals at one time so it was great to have 3 of us already in the top 6! C’mon yes.
The final was hard, really hard. I felt like I was getting totally shut down, only managing to get 2 bonuses. It turns out it was just a very hard final – only 2 people topped anything out – the no.1 and no.2 in the world no less! Pretty disappointing for a final, but the route setting up to that point had been brilliant, and the girls final ran perfectly. Shauna finished 2nd (amazing!), I finished 5th and Stew was 6th. A good result for the Brits.
Innsbruck was a great introduction to the comp season for me, hopefully I can keep some momentum going for Munich in August. Back to it...
Contributed by: Ned Feehally
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