Climbing with the Champ

The title sounds like it was written by Apollo Creed alas its just me again:

The "Scaffolding" post caused quite a storm in a teacup. Quite frustratingly so, as it was purposefully steered away from UKB in order to avoid any such hassle and allow the limited readership of this blog to here my inner paranoid ravings. Lesson learnt, this blog isnt quite private enough and despite the first paragraph effectively saying it was all parandoid ramblings of a scared individual some people took serious offence, just to clarify I'm not talking about Percy here (who answered a lot of long standing questions extremely well and in a very patient manner). I took the post down as to not cause any un-necessary trouble for both him and myself but left the comments in order to ensure transparency. It was a pretty rushed post and on reading it back it didn't come across entirely as intended. Despite all of this, yesterday, I was sorely tempted to put it back up. I won't go into that further.

Good news - the over dramatic italian has been silenced. Despite being warned that it had dodgy electrics Fiat took the diagnostic check to be gospel and ordered new parts (very £££), after a reasoned discussion yesterday they decided that was madness and have refunded our deposit etc. so in the end a routine service and a nice new set of front tyres has made it happy. I will be buying a fault reader for any future issues. I still can't believe that its routine not to use a multimeter or anything to check these failures have actually occurred. Another point to note is that Nat made very little progress with the garage throughout yesteday, they even assured her at one stage that they'd disabled the warning light (a physical impossibility), one phone call from me and it was all sorted and they were very apologetic. Makes you think.

Sunday Nat and I finally made our minds up and booked a Christmas jolly. From the 20th of Dec to the 3rd of Jan we will be staying at the Maisonbleau. Neil even kindly offered to arrange a tree (Waddage!).

Due to that fact, I decided it was time to get this show back on the road and dive head first back into climbing, a few hurried phone calls on Monday found Ned 'Champ, long hair, still slightly ginger' feehally was foundry bound and despite concerns that it's all a little bit too steep for me I decided to join him. Nat tagged along too (and climbed much better than last time). The evening went well with a dismaying display of strength and technique from Simon Lee's extremely young son.
Ned was climbing well, training fitness for the upcoming comp. Bony tony had injured himself somehow so had turned into stopwatch/dungeon master and was working the champ into the ground.
I felt like I climbed well, or very well considering. At first my feet felt very akward and clumpy but as the evening progressed things improved. I didn't fall off until I was about to call it a night, stupidly failing on the last move due to ignoring footholds and on the second failure picking a powerful pinch move to finish with. Ok, so I'm far from on form but it all looks rosey (well, apart from a finger that began aching pretty much straight away, RH middle).

Tonight, I will undertake a full strength assesment on myself (probably at the works). Hopefully this will show what I need to work on in order to get myself where I want to be by the 20th Dec and it should also provide an interesting comparison if I remember to repeat the same assesment at regular intervals down the line.

Lastly, please, if you take the time to read this blog (bored at work?) and are seriously offended easily then go elsewhere. At the end of the day anything you read should be treated exactly as it is; one mans (limited) opinion. Form your own about anything mentioned and if you think that any of the writing is vindictive or especially cutting towards one person then read it again. There are numerous examples on forums and blogs where things are read in a whole different manner to which they intended. That may be down to the shortcomings of one persons writing techniques or just a facet of the medium that we choose to write in.