I mentioned in last week’s Video Friday post how I had spent the prior 2.5 weeks traveling around Italy with Mrs. Narc. Word on the street has it that Italy is a pretty good destination for climbing, but our trip was 100% focused on your more typical tourist activities. You can imagine my excitement then when we arrived home and I set out to the climbing gym for the first time in nearly a month.
Obviously I was psyched to be pulling down again, but I knew I needed to be careful and planned on making it a very brief session. As I worked through my warm-up I could tell my fingers were a bit stiff from only gripping wine glasses for 3 weeks, so I reminded myself again to be careful. After spending a good 20 minutes chatting with a fan from Portland I returned to the bouldering cave to finish up the session by trying something just a touch harder to see where I was at.
I pulled on the wall and reached up right for the first hold, a decent pinch jug. As I was pulling on that hold I started to notice an unpleasant feeling in my middle finger. My left hand made it to the next hold, a crimpy jug, when I started to notice some unpleasant feelings in the middle finger of that hand as well. At that point I hit the eject button, but the damage had been done. Severe pain in my right middle finger and mild pain in the same finger of my left hand.
Ultimate. Devastation.
Up to this point 2011 had been the most successful year of my injury-plagued climbing career. Over the course of many, many fun days at the crag I had managed to climb a handful of boulder problems at or above my previous limits and ticked off a sport route that felt like the hardest thing I’d ever done. With the fall season fast approaching I was looking forward to investing some real effort* into a project here in Wisconsin, but I guess that’s just going to have to wait…
Now that we have my sob story out of the way let’s watch some videos:
- The North Face: Towers of the Ennedi
- Nina Caprez Climbing Fish Eye (5.14b) At Oliana
- Phil Schaal Flashing V12 In Rocklands
- Midwest Unknown Trailer
- Chris Sharma Interviewed By Playboy Italy
*I noticed the other week that of the 60 or so harder boulder problems I’ve ever done, only 3 have taken me more than 1 day of work with the longest taking something like 3 days. I blame this partially on the distance between myself and many of the boulder problems I’d like to project, but I think it probably says something about my commitment toward working things as well…
