Reminder/humiliation

In the depths of winter I wrote on this blog a little list of goals for the year – “to check up on later this year and see how I’m progressing.” Well, later is now and with six months of the year down it’s time to check on my progress.

This is going to hurt.

First, sports climbing. Onsighting 6c and redpointing 7a. Nearly there – I flashed a 6c in Portland very early on in the year, came to within an ace of redpointing a 7a at Swanage just before Easter. Our trip to France was supposed to give a final boost to my sports climbing and see my hit the magic mark, but that didn’t happen thanks to the weather. I missed quite a bit of training and a couple of trips away due to getting tattooed and injuring my shoulder, and once the summer arrived I’ve been trying to concentrate on trad climbing. So nearly, but not quite. Hopefully that’ll be rectified in the autumn with some south coast sports trips.

Trad climbing. I’ve been trying hard on this one in the last few weeks, with trips to Pembroke, the Peak and Swanage. It’s been tough. I’ve been wracked with nerves and though the climbing has felt easy, the overall leading of harder routes felt a bit beyond me at first. But it’s slowly coming back, I threw myself on an E1 last weekend and though I didn’t get up it, I wasn’t too far off. More confidence and speed with my gear placements is what I need. So with a bit of luck, some good weather, and the right route, I still hope to get up an E2 this year. Not so sure about an E3.

I’ve visited the Verdon, and spent a bit more time at Swanage and Portland, tho the Bill still has plenty of crags I’ve yet to even visit. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll make it to Cornwall or N Wales this year. I had plenty of time off with my old job and was planning to take a bunch of long weekends to get far away from London, but my new position has fewer holiday days and most of them will be used up in our trip to Sri Lanka later in the summer.

Despite not actually ticking any of my main climbing goals, I feel I’m getting there which is great. Unfortunately climbing a lot is really, really detrimental to writing. It takes up a lot of time and energy. So my ambition of writing a play or short story remains very much unfulfilled, even unworked upon. Getting a newspaper article published hasn’t happened yet either, though I hope with work to get a few ghosted op-eds out there in the next few months, which is at least half a tick.

However I’ve been writing much more on here which is proving to be a good way of working on a few ideas and keeping my hand in.

Two big projects I’ve achieved this year didn’t even rate in my list, but I’m very happy about achieving them. I got a new job, which is really exciting, promises some interesting travel and is a whole lot more stimulating than my previous one. Result! And I’ve gotten tattooed, a very long-standing desire which I’ve fulfilled big style. I’m very pleased about getting that done, even if the result was to make me too skint and knackered to manage all the other things.

I’ll check in with this list again at the end of December.