Then, as the months wore on and I had built a power base, we’d focus on power-endurance with 4x4s and route-climbing doubles, all while keeping the power high with ongoing MoonBoarding and max hangs. I was also supposed to campus (sorry, Nina, I bailed), deadlift (umm, about that…), and do weighted pull-ups and max hangs (OK, I did do these-good job, me!). So, to build raw power, Nina prescribed twice-weekly MoonBoarding as the central foundation. Until he addressed his power deficiencies with specific training, including MoonBoarding, he could only get through this crux one time in three. Matt Samet on the first, layback crux of Big Poppa (5.13d), Staunton State Park, Colorado. But she and I both agreed that I just didn’t have much torque-the sort of snappy, jumpy, speedy-and-precise Grr you need to tame cruxy sport climbs. As we climbed together on Cayman Brac, Nina noticed that I can climb lots of pitches in a day and can hang on forever-endurance wasn’t the problem. That night, we talked about goals, strengths, and deficiencies. With sends up to V13 and ticks of all of Bishop’s most terrifying double-digit highballs ( Ambrosia, Footprints, Evilution Direct,and later, Too Big to Flail), she knew her material. When Nina offered to develop a training protocol for me for Big Poppa, my spring sport-climbing project, I jumped at the opportunity. (Note: Just because you’re in a rock gym doesn’t mean you’re “training”-you’re just climbing…on plastic.) Or, on my more “serious” gym days, doing some light-duty bouldering circuits, then finishing out on the auto-belays for the “ultimate pump.”Īnd so, you know, staying fit enough but never really getting stronger. But of course, like the stubborn, old-school climber I am, instead of facing the facts about my plateaued climbing, my outsized ego, and my longtime training aversion, I’d kept puttering along, conflating just climbing whatever had fresh tape on it at the gym with actual training. “But I feel like something needs to change.” Now in my late 40s, I was seeing the inevitable power decline of middle age. “I’ve never really trained for anything-just gotten by doing what I could,” I continued. That night while our group savaged the buffet at the resort where we were staying, I talked about my frustrations. Six of us were on an editorial trip to Cayman Brac in December 2018, and earlier that day I’d been shut down on the difficult dyno crux of a 5.13 at Dixon’s Wall, In Vino Veritas, that she’d hiked the first ascent of, flashing it with energy to spare-and calling the dyno “V4” with a semi-sadistic grin upon lowering. “I’m tired of being weak,” I told Nina Williams.
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